Hate to break it to you, but that overpriced microbrew that you are buying did not cost more than 1$/pint to make. (I consider a pint to be ~500ml, a tall can)
So you can have cheap good beer, especially if you homebrew. My beer costs about $1/L and is as crafty as they come (I make it in the bathtub!)
Many feel that the election was stolen due to illegal robocalls by conservatives. But yes, it is a point of national shame that even 40% of the country voted for these sickos. Especially after they were judged in contempt of parliament and should rightly be in jail. The main problem is that the canadian economy never collapsed as the american one did. Housing in vancouver and toronto is still in a bubble. The economy is hanging by a string basically and all it will take is most likely one moderate jar to send it under. But as of now, the conservatives have propped things up and sold stuff off to foreign interests in order to keep us from sliding under. They cannot continue that forever and then their reign will end, same as bush.
I used to recommend MSE, however after it not finding something when I KNEW there was a virus, only avira was able to find it and remove it.
Ever since then, I have swore by avira. However you do have to jump through hoops to get it working though, such as having to blacklist avnotify.exe in secpol so you don't see avira ads. Annoying, and why it makes it difficult to recomend to anyone who is not comfortable with editing windows security policies.
This is a very interesting topic to me as well and I am somewhat saddened to see everyone recommending MSE which hasn't seemed to work well after the initial few months when it was released.
I now wonder how many people with MSE just think they are secure, because yes it is very unobtrusive. However after finding several other viruses which MSE did not detect over the last year, avira was the only one to find them all. I do several virus uninstalls a month, mostly from employees home systems. Many have MSE installed.
Yes it takes great skill to attend meetings, sign cheques and provide "vision". He didn't build shit. Thousands of programmers employed by him did. CEO's have crazy visions all the damn time. Just because in highschool he did some programming doesn't mean he knows what the reality of software development is on the ground, 30 years later.
But what exactly is he trying to say? Online cloud based collaboration is the future. That is what everyone is saying these days. And as with all future predictions, I am sure they are 100% right. After all, we all telecommute to work using our very own government provided T1's without even having to undock our hovercars!
You know, thats funny. When he says "lets see if those bastards can do 90" I always thought he meant 90km/h. ( i still do kinda when I accelerate past someone and think of the line from the movie) And for years I was thinking, so what? he beat a run down beater of a VW bus. When really he should have said 150! (150km/h = 90mph) Which makes more sense as most 80s cars cant do past 140 or so, so it would have been an appropriate level of massive speed for the time.
" But unless authorities or the facility in question are contacted, they have no business what a person says in his own Twitter."
How does something you post to the internet, on a site made expressly for the purposes of sharing this information with others, become "your own" anything? He didn't write this in his private notebook that some police officer found in an illegal search of his bedroom. Once you post something to the world, you lose your exclusive rights to it. This includes the right to bitch that people are reading and in some cases reacting to it. DUH!!!
If you didn't take him seriously and it was infact a real threat, is it worth risking your job over? Do you want to be the guy who ignored a "bin laden plans to hijack planes" memo?
Let me make it simple here, don't threaten to blow up public infrastructure on a public forum like the internet. Period. What should be common sense to most people seems absent from the always on, speech entitled twitter generation that thinks they have a right to write any garbage they want free and clear.
Just take it into a real life context. If you were responsible for securing a facility and you heard someone just outside the gate joking with his friend about blowing up your facility, are you telling me you wouldn't report that to the police?
Most people are not experts on judging the validity of threats. That's why we have police. Jokes are only jokes until things start blowing up, then its all like "where were the signs!!" and "how come you didn't connect the dots??". People think its all so easy, because they are looking at everything in retrospect. Most people who are actually responsible for things, don't have the luxury of ignoring things like this. Again, if it's my job on the line vs some idiots "joke", I can tell you right now 100% which is more important to me. And its not the idiot.
"Yeah, [you are] right. Quality and user experience has nothing to do with it. There's just millions of blind idiot fanbois buying there stuff constantly. Sure."
Well you certainly hit the nail on the head there!
