Hence why we buy most of our stuff online.
Sure, we're buying sight-unseen, but there are a lot of reviews out there. Besides, you don't really know a product simply because you can feel it's weight or bang on it once or twice and call it good.
Yeah, Wally can beat out people when it comes to the price of bottom rung items. They're competitive for that bragging right, and the societies assumption that Walmart is cheap. But if you don't want the cheapest of cheap crap, Walmart isn't such a good deal. Classic bait and switch.
That's fucking brilliant. We need a +6 interesting.
There's a caveat of choosing which books to shill though. A bidding system sounds like a good idea, as long as you're ok with re-enforcing the status quo. Something like Project Wonderful.
I heard that for every ribbon magnet I slap on there, they kill 10 more insurgents! And since it's not a sticker, it won't ruin my paint. And I won't have to suffer the atrocity of a devaluation of my car. And I can simply take it off when it's convenient.
but it was a hell of a lot better decade than the one now ending.
I'll drink to that. Well, if not to it, then at least at it. Fuckin' A, it's hard to look back at the 'ought years. Good years for me personally, I guess, but damn depressing when I look around.
Of course, the 80's had their fair share of issues as well.
Buying youth sex slaves isn't a "horrible thing"? Wake up yourself. That ain't normal. Grow a fucking heart.
But your post brings up an important point. A lot to most of the information in these leaks was obvious to the people in the know. Usually reports about them would be waved away as being unsubstantiated and based on rumor. The leaks, however, provide EVIDENCE of wrong doing.
At least on the USA side. Everyone here should have known that it was the Chinese government behind the hacks on Google. Duh. And the leaks show that even the Feds think it was China. But that's USA saying that China is guilty, not China saying China is guilty.
You say that these sort of dirty underhanded backroom actions are "normal". Sadly, I'd have to agree with you. Doesn't that strike you as odd? Doesn't it strike you as bad anymore? Are you so jaded to the bullshit that you no longer care? Well I still care about this country, and this shit needs to be fixed.
Yup, read the fine print: "up to 8 Mbps"
Asked for metrics about what they actually delivered. Like what the average speed was for a request. What their uptime was. The mean-time to fix. Got transferred around a little bit until a tech started talking to me. His answer: "We don't keep track of that".
"So you'll deliver between zero and eight Mbps, and I just gotta hope that it's greater then zero"
"Well, we'll do our best to..." blah blah blah
"I guess we'll find out"
Turns out, that when I bought "up to 8", I really only ever got 3, and often got 0.
And so now I'm on DSL that gets me about 93% of what they sold me, and I'm ok with that. But I sure would like to pay a little more for a fatter pipe.
You can dance and prance around your legal fine print all you want, but I paid for 8, and got screwed. That's bad business. If you try to sell me that shit, you're a bad businessman.
And while I myself haven't fallen for what goes by the legal definition of false advertising in this particular market, they have, as you mentioned, pulled this crap before. That's also bad business. I'm not a fan.
-DynCorp, funded by USA taxpayers, bought young male sex slaves for Afghan cops in a "batca bazzi" party. It's a tradition over there apparently.
-They're moving prisoners out of Guantanamo to foreign prisons.
-Under reporting deaths in Afghanistan. It's not going nearly as well as they've said it has.
-Strong-arm tactics regarding the Copenhagen Accord. Spying, bribing, threats, and cutting off millions of dollars to Ecuador and Bolivia. Politics as usual, sure, but it's still corruption.
-Shoving US-style IP laws down Spain's throat.
-Diplomats know that the Saudi Arabians are the primary donors to Al-Queada. Aren't they an ally? Isn't our "strong military presence" in the area supposed to stop that sort of thing?
-The CIA pressured Spain into dropping investigations into the killing of José Couso, a Spanish journalist, in Iraq by American troops.
That's, you know, our government doing horrible things of various levels. There's a BOATLOAD of details about others doing horrible things. For example:
The Shell Oil Company claimed it had inserted staff into all the main ministries of the Nigerian government, giving it access to every movement of politicians. Ann Pickard, then Shell's vice-president for sub-Saharan Africa boasted that the Nigerian government had "forgotten" about the extent of Shell's infiltration and was unaware of how much the company knew about its deliberations.
But they don't build an extra lane for that, they simply carve an express lane out of the plebeian lanes.
Instead of having an incentive to build more lanes, they just have to annoy the plebes enough so they cough up some more dough.
That's probably going to hurt Julian in the long run. Michael Moore is kind of the Rush Limbaugh of the Liberals, and as odd as it is, it seems that the two-party system here has decided that Wikileaks is on the liberal side. So this will only re-enforce that.
I'm still confused why the people that are supposed to be for a smaller government would be nay saying evidence that big government is doing horrible things behind our backs.
Comcast is a business designed to make profit yes?
