There are several reasons. Sure, it's fun, but more importantly, it's not NOT-fun. Regularly having to reboot the machine, trying to solve system crashes (where your only choices are quite often reinstall the driver (or whatever) or finally reinstall the OS), limitations on how customizable the GUI is, updates that hose the system, uncertainty over the invasiveness of the OS, slow boot times, etc...etc...
That's Windows, to me. For my needs, Linux is simply much better, and (once configured) I never seem to have problems creeping into the system. Once it's set up, I don't have to hold my OS's hand to keep it in working order. Every Windows system I've used tends to degrade after a few months of use, in my experience. It's nice to use my computer the way I want to and not as a computer maintenance hobby machine. YMMV
Granted it's not sci-fi tech, but...Fsck that sh!t. If I have my choice of sci-fi female/femaleish characters, I'll take the Bene Gesserit over lousy robots, any day...
Crap... now I want to create a lulzcat image of a 300lbs, slick skinned, unshaven geek with exaggerated, plaintive eyes and the caption "U Has Bene Gesserits?"
I can't wait for my self-driving car. Go to sleep in the car Friday night, wake up in Vegas/SanFran/Wherever in the morning. Visting mom would be a lot less of a chore. That's just technological overkill. I'm able to achieve the same results with 40oz of whiskey. It's cheaper, DIY, and probably safer.
I'm not entirely sure you're not joking, but I'll respond as if you aren't...
What an asinine POV.
I run an internet application programming business. I don't want standards. Browser standards will make it really easy for anyone to create a web-page semi-well. Right now, my efforts are spent on the high-tech skills of managing a high-tech industry. If things become too easy, my skills will switch to competitive sales. That's good for the consumer who doesn't care about excess quality, sure. But it's just plain aweful for my employees. I'll pay them less, I'll outsource more. If I were your boss, I'd fire you. If I were your employee, I'd quit. Someone who is more interested in maintaining their corporate/company's status quo, regardless of the market, is useless. I'm sure the flailers would have loved to artificially inflate their value compared to the threshing machines, or the farriers to do the same with the automobile. In reality, someone will undercut you. There is more profit in undercutting you than in your protectionism. Your view has nothing to do with capitalism, but protectionism. You want your market to remain esoteric enough to avoid competition. As you said "it's not hard to program". You're doing yourself and your employees a disservice by relying on obfuscation/secrecy instead of quality to sell your product. You might get lucky for a while due to inertia of the system (perhaps even your whole life), but you can only be successful in a capitalistic environment two ways (AFAICT): Stack the deck(eg influence legislation), or build a good hand(eg build a better mousetrap). Since you've mentioned competing against 12 year olds, I'll assume that you aren't in a position to stack the deck, and you explicitly stated that quality wasn't your goal (see your comment about consumers), so I assume your entire strategy is making sure you hide your cards well enough that no one even knows if you're playing the game.
This is a nice touch:
I'll produce high-quality products and services, I'll stand behind them, and I won't worry about competition. You've already said the exact opposite. In fact, the gist of your post was the exact opposite. You're supremely worried about competition, to the point where you don't want either market stability, market information, or standardization to wreck your money-grab.
We decided against it. The world is weird enough as it is, and it appears too many people (generally well armed) are in the midst of bad trips, anyhow. However, intriguing patterns, such as paisley, Atari graphics, or mirrors are still available to help us all through this difficult time.
This is a community service message brought to you by The-People-Who-Were-Fired-Out-Of-A-Gun-Lined With-Baroque-Paintings-Into-A-Sea-Of-Electricity[Wade Davis reference].
I recently posted some of my ideas about where the big record companies dropped the ball, including one that is similar. The high-end box-set seems like a damned good idea. I'm not a big enough fan to blow $300 for Ghosts, but I would probably pay $300 for a box-set of everything NIN has ever done. Even the deluxe Ghosts set is a good idea @ $75. It targets serious fans who don't feel justified spending $300.
The entire pricing setup is done well... You can support the band for a trivial $5 or get a lot of interesting extras for less trivial amounts. If this kind of thing ended up being done with a one-stop-shop site for many bands, the RIAA would be seriously worried.
Agreed... Even visually perusing the URL is sometimes not going to be reasonable. For instance: www.paypaI.com... Capital "I" rather than small "l" looks fine in the address bar... At the moment, it's a redirect to this site. It's pretty hard to train Mom and Pop to deal with this stuff sensibly, but the example I've given shows that the general precautions of actually looking at the URL that many knowledgeable people take can have pretty big problems, too.