Mythbusters proved that driving a motorcycle is in most cases worse for the environment then driving a car. You should watch that episode before you think you are saving the planet with a motorcycle.
" I would agree that most Western nations agree that murder is bad."
With the obvious objection of the USA and other nato countries. Right? Otherwise I would refer you to iraq and Afghanistan where civilians are being killed by soldiers every day. The western world is crazy murder happy. Especially the usa. USA has the death penalty. You don't get much more pro-murder than having the government do it and declare it legal.
Continue watching. The show got alot more interesting and nuanced after the first two episodes. Its getting harder and harder to tell who the "bad guys" are. (the show isnt the best scifi ever (they solve alot of problems with duce ex machina), but its interesting and being marketed heavily in canada which starts a good discussion over how far we would let the corporations run amok)
"And before you spew the bailouts/ do-overs/hard working american rhetoric, let's actually review the facts related to the topic on hand.
-Knight is a market maker. Their sole purpose on NYSE to ensure liquidity and make money. They do it by actively stepping in to sell and buy particular securities. There is nothing there that "games" the system."
How is buying something literally milliseconds before a "real" buyer, jacking up the price and then selling it to the "real" buyer (who actually wants it), a millisecond later NOT gaming the system? Because you termed them "market makers"?, whatever the fuck that means! (there is already a market if people are buying and selling to eachother, so what are they "making")
If I sat in the line at the supermarket, and when people put their goods on the conveyor belt, i immediately bought them from the store, and then almost immediately, sold them to the customer who originally put them there at a small profit, it would be obvious that this would be wrong. I haven't added anything, the person still gets the exact same product, but in those few seconds, i have made them pay more. I do this because I have fancy computers and lots of money to buy up the stores inventory and hold onto it for a few seconds.
Would that be fair? is that what society should be doing? Middlemen everywhere jacking up prices for people who just want to buy a god damn apple? Please explain to me why with tangible goods, this would be a ridiculous practice, but with electronic bits, it becomes normal procedures. Please explain why these people should exist, and what real world value they are adding to the stocks that they momentarily hold. Why don't you let the buyer and seller work out a fair price on their own?
"The problem is that once they locate the buyer and seller, they need to buy the stock from the seller first, then turn around and sell it to the buyer, but the buyer may have cancelled they transaction"
So what value are they adding? Seems like you are describing a useless middleman which uses computers and enormous wealth to stand in the way of two parties negotiating on a price. The middleman does not intend to invest in the company that they are trading, they are just skimming off the top. This drives up the price for everyone, and makes money for the middleman. Why is the exchange itself not matching up buyers with sellers? why do we need these third party traders doing it? Surely a computer can take a sell price and match it up with someone who wants to buy it. Why have the middlemen artificially inflating the price automatically? You seem to be saying that these people should not have to incur any risk in that 1 or 10 seconds. Why? they are gambling with no risk, if their trades always go through and they always inflate the prices people pay, and rip off the sellers.
Sounds like common sense to me. Society as a whole should be working to eliminate middlemen, people which add no value. Why by a car from a dealership when you can order it on the internet for a fair price (the same as everyone else would pay) with no negotiation required.
"Intelligence is knowing that a tomato is a fruit."
Nope, intelligence is knowing history, that it is BOTH, and contested.
"Botanically, a tomato is a fruit: the ovary, together with its seeds, of a flowering plant. However, the tomato has a much lower sugar content than other fruits, and is therefore not as sweet. Typically served as part of a salad or main course of a meal, rather than at dessert, it is considered a vegetable for most culinary uses. One exception is that tomatoes are treated as a fruit in home canning practices: they are acidic enough to be processed in a water bath rather than a pressure cooker as vegetables would require. Tomatoes are not the only food source with this ambiguity: avocadoes, eggplants, cucumbers, and squashes of all kinds (such as zucchini and pumpkins) are all botanically fruits, yet cooked as vegetables.
