There is the real downside of the cost of a good e-reader. Many people use their smart phones but I know that wouldn't work for me. I much prefer my paperwhite with it's e-ink display. But that is an extra cost and not necessarily a trivial one. So I can see how a fan might be disgruntled if an author they followed published a new book that wasn't available in the format they liked and reading it would mean investing in new hardware.
I leave my Paperwhite in my car. When I go on lunch break I always take it into the restaurant with me and read while I eat. I find it a very enjoyable way to push all the work related crap out of my head for an hour. It's also very handy for travel. Given it's boring nature, according to the kids, I don't get harassed into letting others use it and the battery lasts forever.
For the last seven years at least, maybe all the way out to ten, I have only used a firewall, ABP, and NoScript. No antivirus or malware scanners required. And I've thus far had no infections or problems at all.
I honestly can't remember the last time I actually went to a store to do research for an online purchase. It just doesn't happen. If I actually take the time and go to a store and they have what I need/want it is very unlikely that I'll go back home and order whatever it was to save a few bucks and spend even more time waiting for it to be delivered. I don't doubt that there are people who do that but judging by the number of people living paycheck to paycheck I doubt they are in the majority.
There are separate air gapped networks for the major classification levels. Within those networks you can send email and it should be pretty safe, although even there the rule is to encrypt. Without those networks for sharing and distributing information you might as well not collect it. Running a modern government without such technologies is practically speaking impossible.
To be perfectly fair the economic collapse can't really be blamed on a single president. That disaster was decades in the making. The bailouts are more attributable to him but they couldn't happen without the agreement of congress. And not bailing out the finance sector could have made the collapse much more serious than it was. What I would say that he definitely has responsibility for is not imprisoning any of the responsible parties, or really levying any punishments at all. Although it's not like Obama did any better on this front at all.
Not finding O.B. faster isn't really anything that I think the President could have affected very well. He already had the various 3 letter agencies, and the DoD hunting for him, and those efforts did eventually pay off, although it's questionable in my mind if the money was worth it.
Abu Ghraib could have been handled better with more punishments for the leadership that was involved. But so far as actually preventing it from happening, that's pretty much a lost cause once the war in Iraq was started. War is horrible and it'll bring out the best and worst in people. Which is why, even when morally justified, we should be very hesitant to start beating those drums. I definitely feel we can blame Bush for the war in Iraq but I think Abu Ghraib is just a piece of that and not necessarily something you can hold him individually accountable for.
I would have more empathy with Trump if he didn't fell the tree, trim the lumber, smelt the iron, forge the nails, craft the mallet, and then haul it all up the hill and demand that the press perform the honors of nailing him to his own cross.
I really can't fathom why the right seems to be picking Trump as their front runner. Not that Hillary is much more palatable on the left. At this point it really is a race between two very unpleasant lizards.
I think Japan actually has coal they could dig up if they needed. The abandoned industrial island that James Bond movie was filmed on was a coal mining industry town. It was abandoned because the price of coal changed such that it was no longer economically advantageous to mine it there.
I'm pretty sure that Amazon won't have much trouble getting away with raising prices. There is a lot to be said for being able to do most of your shopping through a single storefront that you mostly trust. They could raise their prices by a very minor amount and become profitable. Walmart is a good brick and mortar example of the same kind of situation. They aren't always the absolute cheapest, but they're still killing off their competition because it's convenient to get all your shopping done in one stop.
I expect that the cost of insurance will eventually kill off human driven cars. I don't see any reason that personal ownership would have to go though, it might get a good deal more expensive with the amount of resources going into the production of the car.
I have to disagree on point #1. The minimum wage was expressly implemented as a living wage. It has not kept up obviously and societies view of it has shifted, but none of that changes the original intent.
#2 - Job skills only seem to matter in specific ranges and areas of the work force. The primary skill of management past the front line managers seems to be brown nosing and passing the buck. There are of course some actual talented leaders out there, but they seem to be in a tiny minority.
When it comes to actual money the rich aren't hoarding it in such a way that it isn't actually being pushed back into the active market. At the very worst they are putting it in savings accounts, which the bank then uses to make loans often at leveraged rates. The burden the rich put on society comes from their income being taxed at an effectively lower rate than everyone else. Anyways even with the rich effectively putting their money back into the market it disproportionately flows to those that are already wealthy.
