Slashdot story in 2152: MPAA asks again for control of brain-implanted memory remapping devices

The MPAA is arguing that if they could directly control consumer's neural recall pathways, the could make more money by reselling you movies you've already seen.

Where's the +2 Both Prescient and Scary mod when you need it?

I expected the coldest spot to be one of your ex's hearts. But that's just the way your life has been going lately, isn't it?

The temperature listed is definitely Farenheit - in Celcius, absolute zero is -273.15.

All of those "cool little tools" for Windows users cost far more money than they were worth. ($99 to sync my contacts to the computer? Then another $99 for a different sync program if my replacement phone wasn't the same one as my previous phone? Really? Okay, I'll pay a neighborhood kid $10/hour to do it for me and it'll be done for $20.) Your problem wasn't that there was no Apple phone. It was that you were on a non-GSM provider. You could have gone to AT&T or T-Mobile even before the iPhone was out, and stored your contacts on your SIM card, and taken them with you from phone to phone - and not had to call your provider to switch phones, either.

Yes, I'm aware that there are other things people think are advantages to the iPhone. I just wanted to point out that you could have made your experiences with cell phones 500% better just by doing some goddam research instead of waiting for Apple to hand you a ready-made solution.

The UMID mBook m1 has a lot of what you're looking for. It's clamshell, not tablet; there's no DVD/CD burner, but there's USB ports to connect one; and it's smaller than you asked for. Last I looked they were running a bit over $600, which is still kind of steep for something I'm likely to accidentally step on or leave somewhere.

And how exactly do you pull off being exact and punctual while being sloppy and unable to figure out what time it is from being drunk?

Thank you, sir, for the polite and considerate response despite my (intentionally) somewhat inflammatory tone. I would also describe myself as libertarian (note the small L - I don't currently, never have, and suspect I never will belong the Libertarian party in the US), but not as an anarchist.

It seems we have similar political positions, but have a difference of opinion on what the most important issues in the past election were. In my opinion, the single most important issue in the previous election was that hundreds of American lives and billions of taxpayer dollars were, and continue to be, wasted on war that was started based in information that was known to be flawed and that does nothing to improve the security or defense of our nation. McCain's statements that we might be in Iraq for "a hundred years" is one of the things that made me vote against him.

But anyway...

I hadn't know that tidbit about McCain's treatment of his wife.

I don't hate the United States at all. There is much to love about what has been accomplished here. Unfortunately little of it has been done in my lifetime (I'm a Tweener - between the Baby Boom and Generation X).

I'm from the next set of Tweeners - born too late to really be a part of Gen X and too early for Gen Y - and I feel pretty much the same. I don't think a country led by Hillary, Obama, McCain, or Palin is one that will achieve accomplish great things. Hopefully, we have more inspiring options in 2012.

My own vote was stolen by California Democrats when my voter registration was mishandled[1], so I didn't even have the opportunity to vote for Governor Sarah Palin (and pray for McCain to not last an entire term).

Were you planning on voting for the McCain/Palin ticket because you hate America, or because of an "it has to get worse before it gets better" type of viewpoint where you think that making things worse will allow the revolution to come sooner rather than later?

Voting between the lesser of two evils has certainly gotten more evil.

Agreed. The problem with voting for the lesser of two evils is that both sides are still evil. This is not a good situation to be in. Unfortunately, political positions that I would not describe as "evil" are generally untenable.

On the gripping hand

A Niven/Pournelle reference! I take back the "hate America" comment!...Wait, no I don't; I still want to know why you were willing to risk having a book-banning dunderhead as President. But I'm less pissed about it than I was before.

You forgot the low-cost, low-power Lizard CPU (being developed by the designers of ARM CPUs) and the highly logical Spock CPU (from AMD, of course).

According to Wikipedia: There's a minimum age of 16 and you can't be currently enrolled in high school; some jurisdictions may raise the age limit to 18. If I had known this when I was in high school, I probably would have dropped out to become eligible.

I agree with you: This kid is, probably, bored out of his skull. I know I was in high school. The only reason I bothered doing enough work to graduate is that I wanted to learn engineering, which (I thought) meant going to an engineering college, which in turn would not be possible without a high school diploma.

If you ever find the slash on your phone, try http://pixelcity.com/s/

Also, my wife's Motorola phone has the alarm clock under (I think) "Fun and Apps", which is the last place you'd think to look, as alarm clocks aren't "fun".

Have him take the GED (from your description, he'll pass easily) and either apply to college or get a job. Clearly, school is torture for him, and totally unnecessary to his further development, so why are you, as a loving parent, forcing him to stay in school?

And an AZERTY keyboard makes sense if you're...um, French, I think. Or live in a French-speaking country.

Hunt & peck works surprisingly well for a large number of people. Most people I know don't touch-type but achieve reasonable typing speeds. Even with thumb-typing on a cell phone with fully keyboard, a reasonable speed can be achieved without much effort as long as the layout is one you are familiar with.

As you can see from the picture on this wikipedia page, hollow-point bullets are not exactly "pointy". Hence my vote for "other" - and this comment should explain what "other" means in this case.

what makes you think it wasn't designed by a concerned parent who is also a dominatrix? They're not mutually exclusive, you know!

Regardless of how you feel about piracy, RIAA's idiotic tactics are going to make people want to stop supporting musicians entirely.

Which is too bad, since as you mentioned, shows are where the musicians really make money. I try to go to more shows by local bands at small, local venues; I sometimes go to shows by major-label artists but I'd rather spend $10 to hear $RANDOM_DEATH_METAL_BAND than $30 or more to hear bands that maybe everyone's heard of but their music is the same pablum that gets played on the radio every day.

But anyway, the reason I'm bother to reply is to ask these questions: Do you create original music? If so, is it available online? And (although this is off-topic for this discussion, but you don't have your e-mail shown to the public so I have to ask here) can I use it in my podcast? Feel free to e-mail me at my slashdot user name @yahoo.com to discuss further if you'd like.