This dispute has led to legal speculation in the United States. In 1887, U.S. tariff laws that imposed a duty on vegetables, but not on fruits, caused the tomato's status to become a matter of legal importance. The U.S. Supreme Court settled this controversy on May 10, 1893, by declaring that the tomato is a vegetable, based on the popular definition that classifies vegetables by use, that they are generally served with dinner and not dessert (Nix v. Hedden (149 U.S. 304)).[56] The holding of this case applies only to the interpretation of the Tariff Act of March 3, 1883, and the court did not purport to reclassify the tomato for botanical or other purposes."
Personally, I think they are right. Foods should be classified or grouped together based on physical characteristics and normal usages. Intuitively, you know that a tomato is a vegetable. Admit it!
People that say tomatoes are a fruit are just pedantic smart alecks. That's what wisdom has taught me.
"Define "common". The police claimed that for 2008 there were "over 300" home invasions and kidnappings (fewer than 1 per day, in an area with 4.2 million people),"
LOL. I would define common as "happening almost every day" but whatever!
"The atom bomb was (and is) a good thing. Notice how no one's actually tried to take over the world lately? "
You just say that because one hasn't exploded near you yet. No "nation state" has tried to take over "the world", its true. However corporations, globalization and international bankers, even if they are not nation states, have linked the world financial system so closely together that they may as well be thought of at least trying to take over the world.
Just because people do it with a little more finesse, and it is done in back rooms instead of the battlefield doesn;t make it any less evil.
I am sure that the world has not seen the last of nuclear war. That dead hand thing still could be active in russia, just a few corroded wires away from making your statement a horrible cliche of pre world war 3 thinking.
Its not just praise, its a glowing recommendation. From a brand new account with two posts? FP posted the exact minute the article was posted? "A great domain name, and easy to remember" Really? Thats what makes it a pro service, that its got "brand recognition"? What slashdotter would recommend something based on branding!!! no one would!!!
Don't even get me started on their use of proper punctuation!! Look at all them commas!
are you really that naive?
he says the word great like 3 times. No one but advertisers, PHB's and marketers say the word great that many times. Not to mention superb. Who says that? someone siting in a microsoft corner office - that's who!
"I can't but recommend you to try it!"
You can see where the marketeer tried to improvise the end there without getting the copy signed off on. Everybody wants to be creative! stick to the script marketdroid!
"Waterworld grossed $21 million in its opening weekend. But that doesn't mean the film was good or that it was an overall success."
I think it was a great movie. Mutants, boat based archipelagos, resource scarcity in post apocalyptic communities, the exon valdez, people living on oil tankers, how quickly history can be erased. Personally, I think it was decent SciFi, way better than the pro american jingoistic ID4 (independance day) which was released about the same time.
The film did end up making money (90mil after expenses), and still is one of the very few science fiction movies that depict an end of civilization caused by massive flooding / global climate change. They also built most of the sets and everything for real in the ocean (and a large tank i think), as opposed to now adays when they would just render it with computer graphics. That alone makes it worth seeing. They pretty much blow up and sink a 200 million dollar set!
" you can't convey different intent (right-click, middle-click, other mouse buttons etc.) easily."
Um, pretty much every modern touch screen device allows you to right click by holding your finger in place for 2 seconds or so. This generally brings up a context menu. I have personally done this on my GF's google nexus phone as well as those 42 inch dell touch screen display things you find in certain kiosks and displays. There is a windows control that controls the behaviour of this in windows 7 even.
So your statement is factually incorrect. I still think tablets are mostly stupid, however they do have their niche uses, and those uses are growing. Remember that smart phones these days are basically tiny tablets. And more than half of everyone I see on the train in the morning is glued to their phone. There is definitely a market.
"Yes I've been poor, capitalism is the only way out"
Well thats not surprising, seeing as america is a capitalist society. *sigh*. What are you arguing? that you pulled yourself up by your own bootstraps with no outside help? Good for you. Hopefully you realize that not everyone is so lucky. I too pulled myself out of the gutter, but I have no illusions that this is because I live in a resource rich society where there are many options open to me. Also, I was young at the time, and under no illusion is that not a major part of it. If I had to do it again when I was 50 years old with, likely, multiple medical problems, I may have a very different experience.