Don't forget Professor Oppensource, with his evil creations! Give him a monocle and a Nazi armband, with the Firefox logo instead of a swastika. Lesser villains such as Dr. Oppenoffis could be thwarted by the team's pet Oox,Mel. If MS is going to implement the gayest idea ever, they might as well go all the way.
Re:If you want to see the real Cuba, go now...
on
Fidel Castro Resigns
·
· Score: 1
Personally, I'd rather have the aforementioned fast food restaurants than hordes of military personnel with automatic weapons all over the place. Luckily, at any noteworthy public event in New York, you get both nowadays.
Cuba is only unique in that the destruction caused by communism is so apparent everywhere. The crumbling buildings. The antiquated automobiles. No doubt Communism contributes, but that kind of ignores the elephant in the room, a hostile US government that has spent years attempting to economically throttle it.
The authoritarian presence. The warning to tourists to stay in designated tourist zones. The many desperate women offering their daughters as prostitutes. Strangely, as a Canadian, this is not too different from my sense of the US nowadays.
If you have truly been there, I cannot understand how or why you would think that American chain restaurants are somehow worse than the abject human misery that dominates that island. I suppose some people find the world to be a better place, even with all its misery, when it's not an uptight shopping mall.
Cuba is the final testament to the failure of communism. Freeing the country will do wonders to bring the truth to light, especially with the renewed faith in this system amongst the poor of Latin America. As the election of Daniel Ortega demonstrated? Or the massive popularity of Chavez?
What a quaint and backward notion! There was no Intelligent Designer who created life [scoff], it was an Intelligent Astronomer who placed our planet in the perfect spot for life to form on its own. Of course, there are some indications that it was actually an Intelligent Particle Physicist who started it all off, so there are obviously many more discoveries to be made in the field of Intelligent Science.
But an Intelligent Designer? Piffle! He just hung the drapes and painted the place. And the bastard didn't even let us select our own wallpaper.
I've been thinking about this sort of thing recently, and here are a few of my ideas (wrt music).
What the music industry should have done is this:
Create a decent online store and classify the music as either popular (the Brtineys, Metallicas etc), historical (the Creams, Johnny Cashes etc), or up-and-coming (the Modest Mouses, Jason Webleys etc) where they DON'T sell the biggest hits, they give them away, when you purchase a different track from the same artist, as well as a track from any band classified 'up-and=coming'. Personally, I think $1 a track is quite a bit too much, but whatever, they'd have to discover the actual price point. Regardless, basically three tunes for the price of two.
If even a small percentage of those who buy then go and buy further tracks from the u&c bands, it would be promoting new and less homogenized music, as well as making the smaller bands more profitable for the labels.
For big acts (U2, the Stones, that sort of thing), I'd also offer some meatspace uber-boxset, with absolutely EVERYTHING they've done. These half-asses boxsets that are actually offered nowadays don't appeal to me at all. DVDs of all their studio work, a few DVDs of all known live recordings, a DVD of demos, DVDs of all known video, a book about the band, a book of all known tour and show posters, etc... Basically, I mean EVERYTHING. Number the boxsets and sell the first ten for a ridiculous price (maybe a couple thousand), and the next hundred for maybe twice the general price. Anybody else can get it for $200 or whatever... I know there are several bands that I would have happily payed that amount, and judging by the twenty to thirty million people who entered the lottery to see Zeppelin for $300 (IIRC), there are bound to be plenty of others like me.
Then, instead of the current rush ticket buying system for concerts we have now, I'd open the sales to those who bought the boxset first, followed by those who have bought tracks from the online store, followed by the general public. As well, bases on the areas the boxsets have sold well in, I'd do another concert, for $500 per couple, limited to 300 or 400 people. Personally, I wouldn't have paid $100 to see Zeppelin with 20,000 other people, but I would have paid quite a bit more than $500 to see them with only 400 people. Let everyone at the show meet the band. Considering what deranged, out-of-touch twats so many of these celebrities have become, it would be doing them a favour.
Anyhow, that's my 2c. An industry which is providing something people want has clearly fscked up when they have become as hated as the IRS.
Trust me, there'd still be typos. For some people, an OK button has an irresistible attraction; if they see one, they can't resist clicking on it, without looking at what they're agreeing to. I agree. And don't even get me started on "SUBMIT" buttons, I can't help myself, and click them before I've even fini
So you've got at least 7 orders of magnitude of cost reductions to work through No problem... Just make a metric-imperial conversion error, and the problem solves itself. Zing!
