The insurance co-pay for the antibiotic eyedrops I had to take after my vitrectomy was the same as the price Canadians pay retail for the same drug. We are being gouged and gouged badly by the drug companies. Thak God Patents aren't forever like copyrights are.
Actually, I just mean that there is no free thinking here, just stupid cliched memes
Uh... how about
As Tami slept, I'd turned on the TV. It's odd that we still say "turn on" when we refer to turning something on, as there's nothing to turn. The only knobs left are on the stove and car radio, and the cheapest of boom boxes. But even though the radio part of my cheap boom box is analog and has volume and tuning knobs, the on-off switch isn't part of the volume knob the way they used to design things.
The science fiction writers were right about one facet of 21st century life - everything is push buttons. If language evolves, then why don't we say "push on the TV set"? No longer do you turn anything to make it come on like you did with the black and white 20th century TVs you had to get out of your chair and turn a knob to change channels on.
<snip> I flipped the channel some more. There's another archaic word; the picture looked like it flipped when you changed channels on the old TV sets, but even though the transition is now seamless we still say "flip the channel" and even though there's no knob we still say "turn it to channel seventeen". But "gay" no longer means "happy and carefree" so that Deck the Halls is now a song about transvestites, "gay" refers to a group of people of whom half attempt suicide, and "hacker" no longer means someone who writes quick and dirty code or modifies hardware, but now means "cyber-burglar".
I know two people who were recently incarcerated. Linda is a nonviolent drug offender and spent months in a maximum security state prison (Dwight Correctional).
Lance broke into a couple's home wielding a large knife and tried to kill a man. He spent two weeks in the Sangamon County Jail for it.
Another man I know, the brother of a very old friend, spent five years in a Federal prison for loaning money to a drug dealer; the dealer spent two years in a different Federal prison closer to home.
Considering some of the irrational and illogical laws and punishments we have in this country, the penalty for encryption may well be harsher than the penalty for bloody terrorism. We keep electing stupid dishonest power junkies to office.
A vote for one wing or the other of a two-party state is worse than useless.
The Onion and Fox news have both mentioned Bob Barr, the Libertarian candidate. Maybe the time will come when a real news outlet will mention third party candidates, instead of just parody outlets like The Onion and Fox?
I can't even find mention of the Green Party's Presidential candidate on their own web site, so in their case I think the mainstream media can be forgiven for ignoring them.
The news today is saying that "John McCain challenged his Democratic rival, Sen. Barack Obama, to a series of 10 joint town hall meetings, starting next week in New York City". I guess he's afraid of Bob Barr?
Perhaps "closer to actually being useful?" I hadn't tried it before, but clicked the link to it from TFA.
I wanted to find the aging but still humorous "police warning" about the new date rape drug "beer". So I luugged in "date rape" beer. None of the first page results returned a copy (there must be hundreds) of the document I was looking for.
Google had the one I was looking for at the top of its list. Wikai search still has its work cut out for it. A search engine that can't beat Google or add something to the party really has little reason to exist.
Schitzophrenia, depression, and other such diseases that were treated with lobotomy are in fact very often deadly and always terrible. These illnesses are not trivial by any means.
The article you linked also says he died 38 years ago. Not all surgeons, of course, are ethical any more than all businessmen are ethical.
It's because all the dot coms are being used or squatted. You can't get "CollegeDegree.com" but you CAN get "67CollegeDegrees.com", or rather could before it was registered.
I let mcgrew.info lapse, so.info should be safe now. However, horror awaits the unsuspecting eyeballs that cruise.org, since I have a journal at slashdot. I'm told it's far worse than goatse.
My hosting service was in Canada. That means I couln't host any content that broke US law, Illinois law, or Canadian law. I was free to completely ignore the laws of any other country.
Routers don't have to obey any laws except the laws of physice, but the people using them do. You don't send a gun to prison for murder, you send the human who fired the gun.
by the 2020s we'll be adding computers to our brains and building machines as smart as ourselves
As a cyborg myself, I don't see any sane person adding a computer to his brain for non-medical uses.