"they both drive nicer cars than I do."
That's because american society is fucked up. It is extremely based on car buying, that there are actually incentives to trade in a perfectly working 4 or 5 or 10! year old car for a new one, incurring new debt.
So maybe your rents are idiots and cant manage money. That does not mean that everyone using government programs is wasteful.
Personally, I would argue that the overemphasis on making everyone a competing capitalist, and that everyone expects to be rich "One Day", actually leads to wastefulness of government resources. If people came to grips with using less, consuming less, they would be happier, and most likely make better decisions. I think that abuse of government programs is perpetuated by the same culture which tries to say that everyone needs to be rich to be happy. So in a way, capitalism may be the only way out, but it is also the cause of most of the poverty and artificial scarcity of resources, in the name of capitalism. Not only do the poor not have money, they also feel bad about it. It doesn't have to be that way, and its a cultural shift that is required. It certainly does not help to blindly praise capitalism because some aspects are personally helping you. There is alot of bad in the philosophy as well.
"Regardless, without deception, the police couldn't do their job very well"
If ever one wonders why people do not trust authority figures like the police, here you are, the quote above. Police will lie and lie and lie to you in order to get the result they want. Do not trust police!! The comic is more hilarious for the fact that none of those "crimes" SHOULD BE CRIMES!! You have prostitution and drug dealing. Solve them by legalizing drugs, legalizing prostitution. Two of the most common scenarios where you would be entrapped for exercising your freedom, disappear.
Personally, I do not care what the law says. Any time a cop convinces you to do something illegal it should be entrapment. Police/Lawyer state conditioning comics aside. The remark there about "corrupting any law abiding citizen" are interesting as well. If someone called me to offer free drugs, then hell yes I would take them! But am I not "any" citizen because most people don't smoke weed? What if the drug was alcohol? What if "any" person would accept free weed and the only thing preventing them is its illegality! What if the entrapment involved money instead? If someone offered you 10k to move a bag across town, no questions asked, I doubt many people would say no.
It is amusing to me how illogical the law is. If "anyone" would be corrupted by an influence, then its entrapment? But if society considers most people as not drug users (even though statistically, most people drink alcohol or coffee, or both!), then it is not entrapment. What a world!
" Other stores may pay more, but is it really a good thing for our society that they employ bright, capable people as floor sweepers and shelf stockers?"
Um, if they pay them a living wage, then why not? Forgive me if I have the outdated notion that when I go to a hardware store and ask a question, I would like a thoughtful answer, not the generic "I don't know" and shoulder shrug that is more and more common in these big box stores. Forgive me for thinking employees should have a basic knowledge about their products and not just be slaves cleaning up after me and loading the food trough - as it were. There was a time, and there still is at smaller stores, where employees made passionate recommendations or advised one on the right tool for the right job.
"Walmart is helping society by making these people employable"
So is your argument that the dumb and disabled are entitled to a much lower standard of life and expectations than other people in society? thats fucked up, masquerading as sympathy for the unfortunate.
Sure "domestic freedom fighters/terrorists" could do it, but killing civilians doesn't exactly win support for your cause.
Its equally likely, that if for example, tea partiers, starting bombing rail lines, that public support would turn drastically against them and the government would have to do nothing more than encourage you to report on any suspicions of domestic terrorism around you. Civilians, do not like being killed. Even for the "greater good" (as determined by your small minority of revolutionaries i guess??) so your 10k fighters would quickly be identified by the other 500M people who don't want to die for the cause. In this scenario, its not so much guns and bombs that defeat your revolution, but espionage, pro state propaganda and the fear of terrorist attacks.
I think you are mixing the ideas of what is "good" and what is "possible". I had assumed however that all you people talking about revolution actually wanted it to succeed. It may be "possible" to rebel yes, but if you do not succeed in your revolution, well then you are just another terrorist with a crazy manifesto. Nothing changes and you lose by default.