Thanks a lot for those links. The second one is undoubtedly the best link I've ever clicked.
On the first link: I've only ever read The Beauty Myth by Wolf, which I thought was pretty good, and am now interested in what else she's written. There were some fairly profound insights in her article. It made me remember a line from some minor radical in the eighties (maybe an Earth First member): "The only reason they don't have martial law in this country is they don't think they need it yet." (I think that's the line, though ICBATG.)
Even more than that, I would suggest "half your age plus 7, truncated at the decimal point" be considered as a replacement for current statutory rape laws when one or both parties is under age 18. Actually, that makes a lot of sense to me... It allows for sexual activity for any kid >= 13, and not for a kid < 13, since floor(13/2 + 7) = 13 (ie both parties are 13), but floor(12/2 + 7) = 13 (ie one party is 12, but the other party is 13, and it wouldn't be allowable for the 13 yr old). Pretty strict age ranges would still exist for the other < 18 ages...
18/2 +7 = 16
17/2 +7 = 15
16/2 +7 = 15
15/2 +7 = 14
14/2 +7 = 14
13/2 +7 = 13 (it was pretty pointless to type these out, I know...)
Personally, I think that's reasonable. It may not be ideal to have 15 year olds having sex with limited understanding of the consequences (same with adults, really), but it strikes me as a better situation that sending one or both to the courts.
I totally agree with that. And we're still in the Wild West days of the Internet. Look at Google's purchase of YouTube. That was a fsck load of money for what was basically a minor entity. They bought a popular saloon at the centre of things, without knowing whether the development on the other side of town will become the actual town, or if gold will be discovered fifty miles away, or if the local one will dry up. So many big players rise from nothing (such as Google itself), and without any predictable pattern, that it's kind of ridiculous to spend that much on a company that you can't recoup a decent amount of your investment by stripping its assets if the market tanks. (Since there really wouldn't be any assets worth stripping.)
It wasn't very long ago that the dot-com bubble burst, I kind of wonder if we're due for another one. I guess if the purchase is profitable enough in the short term, then it would be worth it, but that seems like a pretty unstable strategy to me, and I doubt it's the case for most of these acquisitions.
which means I have to thumb carefully past people I definitely *don't* want to call by accident (but still need to have in my book) Tell me about it...
[Me autodialling]
Callee: Hello?
Me: Hey baby, it's Thursday. I've got the Tantric oil, buttplug, and Fischer-Price chainsaw ready. When are you heading over?
Callee: Ummm... How's your week going?
Me: Mom?
As we learned from the movie Hackers, computer networks should be taking down ships, not the other way around. Has the whole world gone topsy-turvy on me?
Maybe there's some sailor/hacker out there called Ahab-Override who can save the day...
In a rare "double-whammy" decision, the DOJ has ordered Steve Ballmer and Darl MacBride to co-produce (and star in) a feature length film entitled "2 CEOs, 1 Cup"... MacBride couldn't be reached for comment, but Ballmer was heard saying: "No problem. Bill has been preparing me for this for years".
Seriously, though. Why does the DOJ seem so toothless when it comes to corporations or the ultra-wealthy, yet act like right-stomping psychopaths for small players (to the point of waffling on definitions of torture, or weaseling around the constitution)? How could it be anything but corruption?
I've just spent the last ten minutes trying this with various objects (while varying other factors like eyes open/closed) and couldn't seem to do it either, until it occurred to me that I've experienced that sensation before. When jigging (fishing) I can feel the lead weight touching the bottom, and follow the contours of rocks, etc. I'm definitely experiencing the contact in the weight. So I tried it with a washer and a piece of string, and sure enough, it felt like I experienced the contact with the floor via the washer.
I can't seem to do it with anything else, though. I wonder if it is a problem with suggestion, though I mean it differently than you. Knowing where the sensation is supposed to happen (in the pencil tip), and how that sensation can be refocused to the hand (where the sensation actually happens) maybe you (and I) are automatically refocusing to the hand. Basically, a "don't think of pink elephants" sort of thing... Instead of the suggestion working to make people feel it in the pencil, you and I are being suggestible to feeling it in the hand.
Then again, maybe I was just being suggestible (or compliant with the norm) with the string and washer... I should probably shut up now: I feel like I'm approaching a point of "it's turtles all the way down"...