It's also a matter of fiscal costs. Just imagine the hell we could create if our congress critters could wage war without accumulating the huge debts like we have for our current middle eastern escapades.
Lowering all of the perceived costs for using violence to get our way is obviously going to make it a more appealing tool.
One of the most humorous examples of this kind of thing that I've seen involved a busted faucet in a break room. The faucet was leaking and had to be replaced. So the facilities people came in and removed it. Then as they didn't have a replacement part, put up a sign saying the part had been ordered and would arrive in a few weeks. This is the main break room that gets lots of use throughout the day. Someone printed up a map showing directions from the building to a nearby Home Depot, along with a part number for a cheap replacement available there.
I've never used Fraps but I have played with Shadowplay and I have to say it worked way better than I expected. When I went back and watched the video it had created it actually looked better than what I remembered the gameplay actually looking like. Which is probably a result of being focused on gameplay elements at the time I was recording rather than watching for blur and other video artifacts. Anyways that is a much appreciated change from the free video recording applications I had used in the past which hogged resources and produced almost unusable videos. Even if there ends up being some valid argument, or proof, for Fraps performing better. Shadowplay has a very strong position as being good enough, light on resources, free, and already installed for anyone with the proper generation of nvidia card.
Even if you were to have a perfect security checklist with clearly defined problems and predetermined solutions, you're still screwed. There hundreds, if not thousands, of individual little projects each with their own budgets, priorities, and egos. Some like DFAS are colossal in scale and seemingly represent intractable problems. The DoD has spent billions trying to replace that hodge podge of systems and has gotten basically nowhere. In every case you'll find that fixing all or even most security problems will fundamentally break an application in some way. Just to get all the programs into real security compliance, not just pencil whipped by having someone accept the risk, would probably require designing and rebuilding everything from the ground up. And that would only address the vulnerabilities that we know about today.
Oh, I'm definitely of a "certain age", but I'd doubt that you could actually be specific about that. Hogwash is a term, that to me, means watery shit. When you wash of a dirty hog that is exactly what you get. That said I don't think I knew any adults growing up that actually said it, I'm pretty sure I learned it from TV or reading.
So far as our brains processing all of reality goes, that is an impossible feat for our brain, or any other for that matter. We certainly seem to be capable of processing the laws that determine interactions of mater and energy and that is all that actually matters. The current knowledge isn't perfect and of course might take eons or days to advance significantly. And it is impossible to know how much we don't know. But there is no point of fact that I've ever heard of that indicates we're missing something fundamental, possibly with the exception of dark matter.
Ohh look a fun part: I can tell by your pejorative use of the word "scientism" that you're the embodiment of a non-sequitur. Everything is reducible and quantifiable through science. We may not have the means or ability as of yet to do so, but we'll get there eventually. To argue for something being permanently beyond science is to argue that it is beyond reality, and if it isn't a part of reality than it literally doesn't matter.
I haven't played the GTA series so I can't say with absolute certainty that it endorses violence, but if it is much like nearly every other FPS or RPG then yes, it absolutely does. When all or the vast majority of the carrots in the game are designed as rewards for simulated violence then it is definitely endorsing those actions. That isn't to say that any of these games endorse real violence outside of the game. The point though is that they serve as a safe means of release.
Online communities could very possibly be fulfilling the same purpose. Whether some arbitrary person felt a community was bad enough to deserve banning doesn't really serve as a good benchmark for whether or not it was moderating potential bad behavior. For instance I knew many concerned christian mothers at the church I grew up in who would have banned Dungeons and Dragons if they had the power to do so.
I agree that communities can shape people, whether online or offline. And I don't see any reason to ban a community. Perhaps they should be moderated in some way if they are found to be actively empowering their members to violate other peoples rights. But banning them just pushes the community out of sight, it is pure fantasy to think they'll just vanish.
In Reddit's case they are hoping that those communities will just go elsewhere. They are afraid of brand damage basically. The funny part of that though is that for many of us that damage was already a part of their image and had been for years.
Spiritual hog wash. We're descended from a puddle of something that evolved into a single cell organism eventually, and so is that goldfish. There is nothing to say that goldfish won't eventually evolve into something as intelligent as us or even surpass our current state. The only thing which science is portrayed as coming up completely blank on consistently is spiritual bullshit. The truth though is that science can't be bothered with it because it is obviously bullshit.