I don't think he is advocating for pacisfism, but against suicide by cop/military. Which is what would happen if you (even with hundreds of friends) decided to fight the american federal government.
Sure your american history may not agree, however most of that history happened before modern weapons. If you want a current real life example, look at the conflict in syria. They are fully armed, and yet cannot stop the government and their supporters who from what I have read are in the minority. Why is this? Because a professional military is better at waging war than a rag tag group of your friends.
Maybe the free syrian army will win in the end. But mark my words, it will not be without outside help in the form of modern weapons and trained soldiers.
I do not disagree with your sentiment. And perhaps it will be more realistic in 5 years time if the american government collapses and can't pay soldiers, say. If the government was in a state of collapse, then you may be able to defeat it with your band of revolutionaries. However as it is right now, you couldn't do jack shit. They would drone strike and MOAB your compound to dust. They would kill your family and all supporters just like waco texas. And the public most likely would not care, because things just are not bad enough yet to have a popularly supported revolution.
Bottom line, if there is a revolution, there will be guns a plenty everywhere. Even in places like canada, that currently have strict gun control laws. Any laws about acquiring guns would obviously go out the window if there was a revolution. Having guns now (with no revolution), provides a false sense of security and not much more. They will not defend you as your constitution dictates because it was written hundreds of years ago when it was a more of an equal playing field.
I think that is what he was trying to say, and the point that you are missing here.
Slashdot Mirror
Hate to break it to you, but that overpriced microbrew that you are buying did not cost more than 1$ /pint to make. (I consider a pint to be ~500ml, a tall can)
So you can have cheap good beer, especially if you homebrew. My beer costs about $1/L and is as crafty as they come (I make it in the bathtub!)
Many feel that the election was stolen due to illegal robocalls by conservatives. But yes, it is a point of national shame that even 40% of the country voted for these sickos. Especially after they were judged in contempt of parliament and should rightly be in jail. The main problem is that the canadian economy never collapsed as the american one did. Housing in vancouver and toronto is still in a bubble. The economy is hanging by a string basically and all it will take is most likely one moderate jar to send it under. But as of now, the conservatives have propped things up and sold stuff off to foreign interests in order to keep us from sliding under. They cannot continue that forever and then their reign will end, same as bush.
MSE? have you ever done any back to back trials?
I used to recommend MSE, however after it not finding something when I KNEW there was a virus, only avira was able to find it and remove it.
Ever since then, I have swore by avira. However you do have to jump through hoops to get it working though, such as having to blacklist avnotify.exe in secpol so you don't see avira ads. Annoying, and why it makes it difficult to recomend to anyone who is not comfortable with editing windows security policies.
This is a very interesting topic to me as well and I am somewhat saddened to see everyone recommending MSE which hasn't seemed to work well after the initial few months when it was released.
I now wonder how many people with MSE just think they are secure, because yes it is very unobtrusive. However after finding several other viruses which MSE did not detect over the last year, avira was the only one to find them all. I do several virus uninstalls a month, mostly from employees home systems. Many have MSE installed.
Yes it takes great skill to attend meetings, sign cheques and provide "vision". He didn't build shit. Thousands of programmers employed by him did. CEO's have crazy visions all the damn time. Just because in highschool he did some programming doesn't mean he knows what the reality of software development is on the ground, 30 years later.
But what exactly is he trying to say? Online cloud based collaboration is the future. That is what everyone is saying these days. And as with all future predictions, I am sure they are 100% right. After all, we all telecommute to work using our very own government provided T1's without even having to undock our hovercars!
You know, thats funny. When he says "lets see if those bastards can do 90" I always thought he meant 90km/h. ( i still do kinda when I accelerate past someone and think of the line from the movie) And for years I was thinking, so what? he beat a run down beater of a VW bus. When really he should have said 150! (150km/h = 90mph) Which makes more sense as most 80s cars cant do past 140 or so, so it would have been an appropriate level of massive speed for the time.
Ah unit conversion fun!