Democracy is two wolves and a lamb sitting down and deciding what is for lunch. Lamb: "No, guys, trust me! I wouldn't try to pull the wool over your eyes! It's a hanging chaaaaaaaaad." [sorry, couldn't resist]
Instead, be cautious about that hot blonde at the gym who confessed a lifelong sexual weakness for balding guys trying to work off the desk paunch and who expresses a sweet naivete and engaging curiosity about how, precisely, you do your job. Umm... ahh... Would you mind asking her if she has a sister?
I thought America was the "land of the free". In short:
Don't believe the hype.
IMO, freedom is never something you have (despite what someone else or some piece of paper says), but always something you fight for (despite what someone else or some piece of paper says). Tyranny isn't the enemy of freedom, complacency is. But then again, I'm a pretty cynical bastard.
little virtual cities with no headed pedestrians and 5 legged dogs. Why just 5 dogs? Or would there be a lot of non-legged dogs as well? Quite frankly, I'm finding this quadruple amputee dog idea kind of disturbing. I need to go lie down....
Slashdot Mirror
There are several reasons. Sure, it's fun, but more importantly, it's not NOT-fun. Regularly having to reboot the machine, trying to solve system crashes (where your only choices are quite often reinstall the driver (or whatever) or finally reinstall the OS), limitations on how customizable the GUI is, updates that hose the system, uncertainty over the invasiveness of the OS, slow boot times, etc...etc...
That's Windows, to me. For my needs, Linux is simply much better, and (once configured) I never seem to have problems creeping into the system. Once it's set up, I don't have to hold my OS's hand to keep it in working order. Every Windows system I've used tends to degrade after a few months of use, in my experience. It's nice to use my computer the way I want to and not as a computer maintenance hobby machine. YMMV
Granted it's not sci-fi tech, but...Fsck that sh!t. If I have my choice of sci-fi female/femaleish characters, I'll take the Bene Gesserit over lousy robots, any day...
Crap... now I want to create a lulzcat image of a 300lbs, slick skinned, unshaven geek with exaggerated, plaintive eyes and the caption "U Has Bene Gesserits?"
What an asinine POV. I run an internet application programming business. I don't want standards. Browser standards will make it really easy for anyone to create a web-page semi-well. Right now, my efforts are spent on the high-tech skills of managing a high-tech industry. If things become too easy, my skills will switch to competitive sales. That's good for the consumer who doesn't care about excess quality, sure. But it's just plain aweful for my employees. I'll pay them less, I'll outsource more. If I were your boss, I'd fire you. If I were your employee, I'd quit. Someone who is more interested in maintaining their corporate/company's status quo, regardless of the market, is useless. I'm sure the flailers would have loved to artificially inflate their value compared to the threshing machines, or the farriers to do the same with the automobile. In reality, someone will undercut you. There is more profit in undercutting you than in your protectionism. Your view has nothing to do with capitalism, but protectionism. You want your market to remain esoteric enough to avoid competition. As you said "it's not hard to program". You're doing yourself and your employees a disservice by relying on obfuscation/secrecy instead of quality to sell your product. You might get lucky for a while due to inertia of the system (perhaps even your whole life), but you can only be successful in a capitalistic environment two ways (AFAICT): Stack the deck(eg influence legislation), or build a good hand(eg build a better mousetrap). Since you've mentioned competing against 12 year olds, I'll assume that you aren't in a position to stack the deck, and you explicitly stated that quality wasn't your goal (see your comment about consumers), so I assume your entire strategy is making sure you hide your cards well enough that no one even knows if you're playing the game.
This is a nice touch: I'll produce high-quality products and services, I'll stand behind them, and I won't worry about competition. You've already said the exact opposite. In fact, the gist of your post was the exact opposite. You're supremely worried about competition, to the point where you don't want either market stability, market information, or standardization to wreck your money-grab.
We decided against it. The world is weird enough as it is, and it appears too many people (generally well armed) are in the midst of bad trips, anyhow. However, intriguing patterns, such as paisley, Atari graphics, or mirrors are still available to help us all through this difficult time.
This is a community service message brought to you by The-People-Who-Were-Fired-Out-Of-A-Gun-Lined With-Baroque-Paintings-Into-A-Sea-Of-Electricity[Wade Davis reference].