I was going to say that sane people don't undergo surgery for trivial reasons, then I thought of liposuction and botox for rich morons, and LASIK for baseball players without myopia. I don't see any ethical surgeons doing something as dangerous as brain surgery for anything but the most profound medical reasons, like blindness or deafness.
As to the "as smart as ourselves", the word "smart" has so many meanings that you could say they already are and have been since at least the 1940s: "1. to be a source of sharp, local, and usually superficial pain, as a wound." Drop ENIAC on your foot ans see how it smarts. "7. quick or prompt in action, as persons." By that definition a pocket calculater is smarter than a human.
Kurtzwiel has been saying this since the 1970s, only then it was "by the year 2000".
We don't even know what consciousness is. How can you build a machine that can produce something you don't understand?
it's a purchase of a self destructing disk at a reduced price
Reduced? I was in the grocery store yesterday and there was a bin of movies. I almost picked up Kindergarten Cop, as the movies were $5 and they were standard DVDs, not "Flexplay".
I can see a movie it the mall for five dollars. It isn't a first run movie but they're at the mall before they're on DVD.
One main thing is that they can buy laws or encourage treaties that enable customs agents and airport security types to search laptops...
But that woudn't protect their business moodel at all. How would it? And they didn't have to bribe for those laws; the laws against kiddie porn are the pretext for searching laptops.
They'll just try to sign those good acts to record contracts
Key word here is "try". Of course they'll succeed sometimes, but everyone's read Courtney does the math as well as McGuinn's writing, and lots of other writings that chronicle the industry's rape of their employees ("Working for MCA" as Skynard put it; by law phonorecords are "works for hire").
If they change their business model
If pigs had wings they'd fly. If they change their business model then nobody would take issue with them.
At that point, perceived quality is only important to the buyer.
True, but if (there's that damned little big word again) they sell one at twenty when they could sell five at five, they're losing money. They should sue themselves.
Just because something is indie does not mean it is good.
True. There is far more crappy indie stuff than good indie stuff, but again there is more crappy RIAA stuff than good RIAA stuff.
As for modern studios being "inexpensive," how do you define that.
I define it in this context as studio rental being affordable to the average bar band. A decade or two the only way to get recorded at all was in a label studio, but there are plenty of independant studios these days. I know of three recording studios here in Springfield, and it's a small city with only 100k population.
The wikipedists sure are fast. I had looked it up last week and there was no mention of Heinlein, then today thought "what if I search "Heinlein's Razor"?
It redirected to "Hanlons Razor", which had beed edited quite a bit since last week. It now says
According to Joseph Bigler,[1] the quotation first came from a certain Robert J. Hanlon as a submission for a book compilation of various jokes related to Murphy's law published in 1980 entitled Murphy's Law Book Two, More Reasons Why Things Go Wrong.[2]
Bill Clarke[3] claims he wrote it in 1974; he says "Robert Hanlon" is a misspelling of "Robert Heinlein".
A similar quotation appears in Robert A. Heinlein's 1941 short story Logic of Empire ("You have attributed conditions to villainy that simply result from stupidity"); this was noticed in 1996 (five years before Bigler identified the Robert J. Hanlon citation) and first referenced in version 4.0.0 of the Jargon File,[4] with speculation that Hanlon's Razor might be a corruption of "Heinlein's Razor." "Heinlein's Razor" has since been defined as variations on Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity, but don't rule out malice. or... but keep your eyes open.[citation needed] A variant, Grey's Law (influenced, no doubt, by Clarke's third law), posits "Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice."
And they will, because no corporation suffers from the law unless a rich powerful man is inconvienienced by the corporation's illegal acts.
And because, this will become even more fuel for them (and the **AA) towards pushing making P2P software entirely illegal, regardless of it's use
They want P2P illegal because of its legal use, which is to allow the sharing of material the copyright holder (independant musicians) wants shared. Why should they care about stuff you can hear on the radio being shared? They want to kill their competetion, the indies, who are increasingly showing the world that the media moguls are no longer needed by anyone.