How does something you post to the internet, on a site made expressly for the purposes of sharing this information with others, become "your own" anything? He didn't write this in his private notebook that some police officer found in an illegal search of his bedroom. Once you post something to the world, you lose your exclusive rights to it. This includes the right to bitch that people are reading and in some cases reacting to it. DUH!!!
If you didn't take him seriously and it was infact a real threat, is it worth risking your job over? Do you want to be the guy who ignored a "bin laden plans to hijack planes" memo?
Let me make it simple here, don't threaten to blow up public infrastructure on a public forum like the internet. Period. What should be common sense to most people seems absent from the always on, speech entitled twitter generation that thinks they have a right to write any garbage they want free and clear.
Just take it into a real life context. If you were responsible for securing a facility and you heard someone just outside the gate joking with his friend about blowing up your facility, are you telling me you wouldn't report that to the police?
Most people are not experts on judging the validity of threats. That's why we have police. Jokes are only jokes until things start blowing up, then its all like "where were the signs!!" and "how come you didn't connect the dots??". People think its all so easy, because they are looking at everything in retrospect. Most people who are actually responsible for things, don't have the luxury of ignoring things like this. Again, if it's my job on the line vs some idiots "joke", I can tell you right now 100% which is more important to me. And its not the idiot.
Well you certainly hit the nail on the head there!
Mythbusters proved that driving a motorcycle is in most cases worse for the environment then driving a car. You should watch that episode before you think you are saving the planet with a motorcycle.
With the obvious objection of the USA and other nato countries. Right? Otherwise I would refer you to iraq and Afghanistan where civilians are being killed by soldiers every day. The western world is crazy murder happy. Especially the usa. USA has the death penalty. You don't get much more pro-murder than having the government do it and declare it legal.
Continue watching. The show got alot more interesting and nuanced after the first two episodes. Its getting harder and harder to tell who the "bad guys" are. (the show isnt the best scifi ever (they solve alot of problems with duce ex machina), but its interesting and being marketed heavily in canada which starts a good discussion over how far we would let the corporations run amok)
Number 1 in print, but he's not the first person you think of!
How is buying something literally milliseconds before a "real" buyer, jacking up the price and then selling it to the "real" buyer (who actually wants it), a millisecond later NOT gaming the system? Because you termed them "market makers"?, whatever the fuck that means! (there is already a market if people are buying and selling to eachother, so what are they "making")
If I sat in the line at the supermarket, and when people put their goods on the conveyor belt, i immediately bought them from the store, and then almost immediately, sold them to the customer who originally put them there at a small profit, it would be obvious that this would be wrong. I haven't added anything, the person still gets the exact same product, but in those few seconds, i have made them pay more. I do this because I have fancy computers and lots of money to buy up the stores inventory and hold onto it for a few seconds.
Would that be fair? is that what society should be doing? Middlemen everywhere jacking up prices for people who just want to buy a god damn apple? Please explain to me why with tangible goods, this would be a ridiculous practice, but with electronic bits, it becomes normal procedures. Please explain why these people should exist, and what real world value they are adding to the stocks that they momentarily hold. Why don't you let the buyer and seller work out a fair price on their own?
So what value are they adding? Seems like you are describing a useless middleman which uses computers and enormous wealth to stand in the way of two parties negotiating on a price. The middleman does not intend to invest in the company that they are trading, they are just skimming off the top. This drives up the price for everyone, and makes money for the middleman. Why is the exchange itself not matching up buyers with sellers? why do we need these third party traders doing it? Surely a computer can take a sell price and match it up with someone who wants to buy it. Why have the middlemen artificially inflating the price automatically? You seem to be saying that these people should not have to incur any risk in that 1 or 10 seconds. Why? they are gambling with no risk, if their trades always go through and they always inflate the prices people pay, and rip off the sellers.
Sounds like common sense to me. Society as a whole should be working to eliminate middlemen, people which add no value. Why by a car from a dealership when you can order it on the internet for a fair price (the same as everyone else would pay) with no negotiation required.
Nope, intelligence is knowing history, that it is BOTH, and contested.
Personally, I think they are right. Foods should be classified or grouped together based on physical characteristics and normal usages. Intuitively, you know that a tomato is a vegetable. Admit it!