Even if it is true that all spree killers were motivated by some evil online community, does it actually matter? If allowing them to have that community actually prevents more attacks than it precipitates it is still a net win for society.
This same crap comes up with every article that claims some school shooter did it because the creep played GTA. Crime rates have actually been falling for decades despite the rise of graphically violent video games. Even if some people turn to violence because it works in their favorite murder simulator it would seem that even more people don't resort to violence despite enjoying the same games.
If you would like to be a corporate slave and lapdog that's your choice. I don't care how you classify my employment, or what definitions you want to apply to the terms of my employment, because you aren't a party to them. I'm being paid for 40 hours of work a week between the specific times, if my boss wants more hours they need to apply for and be granted approval from their management, and then get me to agree to work those hours. In most cases I'll do it if the manager has jumped through all the right hoops because I'm a considerate person. But if I have plans that are important to me, or if the extra time doesn't seem to be justified I'll say no. They can cry and whine about it if they want, and if it really matters I'm sure it'll come up in a performance review. But I honestly don't give a damn, I know the company has no real loyalty to me and what matters to them is the money, and so I'll give them the same respect in kind. So if they want more, or different, hours then they'll need to pay up, and put up with getting a negative response on occasion.
China has been busy doing the reverse of Option 2. That is building islands. Which makes me wonder how much shoreline could you possibly build on earth such that each person could own a beach front home and have enough distance between such artificial shorelines that you couldn't see the next one from your house and still get surf.
It isn't necessarily a reporters job to find solutions. It might be beneficial and make for a more interesting article, but the a reporters job is ostensibly to report the facts and try to pretend that they are unbiased.
The idea I read for doing this involved mixing the waste with glass to form large cylinders. You'd then drop them into the ocean near a subduction zone. The cylinder would penetrate something like 60 feet into the sediment on the ocean floor which would keep it sealed from the environment until such time as it actually gets pushed down into the mantle. The problems with the method are apparently mostly related to international treaties governing what you can dump in the ocean.
Slashdot Mirror
There is the real downside of the cost of a good e-reader. Many people use their smart phones but I know that wouldn't work for me. I much prefer my paperwhite with it's e-ink display. But that is an extra cost and not necessarily a trivial one. So I can see how a fan might be disgruntled if an author they followed published a new book that wasn't available in the format they liked and reading it would mean investing in new hardware.
I leave my Paperwhite in my car. When I go on lunch break I always take it into the restaurant with me and read while I eat. I find it a very enjoyable way to push all the work related crap out of my head for an hour. It's also very handy for travel. Given it's boring nature, according to the kids, I don't get harassed into letting others use it and the battery lasts forever.
Wow, if that's an advertisement it's effective as hell. That raises my opinion of Banksy immeasurably.
For the last seven years at least, maybe all the way out to ten, I have only used a firewall, ABP, and NoScript. No antivirus or malware scanners required. And I've thus far had no infections or problems at all.
I honestly can't remember the last time I actually went to a store to do research for an online purchase. It just doesn't happen. If I actually take the time and go to a store and they have what I need/want it is very unlikely that I'll go back home and order whatever it was to save a few bucks and spend even more time waiting for it to be delivered. I don't doubt that there are people who do that but judging by the number of people living paycheck to paycheck I doubt they are in the majority.
There are separate air gapped networks for the major classification levels. Within those networks you can send email and it should be pretty safe, although even there the rule is to encrypt. Without those networks for sharing and distributing information you might as well not collect it. Running a modern government without such technologies is practically speaking impossible.
To be perfectly fair the economic collapse can't really be blamed on a single president. That disaster was decades in the making. The bailouts are more attributable to him but they couldn't happen without the agreement of congress. And not bailing out the finance sector could have made the collapse much more serious than it was. What I would say that he definitely has responsibility for is not imprisoning any of the responsible parties, or really levying any punishments at all. Although it's not like Obama did any better on this front at all.
Not finding O.B. faster isn't really anything that I think the President could have affected very well. He already had the various 3 letter agencies, and the DoD hunting for him, and those efforts did eventually pay off, although it's questionable in my mind if the money was worth it.