Tell that to the Missouri Highway Patol when you cross the Mississippi river from Illinois on your motorcycle when you're not wearning a helmet.
Yes, borders are a thing of the past. They're also a thing of the present and a thing of the future.
If Facebook has offices in Canada, servers in Canada, or workers who live in Canada then Canada has a valid point. If not then Facebook can tell Canada to fuck off.
They should patent it. And no, since Coca Cola is a multinational corporaton with stockholders all over the world, how can you call it an American company?
Apple pie is American. There are no trade secrets to apple pie. Baseball is American. Multinational corporations are decidedly NOT American, although all of them, even ones with headquarters in other counties (Sony, BP, Shell) want you to think they are.
Slashdot Mirror
You goa, girl!
The insurance co-pay for the antibiotic eyedrops I had to take after my vitrectomy was the same as the price Canadians pay retail for the same drug. We are being gouged and gouged badly by the drug companies. Thak God Patents aren't forever like copyrights are.
Forget Ron Paul, McCain is the Republican candidate (and next President) even though I voted for him in the primary.
I'm voting for Bob Barr in the general election.
Uh... how about
2600
I know two people who were recently incarcerated. Linda is a nonviolent drug offender and spent months in a maximum security state prison (Dwight Correctional).
Lance broke into a couple's home wielding a large knife and tried to kill a man. He spent two weeks in the Sangamon County Jail for it.
Another man I know, the brother of a very old friend, spent five years in a Federal prison for loaning money to a drug dealer; the dealer spent two years in a different Federal prison closer to home.
Considering some of the irrational and illogical laws and punishments we have in this country, the penalty for encryption may well be harsher than the penalty for bloody terrorism. We keep electing stupid dishonest power junkies to office.
A vote for one wing or the other of a two-party state is worse than useless.
The Onion and Fox news have both mentioned Bob Barr, the Libertarian candidate. Maybe the time will come when a real news outlet will mention third party candidates, instead of just parody outlets like The Onion and Fox?
I can't even find mention of the Green Party's Presidential candidate on their own web site, so in their case I think the mainstream media can be forgiven for ignoring them.
The news today is saying that "John McCain challenged his Democratic rival, Sen. Barack Obama, to a series of 10 joint town hall meetings, starting next week in New York City". I guess he's afraid of Bob Barr?
I wanted to find the aging but still humorous "police warning" about the new date rape drug "beer". So I luugged in "date rape" beer. None of the first page results returned a copy (there must be hundreds) of the document I was looking for.
Google had the one I was looking for at the top of its list. Wikai search still has its work cut out for it. A search engine that can't beat Google or add something to the party really has little reason to exist.
Schitzophrenia, depression, and other such diseases that were treated with lobotomy are in fact very often deadly and always terrible. These illnesses are not trivial by any means.
The article you linked also says he died 38 years ago. Not all surgeons, of course, are ethical any more than all businessmen are ethical.
It's because all the dot coms are being used or squatted. You can't get "CollegeDegree.com" but you CAN get "67CollegeDegrees.com", or rather could before it was registered.
Ok, now .org is dangerous too.
I let mcgrew.info lapse, so .info should be safe now. However, horror awaits the unsuspecting eyeballs that cruise .org, since I have a journal at slashdot. I'm told it's far worse than goatse.
No, and in fact I could be wrong. I don't even remember where I read it, th eseventies were a long time ago.
My hosting service was in Canada. That means I couln't host any content that broke US law, Illinois law, or Canadian law. I was free to completely ignore the laws of any other country.
Routers don't have to obey any laws except the laws of physice, but the people using them do. You don't send a gun to prison for murder, you send the human who fired the gun.
What does that have to do with anything at all, let alone the subject at hand?