People that say tomatoes are a fruit are just pedantic smart alecks. That's what wisdom has taught me.
LOL. I would define common as "happening almost every day" but whatever!
You just say that because one hasn't exploded near you yet. No "nation state" has tried to take over "the world", its true. However corporations, globalization and international bankers, even if they are not nation states, have linked the world financial system so closely together that they may as well be thought of at least trying to take over the world.
Just because people do it with a little more finesse, and it is done in back rooms instead of the battlefield doesn;t make it any less evil.
I am sure that the world has not seen the last of nuclear war. That dead hand thing still could be active in russia, just a few corroded wires away from making your statement a horrible cliche of pre world war 3 thinking.
Its not just praise, its a glowing recommendation. From a brand new account with two posts? FP posted the exact minute the article was posted? "A great domain name, and easy to remember" Really? Thats what makes it a pro service, that its got "brand recognition"? What slashdotter would recommend something based on branding!!! no one would!!!
Don't even get me started on their use of proper punctuation!! Look at all them commas!
are you really that naive?
he says the word great like 3 times. No one but advertisers, PHB's and marketers say the word great that many times. Not to mention superb. Who says that? someone siting in a microsoft corner office - that's who!
You can see where the marketeer tried to improvise the end there without getting the copy signed off on. Everybody wants to be creative! stick to the script marketdroid!
I think it was a great movie. Mutants, boat based archipelagos, resource scarcity in post apocalyptic communities, the exon valdez, people living on oil tankers, how quickly history can be erased. Personally, I think it was decent SciFi, way better than the pro american jingoistic ID4 (independance day) which was released about the same time.
The film did end up making money (90mil after expenses), and still is one of the very few science fiction movies that depict an end of civilization caused by massive flooding / global climate change. They also built most of the sets and everything for real in the ocean (and a large tank i think), as opposed to now adays when they would just render it with computer graphics. That alone makes it worth seeing. They pretty much blow up and sink a 200 million dollar set!
Um, pretty much every modern touch screen device allows you to right click by holding your finger in place for 2 seconds or so. This generally brings up a context menu. I have personally done this on my GF's google nexus phone as well as those 42 inch dell touch screen display things you find in certain kiosks and displays. There is a windows control that controls the behaviour of this in windows 7 even.
So your statement is factually incorrect. I still think tablets are mostly stupid, however they do have their niche uses, and those uses are growing. Remember that smart phones these days are basically tiny tablets. And more than half of everyone I see on the train in the morning is glued to their phone. There is definitely a market.
Well thats not surprising, seeing as america is a capitalist society. *sigh*. What are you arguing? that you pulled yourself up by your own bootstraps with no outside help? Good for you. Hopefully you realize that not everyone is so lucky. I too pulled myself out of the gutter, but I have no illusions that this is because I live in a resource rich society where there are many options open to me. Also, I was young at the time, and under no illusion is that not a major part of it. If I had to do it again when I was 50 years old with, likely, multiple medical problems, I may have a very different experience.
That's because american society is fucked up. It is extremely based on car buying, that there are actually incentives to trade in a perfectly working 4 or 5 or 10! year old car for a new one, incurring new debt.
So maybe your rents are idiots and cant manage money. That does not mean that everyone using government programs is wasteful.
Personally, I would argue that the overemphasis on making everyone a competing capitalist, and that everyone expects to be rich "One Day", actually leads to wastefulness of government resources. If people came to grips with using less, consuming less, they would be happier, and most likely make better decisions. I think that abuse of government programs is perpetuated by the same culture which tries to say that everyone needs to be rich to be happy. So in a way, capitalism may be the only way out, but it is also the cause of most of the poverty and artificial scarcity of resources, in the name of capitalism. Not only do the poor not have money, they also feel bad about it. It doesn't have to be that way, and its a cultural shift that is required. It certainly does not help to blindly praise capitalism because some aspects are personally helping you. There is alot of bad in the philosophy as well.