Abu Ghraib could have been handled better with more punishments for the leadership that was involved. But so far as actually preventing it from happening, that's pretty much a lost cause once the war in Iraq was started. War is horrible and it'll bring out the best and worst in people. Which is why, even when morally justified, we should be very hesitant to start beating those drums. I definitely feel we can blame Bush for the war in Iraq but I think Abu Ghraib is just a piece of that and not necessarily something you can hold him individually accountable for.
I would have more empathy with Trump if he didn't fell the tree, trim the lumber, smelt the iron, forge the nails, craft the mallet, and then haul it all up the hill and demand that the press perform the honors of nailing him to his own cross.
I really can't fathom why the right seems to be picking Trump as their front runner. Not that Hillary is much more palatable on the left. At this point it really is a race between two very unpleasant lizards.
I think Japan actually has coal they could dig up if they needed. The abandoned industrial island that James Bond movie was filmed on was a coal mining industry town. It was abandoned because the price of coal changed such that it was no longer economically advantageous to mine it there.
Sometimes I wonder if my disdain for watching sports is based in my childhood experience of broadcast games interfering with my cartoon schedule.
I'm pretty sure that Amazon won't have much trouble getting away with raising prices. There is a lot to be said for being able to do most of your shopping through a single storefront that you mostly trust. They could raise their prices by a very minor amount and become profitable. Walmart is a good brick and mortar example of the same kind of situation. They aren't always the absolute cheapest, but they're still killing off their competition because it's convenient to get all your shopping done in one stop.
I expect that the cost of insurance will eventually kill off human driven cars. I don't see any reason that personal ownership would have to go though, it might get a good deal more expensive with the amount of resources going into the production of the car.
I have to disagree on point #1. The minimum wage was expressly implemented as a living wage. It has not kept up obviously and societies view of it has shifted, but none of that changes the original intent.
#2 - Job skills only seem to matter in specific ranges and areas of the work force. The primary skill of management past the front line managers seems to be brown nosing and passing the buck. There are of course some actual talented leaders out there, but they seem to be in a tiny minority.
When it comes to actual money the rich aren't hoarding it in such a way that it isn't actually being pushed back into the active market. At the very worst they are putting it in savings accounts, which the bank then uses to make loans often at leveraged rates. The burden the rich put on society comes from their income being taxed at an effectively lower rate than everyone else. Anyways even with the rich effectively putting their money back into the market it disproportionately flows to those that are already wealthy.
It's also a matter of fiscal costs. Just imagine the hell we could create if our congress critters could wage war without accumulating the huge debts like we have for our current middle eastern escapades.
Lowering all of the perceived costs for using violence to get our way is obviously going to make it a more appealing tool.
One of the most humorous examples of this kind of thing that I've seen involved a busted faucet in a break room. The faucet was leaking and had to be replaced. So the facilities people came in and removed it. Then as they didn't have a replacement part, put up a sign saying the part had been ordered and would arrive in a few weeks. This is the main break room that gets lots of use throughout the day. Someone printed up a map showing directions from the building to a nearby Home Depot, along with a part number for a cheap replacement available there.
I've never used Fraps but I have played with Shadowplay and I have to say it worked way better than I expected. When I went back and watched the video it had created it actually looked better than what I remembered the gameplay actually looking like. Which is probably a result of being focused on gameplay elements at the time I was recording rather than watching for blur and other video artifacts. Anyways that is a much appreciated change from the free video recording applications I had used in the past which hogged resources and produced almost unusable videos. Even if there ends up being some valid argument, or proof, for Fraps performing better. Shadowplay has a very strong position as being good enough, light on resources, free, and already installed for anyone with the proper generation of nvidia card.
Even if you were to have a perfect security checklist with clearly defined problems and predetermined solutions, you're still screwed. There hundreds, if not thousands, of individual little projects each with their own budgets, priorities, and egos. Some like DFAS are colossal in scale and seemingly represent intractable problems. The DoD has spent billions trying to replace that hodge podge of systems and has gotten basically nowhere. In every case you'll find that fixing all or even most security problems will fundamentally break an application in some way. Just to get all the programs into real security compliance, not just pencil whipped by having someone accept the risk, would probably require designing and rebuilding everything from the ground up. And that would only address the vulnerabilities that we know about today.
Oh, I'm definitely of a "certain age", but I'd doubt that you could actually be specific about that. Hogwash is a term, that to me, means watery shit. When you wash of a dirty hog that is exactly what you get. That said I don't think I knew any adults growing up that actually said it, I'm pretty sure I learned it from TV or reading.
