Exile and the Kingdom is also great.

I sometimes wonder if other humans have an inner life like me, it's very tempting for me to project my inner world onto other humans.

We don't have any more evidence that other animals are conscious than we have that other people are conscious. As far as evidence is concerned, your cat is no more conscious than I am.

Are logfiles enough to count as an inner life? We have clear evidence of those.

I think it's the other way around. We have plenty of evidence that humans are doing something different than most creatures and have trouble articulating exactly what it is.

I don't think we do. The only evidence I have that other people are conscious is by analogy; because I assume that whatever conscious is, I am, and other people seem like me.

You've skipped my point though, I'm saying that your definition of conscious isn't a useful articulation of the difference, so of course it doesn't yield a satisfying result.

Then compare the life's work of Picasso to the life's work of most cats. Art is evocative. Cats poop a lot.

Compare it to the life's work of most humans.

Humans poop a lot, I'd guess even more than cats...

See, it's hard to articulate.

I am a philosophical zombie.

A friend runs some SIP networks, he said sometimes when hackers get access to a line they make calls to premium numbers in North Korea and other places. They can run up a 5000$ bills pretty quickly.

I think I recall viruses doing the same in the early 90's, so this isn't exactly a new idea.

In some parts of the world it was the kind of thing you could have happen to the household by just letting your stupid little brother look at one or two naughty ads in the back of a magazine ..

I think there was a TV show or ad instructing children to pick up the phone and hold it near the TV which then was playing dial tones.

please source someone!!!

That's very common, yes. But it's also idiotic for general VoIP providers to allow access to such numbers. There's no reason they need to do that, and they hurt themselves and customers. Many of their US customers don't even need international dialing for the most part.

While you can make some money off fraud on normal-priced international calling it certainly makes it much more difficult and noticeable.

It's why malware that lets you call and text from a compromised phone is so dangerous to your typical user.

I would have thought that North Korea would be flagged as spam.

IIRC certain providers do block them, Comcast specifically comes to mind (despite their website giving it a calling rate)

I have a VPS, when I first got it, it had an additional user setup for some unknown reason. I didn't know it was there until my server was hacked by a bot. I'd suggest adding one step of checking the /home directory or other places to make sure no 'unknown' accounts have been set up.

I'm in my thirties, when I was younger I was certainly more willing to put in the effort to find the music I wanted for free. At the time it seemed much easier to find, for me. Now I pay 10 month for spotify and my effort is much less, but so is my interest.

Same story. And I was at it a couple of years before Napster showed up and made it easy. Searching through ratio-ed FTP sites for the "Flavahood Sexual Healing Remix" of Keith Sweat's "Twisted" (cause that's the one they played on the radio and it was impossible to find anywhere) all while on dial-up, was a badge of honor! But I did buy a ton of music as well... which I promptly would pop into the CD-ROM drive on my linux box, and CDRip and LAME-encode for later usage. But, just like you, somewhere along the way, I didn't feel like it was worth the effort once services like Last.FM/Rdio/Spotify started showing up. $10 a month is little to ask. Sure there are times when I can't find a track or even an artist... but a few minutes later, I'm cruising along listening to something else.

I agree - it's too much effort to be young :(

Me too, actually...but I believe we are a minority, we're certainly not going to sustain the music industry.

im broke so i don't pay, currently using 3mo apple music subscription. that said even when i get a mediocre salary i would pay 9.99 for apple music (or spotify). at most states minimum wage this is ~1 hour a month. since the movie/media companies either have shit teir stresming (hulu, hbo go) i still watch on primewire, but i could imagine with a halfway decent salary for $100 i could have internet, netflix, hbo go, anytging on itunes, prime, and some money left over for an online rental or 2, that strikes me as a good deal.

sure i could torrent, see if the seed health is decent, check if commenters gave positive feedback, and then store a 500mb - 2gb file. but a la carte streaming is actually much better. cable just needs to die but it wont when the internet & media companies enjoy 2 monopolies & gov subsidies

I doubt that awareness will make any different, even when people are told about the issues with using facebook / instagram they keep on using it.

People won't change until they get a serious wakeup call, but even then they will mostly not do anything.

I generally dislike new/modern consumer tech, but this looks pretty cool.

We support a 2-5% tax so people can use credit cards to pay for stuff.

This is an astoundingly underrecognized fact. We do so much to boost economic activity by just a percent or two but how much would enabling cashless transactions WITHOUT a universal ~3% tax help things? In some places it's nearly everything we buy (except for the largest expenses, like housing).

Some of the characters who are suppose to be super smart in 'Death Note' are always eating sweets / chocolate.