If ever one wonders why people do not trust authority figures like the police, here you are, the quote above. Police will lie and lie and lie to you in order to get the result they want. Do not trust police!! The comic is more hilarious for the fact that none of those "crimes" SHOULD BE CRIMES!! You have prostitution and drug dealing. Solve them by legalizing drugs, legalizing prostitution. Two of the most common scenarios where you would be entrapped for exercising your freedom, disappear.
Personally, I do not care what the law says. Any time a cop convinces you to do something illegal it should be entrapment. Police/Lawyer state conditioning comics aside. The remark there about "corrupting any law abiding citizen" are interesting as well. If someone called me to offer free drugs, then hell yes I would take them! But am I not "any" citizen because most people don't smoke weed? What if the drug was alcohol? What if "any" person would accept free weed and the only thing preventing them is its illegality! What if the entrapment involved money instead? If someone offered you 10k to move a bag across town, no questions asked, I doubt many people would say no.
It is amusing to me how illogical the law is. If "anyone" would be corrupted by an influence, then its entrapment? But if society considers most people as not drug users (even though statistically, most people drink alcohol or coffee, or both!), then it is not entrapment.
What a world!
Um, if they pay them a living wage, then why not? Forgive me if I have the outdated notion that when I go to a hardware store and ask a question, I would like a thoughtful answer, not the generic "I don't know" and shoulder shrug that is more and more common in these big box stores. Forgive me for thinking employees should have a basic knowledge about their products and not just be slaves cleaning up after me and loading the food trough - as it were. There was a time, and there still is at smaller stores, where employees made passionate recommendations or advised one on the right tool for the right job.
So is your argument that the dumb and disabled are entitled to a much lower standard of life and expectations than other people in society? thats fucked up, masquerading as sympathy for the unfortunate.
Sure "domestic freedom fighters/terrorists" could do it, but killing civilians doesn't exactly win support for your cause.
Its equally likely, that if for example, tea partiers, starting bombing rail lines, that public support would turn drastically against them and the government would have to do nothing more than encourage you to report on any suspicions of domestic terrorism around you. Civilians, do not like being killed. Even for the "greater good" (as determined by your small minority of revolutionaries i guess??) so your 10k fighters would quickly be identified by the other 500M people who don't want to die for the cause. In this scenario, its not so much guns and bombs that defeat your revolution, but espionage, pro state propaganda and the fear of terrorist attacks.
I think you are mixing the ideas of what is "good" and what is "possible". I had assumed however that all you people talking about revolution actually wanted it to succeed. It may be "possible" to rebel yes, but if you do not succeed in your revolution, well then you are just another terrorist with a crazy manifesto. Nothing changes and you lose by default.
I don't think he is advocating for pacisfism, but against suicide by cop/military. Which is what would happen if you (even with hundreds of friends) decided to fight the american federal government.
Sure your american history may not agree, however most of that history happened before modern weapons. If you want a current real life example, look at the conflict in syria. They are fully armed, and yet cannot stop the government and their supporters who from what I have read are in the minority. Why is this? Because a professional military is better at waging war than a rag tag group of your friends.
Maybe the free syrian army will win in the end. But mark my words, it will not be without outside help in the form of modern weapons and trained soldiers.
I do not disagree with your sentiment. And perhaps it will be more realistic in 5 years time if the american government collapses and can't pay soldiers, say. If the government was in a state of collapse, then you may be able to defeat it with your band of revolutionaries. However as it is right now, you couldn't do jack shit. They would drone strike and MOAB your compound to dust. They would kill your family and all supporters just like waco texas. And the public most likely would not care, because things just are not bad enough yet to have a popularly supported revolution.
Bottom line, if there is a revolution, there will be guns a plenty everywhere. Even in places like canada, that currently have strict gun control laws. Any laws about acquiring guns would obviously go out the window if there was a revolution. Having guns now (with no revolution), provides a false sense of security and not much more. They will not defend you as your constitution dictates because it was written hundreds of years ago when it was a more of an equal playing field.
I think that is what he was trying to say, and the point that you are missing here.