So far as our brains processing all of reality goes, that is an impossible feat for our brain, or any other for that matter. We certainly seem to be capable of processing the laws that determine interactions of mater and energy and that is all that actually matters. The current knowledge isn't perfect and of course might take eons or days to advance significantly. And it is impossible to know how much we don't know. But there is no point of fact that I've ever heard of that indicates we're missing something fundamental, possibly with the exception of dark matter.
Ohh look a fun part:
I can tell by your pejorative use of the word "scientism" that you're the embodiment of a non-sequitur. Everything is reducible and quantifiable through science. We may not have the means or ability as of yet to do so, but we'll get there eventually. To argue for something being permanently beyond science is to argue that it is beyond reality, and if it isn't a part of reality than it literally doesn't matter.
I haven't played the GTA series so I can't say with absolute certainty that it endorses violence, but if it is much like nearly every other FPS or RPG then yes, it absolutely does. When all or the vast majority of the carrots in the game are designed as rewards for simulated violence then it is definitely endorsing those actions. That isn't to say that any of these games endorse real violence outside of the game. The point though is that they serve as a safe means of release.
Online communities could very possibly be fulfilling the same purpose. Whether some arbitrary person felt a community was bad enough to deserve banning doesn't really serve as a good benchmark for whether or not it was moderating potential bad behavior. For instance I knew many concerned christian mothers at the church I grew up in who would have banned Dungeons and Dragons if they had the power to do so.
I agree that communities can shape people, whether online or offline. And I don't see any reason to ban a community. Perhaps they should be moderated in some way if they are found to be actively empowering their members to violate other peoples rights. But banning them just pushes the community out of sight, it is pure fantasy to think they'll just vanish.
In Reddit's case they are hoping that those communities will just go elsewhere. They are afraid of brand damage basically. The funny part of that though is that for many of us that damage was already a part of their image and had been for years.
Spiritual hog wash. We're descended from a puddle of something that evolved into a single cell organism eventually, and so is that goldfish. There is nothing to say that goldfish won't eventually evolve into something as intelligent as us or even surpass our current state. The only thing which science is portrayed as coming up completely blank on consistently is spiritual bullshit. The truth though is that science can't be bothered with it because it is obviously bullshit.
Even if it is true that all spree killers were motivated by some evil online community, does it actually matter? If allowing them to have that community actually prevents more attacks than it precipitates it is still a net win for society.
This same crap comes up with every article that claims some school shooter did it because the creep played GTA. Crime rates have actually been falling for decades despite the rise of graphically violent video games. Even if some people turn to violence because it works in their favorite murder simulator it would seem that even more people don't resort to violence despite enjoying the same games.
If you would like to be a corporate slave and lapdog that's your choice. I don't care how you classify my employment, or what definitions you want to apply to the terms of my employment, because you aren't a party to them. I'm being paid for 40 hours of work a week between the specific times, if my boss wants more hours they need to apply for and be granted approval from their management, and then get me to agree to work those hours. In most cases I'll do it if the manager has jumped through all the right hoops because I'm a considerate person. But if I have plans that are important to me, or if the extra time doesn't seem to be justified I'll say no. They can cry and whine about it if they want, and if it really matters I'm sure it'll come up in a performance review. But I honestly don't give a damn, I know the company has no real loyalty to me and what matters to them is the money, and so I'll give them the same respect in kind. So if they want more, or different, hours then they'll need to pay up, and put up with getting a negative response on occasion.
China has been busy doing the reverse of Option 2. That is building islands. Which makes me wonder how much shoreline could you possibly build on earth such that each person could own a beach front home and have enough distance between such artificial shorelines that you couldn't see the next one from your house and still get surf.
It isn't necessarily a reporters job to find solutions. It might be beneficial and make for a more interesting article, but the a reporters job is ostensibly to report the facts and try to pretend that they are unbiased.
The idea I read for doing this involved mixing the waste with glass to form large cylinders. You'd then drop them into the ocean near a subduction zone. The cylinder would penetrate something like 60 feet into the sediment on the ocean floor which would keep it sealed from the environment until such time as it actually gets pushed down into the mantle. The problems with the method are apparently mostly related to international treaties governing what you can dump in the ocean.