First, I said "much wisdom". Second, where does it say that?
by the 2020s we'll be adding computers to our brains and building machines as smart as ourselves
As a cyborg myself, I don't see any sane person adding a computer to his brain for non-medical uses.
I was going to say that sane people don't undergo surgery for trivial reasons, then I thought of liposuction and botox for rich morons, and LASIK for baseball players without myopia. I don't see any ethical surgeons doing something as dangerous as brain surgery for anything but the most profound medical reasons, like blindness or deafness.
As to the "as smart as ourselves", the word "smart" has so many meanings that you could say they already are and have been since at least the 1940s: "1. to be a source of sharp, local, and usually superficial pain, as a wound." Drop ENIAC on your foot ans see how it smarts. "7. quick or prompt in action, as persons." By that definition a pocket calculater is smarter than a human.
Kurtzwiel has been saying this since the 1970s, only then it was "by the year 2000".
We don't even know what consciousness is. How can you build a machine that can produce something you don't understand?
it's a purchase of a self destructing disk at a reduced price
Reduced? I was in the grocery store yesterday and there was a bin of movies. I almost picked up Kindergarten Cop, as the movies were $5 and they were standard DVDs, not "Flexplay".
I can see a movie it the mall for five dollars. It isn't a first run movie but they're at the mall before they're on DVD.
Intentional pun (who ever admits to that?), and thank you.
One main thing is that they can buy laws or encourage treaties that enable customs agents and airport security types to search laptops...
But that woudn't protect their business moodel at all. How would it? And they didn't have to bribe for those laws; the laws against kiddie porn are the pretext for searching laptops.
They'll just try to sign those good acts to record contracts
Key word here is "try". Of course they'll succeed sometimes, but everyone's read Courtney does the math as well as McGuinn's writing, and lots of other writings that chronicle the industry's rape of their employees ("Working for MCA" as Skynard put it; by law phonorecords are "works for hire").
If they change their business model
If pigs had wings they'd fly. If they change their business model then nobody would take issue with them.
At that point, perceived quality is only important to the buyer.
True, but if (there's that damned little big word again) they sell one at twenty when they could sell five at five, they're losing money. They should sue themselves.
Just because something is indie does not mean it is good.
True. There is far more crappy indie stuff than good indie stuff, but again there is more crappy RIAA stuff than good RIAA stuff.
As for modern studios being "inexpensive," how do you define that.
I define it in this context as studio rental being affordable to the average bar band. A decade or two the only way to get recorded at all was in a label studio, but there are plenty of independant studios these days. I know of three recording studios here in Springfield, and it's a small city with only 100k population.
It redirected to "Hanlons Razor", which had beed edited quite a bit since last week. It now saysBe proud!
And they expect, once again, to get away with it.
And they will, because no corporation suffers from the law unless a rich powerful man is inconvienienced by the corporation's illegal acts.
And because, this will become even more fuel for them (and the **AA) towards pushing making P2P software entirely illegal, regardless of it's use
They want P2P illegal because of its legal use, which is to allow the sharing of material the copyright holder (independant musicians) wants shared. Why should they care about stuff you can hear on the radio being shared? They want to kill their competetion, the indies, who are increasingly showing the world that the media moguls are no longer needed by anyone.
Borders are a thing of the past.
Tell that to the Missouri Highway Patol when you cross the Mississippi river from Illinois on your motorcycle when you're not wearning a helmet.
Yes, borders are a thing of the past. They're also a thing of the present and a thing of the future.
If Facebook has offices in Canada, servers in Canada, or workers who live in Canada then Canada has a valid point. If not then Facebook can tell Canada to fuck off.
They should patent it. And no, since Coca Cola is a multinational corporaton with stockholders all over the world, how can you call it an American company?
Apple pie is American. There are no trade secrets to apple pie. Baseball is American. Multinational corporations are decidedly NOT American, although all of them, even ones with headquarters in other counties (Sony, BP, Shell) want you to think they are.
is that you, non-huffable kitten?