I recently posted some of my ideas about where the big record companies dropped the ball, including one that is similar. The high-end box-set seems like a damned good idea. I'm not a big enough fan to blow $300 for Ghosts, but I would probably pay $300 for a box-set of everything NIN has ever done. Even the deluxe Ghosts set is a good idea @ $75. It targets serious fans who don't feel justified spending $300.
The entire pricing setup is done well... You can support the band for a trivial $5 or get a lot of interesting extras for less trivial amounts. If this kind of thing ended up being done with a one-stop-shop site for many bands, the RIAA would be seriously worried.
Agreed... Even visually perusing the URL is sometimes not going to be reasonable. For instance: www.paypaI.com... Capital "I" rather than small "l" looks fine in the address bar... At the moment, it's a redirect to this site. It's pretty hard to train Mom and Pop to deal with this stuff sensibly, but the example I've given shows that the general precautions of actually looking at the URL that many knowledgeable people take can have pretty big problems, too.
Don't forget Professor Oppensource, with his evil creations! Give him a monocle and a Nazi armband, with the Firefox logo instead of a swastika. Lesser villains such as Dr. Oppenoffis could be thwarted by the team's pet Oox,Mel. If MS is going to implement the gayest idea ever, they might as well go all the way.
Cuba is only unique in that the destruction caused by communism is so apparent everywhere. The crumbling buildings. The antiquated automobiles. No doubt Communism contributes, but that kind of ignores the elephant in the room, a hostile US government that has spent years attempting to economically throttle it.
The authoritarian presence. The warning to tourists to stay in designated tourist zones. The many desperate women offering their daughters as prostitutes. Strangely, as a Canadian, this is not too different from my sense of the US nowadays.
If you have truly been there, I cannot understand how or why you would think that American chain restaurants are somehow worse than the abject human misery that dominates that island. I suppose some people find the world to be a better place, even with all its misery, when it's not an uptight shopping mall.
Cuba is the final testament to the failure of communism. Freeing the country will do wonders to bring the truth to light, especially with the renewed faith in this system amongst the poor of Latin America. As the election of Daniel Ortega demonstrated? Or the massive popularity of Chavez?
What a quaint and backward notion! There was no Intelligent Designer who created life [scoff], it was an Intelligent Astronomer who placed our planet in the perfect spot for life to form on its own. Of course, there are some indications that it was actually an Intelligent Particle Physicist who started it all off, so there are obviously many more discoveries to be made in the field of Intelligent Science.
But an Intelligent Designer? Piffle! He just hung the drapes and painted the place. And the bastard didn't even let us select our own wallpaper.
I've been thinking about this sort of thing recently, and here are a few of my ideas (wrt music).
What the music industry should have done is this:
Create a decent online store and classify the music as either popular (the Brtineys, Metallicas etc), historical (the Creams, Johnny Cashes etc), or up-and-coming (the Modest Mouses, Jason Webleys etc) where they DON'T sell the biggest hits, they give them away, when you purchase a different track from the same artist, as well as a track from any band classified 'up-and=coming'. Personally, I think $1 a track is quite a bit too much, but whatever, they'd have to discover the actual price point. Regardless, basically three tunes for the price of two.
If even a small percentage of those who buy then go and buy further tracks from the u&c bands, it would be promoting new and less homogenized music, as well as making the smaller bands more profitable for the labels.
For big acts (U2, the Stones, that sort of thing), I'd also offer some meatspace uber-boxset, with absolutely EVERYTHING they've done. These half-asses boxsets that are actually offered nowadays don't appeal to me at all. DVDs of all their studio work, a few DVDs of all known live recordings, a DVD of demos, DVDs of all known video, a book about the band, a book of all known tour and show posters, etc... Basically, I mean EVERYTHING. Number the boxsets and sell the first ten for a ridiculous price (maybe a couple thousand), and the next hundred for maybe twice the general price. Anybody else can get it for $200 or whatever... I know there are several bands that I would have happily payed that amount, and judging by the twenty to thirty million people who entered the lottery to see Zeppelin for $300 (IIRC), there are bound to be plenty of others like me.
Then, instead of the current rush ticket buying system for concerts we have now, I'd open the sales to those who bought the boxset first, followed by those who have bought tracks from the online store, followed by the general public. As well, bases on the areas the boxsets have sold well in, I'd do another concert, for $500 per couple, limited to 300 or 400 people. Personally, I wouldn't have paid $100 to see Zeppelin with 20,000 other people, but I would have paid quite a bit more than $500 to see them with only 400 people. Let everyone at the show meet the band. Considering what deranged, out-of-touch twats so many of these celebrities have become, it would be doing them a favour.
Anyhow, that's my 2c. An industry which is providing something people want has clearly fscked up when they have become as hated as the IRS.
Or, as Chewy said in one of his rare, lucid moments: "Grrrughgrhgrhgrhrgghugh"
Dammit, now I want to go Photoshop-up some Chewbacca Lulzcats...
Thanks a lot for those links. The second one is undoubtedly the best link I've ever clicked.
On the first link: I've only ever read The Beauty Myth by Wolf, which I thought was pretty good, and am now interested in what else she's written. There were some fairly profound insights in her article. It made me remember a line from some minor radical in the eighties (maybe an Earth First member): "The only reason they don't have martial law in this country is they don't think they need it yet." (I think that's the line, though ICBATG.)
18/2 +7 = 16
17/2 +7 = 15
16/2 +7 = 15
15/2 +7 = 14
14/2 +7 = 14
13/2 +7 = 13 (it was pretty pointless to type these out, I know...)
Personally, I think that's reasonable. It may not be ideal to have 15 year olds having sex with limited understanding of the consequences (same with adults, really), but it strikes me as a better situation that sending one or both to the courts.
I totally agree with that. And we're still in the Wild West days of the Internet. Look at Google's purchase of YouTube. That was a fsck load of money for what was basically a minor entity. They bought a popular saloon at the centre of things, without knowing whether the development on the other side of town will become the actual town, or if gold will be discovered fifty miles away, or if the local one will dry up. So many big players rise from nothing (such as Google itself), and without any predictable pattern, that it's kind of ridiculous to spend that much on a company that you can't recoup a decent amount of your investment by stripping its assets if the market tanks. (Since there really wouldn't be any assets worth stripping.)
It wasn't very long ago that the dot-com bubble burst, I kind of wonder if we're due for another one. I guess if the purchase is profitable enough in the short term, then it would be worth it, but that seems like a pretty unstable strategy to me, and I doubt it's the case for most of these acquisitions.
[Me autodialling]
Callee: Hello?
Me: Hey baby, it's Thursday. I've got the Tantric oil, buttplug, and Fischer-Price chainsaw ready. When are you heading over?
Callee: Ummm... How's your week going?
Me: Mom?
Every Thursday, like clockwork...
As we learned from the movie Hackers, computer networks should be taking down ships, not the other way around. Has the whole world gone topsy-turvy on me?
Maybe there's some sailor/hacker out there called Ahab-Override who can save the day...
In a rare "double-whammy" decision, the DOJ has ordered Steve Ballmer and Darl MacBride to co-produce (and star in) a feature length film entitled "2 CEOs, 1 Cup"... MacBride couldn't be reached for comment, but Ballmer was heard saying: "No problem. Bill has been preparing me for this for years".
Seriously, though. Why does the DOJ seem so toothless when it comes to corporations or the ultra-wealthy, yet act like right-stomping psychopaths for small players (to the point of waffling on definitions of torture, or weaseling around the constitution)? How could it be anything but corruption?
I've just spent the last ten minutes trying this with various objects (while varying other factors like eyes open/closed) and couldn't seem to do it either, until it occurred to me that I've experienced that sensation before. When jigging (fishing) I can feel the lead weight touching the bottom, and follow the contours of rocks, etc. I'm definitely experiencing the contact in the weight. So I tried it with a washer and a piece of string, and sure enough, it felt like I experienced the contact with the floor via the washer.
I can't seem to do it with anything else, though. I wonder if it is a problem with suggestion, though I mean it differently than you. Knowing where the sensation is supposed to happen (in the pencil tip), and how that sensation can be refocused to the hand (where the sensation actually happens) maybe you (and I) are automatically refocusing to the hand. Basically, a "don't think of pink elephants" sort of thing... Instead of the suggestion working to make people feel it in the pencil, you and I are being suggestible to feeling it in the hand.
Then again, maybe I was just being suggestible (or compliant with the norm) with the string and washer... I should probably shut up now: I feel like I'm approaching a point of "it's turtles all the way down"...
Don't believe the hype.
IMO, freedom is never something you have (despite what someone else or some piece of paper says), but always something you fight for (despite what someone else or some piece of paper says). Tyranny isn't the enemy of freedom, complacency is. But then again, I'm a pretty cynical bastard.