I see this argument way too much. It's very true, but it's entirely irrelevant. We don't CARE if they want to make profit. It's no excuse. It's like saying that it's run by a sociopath sadist that just wants to hurt you, so it's perfectly fine when he breaks your kneecaps. And that simile isn't that far off, "making profit" is at the expense of the customer.
What I care about is getting the damn thing I paid for.
And the false advertising, that bugs me too.
Sorry, by "boy sex toy", I meant a young male sex-slave. A "sex toy" that is a boy.
Also, if it were simply biometrics, I'd honestly understand that. You know, from a simply verification standpoint. Gotta fight off the pod people somehow. But they were instructed to get PASSWORDS and ENCRYPTION KEYS. So the biometric part is that much more wrong.
Two afghan police, and nine afghan civvies got charged. Maybe.
What exactly happened to the private security firm (DynCorp, btw)? or the US citizen working for them who bought the boy prostitute?
Hmmm. True. I should have said "A private defense contractor, funded by USA taxpayers, bought Afghan cops a boy sex toy.
But while it was obvious and the leak irrelevant that the Chinese government was behind the hacks into Google, the leaks about US wrongdoings is very relevant to me. It's evidence of illegal activity. We're (supposed to be) a civilized country. Wrong-doings get punished.
-USA taxpayers paid a private defense contractor to buy Afghan cops a boy sex toy. Apparently it's a pre-taliban tradition.
-Our diplomates were instructed to get the U.N. leader Ban Ki-Moons biometrics, passwords, and encryption keys.
-We've pushed our own IP laws onto Spain
But holy cow, you may just want to take your pick of anything on the wiki page. There's plenty there. Most of it is, yeah, stupid things like candid descriptions by diplomats. But some of is examples of people in power abusing said power.
I asked the same question in one of these thread. Someone actually had a response and linked to the original cable to prove it. I can't name him as the cable didn't include his name, but it referred to him as part of a wealthy family and professional fencer out of a specific city in Iran. He was a minor informant or he assisted the US embassy in some way.
The Iranian counter-intelligence could probably find out who he was, and his life might be rough after that. They may even kill him.
And so that's one. Maybe. But you know what? It's a small price to pay to keep a behemoth like the USA honest and legit. Transparency is almost always a good thing. So a toast to this Iranian fencer, and the hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis, may their deaths be not in vain.
Yeah, apparently monkeedude was a bit rash with that whole "WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE" bit, so thanks for the correction.
On a side note though, Dad used to be the guy at the power company keeping the lights on, and he has some horror stories about the frailty of our power grid. There was one oversubscribed power-line in Jersey and a suicidal squirrel that caused a rolling blackout that got to Chicago.
The joys of deregulation.
So, a global event that mucked about with the power grid? It could be more like a week, depending how things go.
Of course, Dad is pretty cynical about human nature. He said that 3 days without street lights and people revert to animal-like tribes. I chaulk that up to the fact that he had to talk to all the nut-jobs bitching about their power being out.
Well, I was going more for funny commentary on the interactive nature of games with some references to Nethack, which usually go down well around here. But I guess I got carried away at the end there.
Huh.
How dead? Like, everyone day-side gets cancer, or the lithosphere gets scrapped off?
Now, for a comet or meteroid, we could theoretically nudge it out of our path with a nuke,
if we got lucky enough to see it beforehand,
and the rocket scientists with the slide rulers didn't botch the deep-space billiards,
but is there anything at all we could do to survive this?
Even, say, with 50 years warning and mankind's unified effort?
Hey now, I put my heart and soul into that tourist. He had gotten further then any of his slain, crushed, drowned, poisoned, petrified, and de-brained brethren. By hook or by crook I had wrested Mjolnir and Whisperfeet from the powers that be. And with those, he was on a roll. Nigh unstoppable, this tiny god of death strode through the dungeon of doom.
...Until the fateful day he choked to death on a tin of spinach. SPINACH! One little tin. He hadn't eaten a bite in forever. His own success was his downfall, for lo, upon his left ring, these words appeared:
Slashdot Mirror
Hence why we buy most of our stuff online.
Sure, we're buying sight-unseen, but there are a lot of reviews out there. Besides, you don't really know a product simply because you can feel it's weight or bang on it once or twice and call it good.
Yeah, Wally can beat out people when it comes to the price of bottom rung items. They're competitive for that bragging right, and the societies assumption that Walmart is cheap. But if you don't want the cheapest of cheap crap, Walmart isn't such a good deal. Classic bait and switch.
That's fucking brilliant. We need a +6 interesting.
There's a caveat of choosing which books to shill though. A bidding system sounds like a good idea, as long as you're ok with re-enforcing the status quo. Something like Project Wonderful.
I heard that for every ribbon magnet I slap on there, they kill 10 more insurgents! And since it's not a sticker, it won't ruin my paint. And I won't have to suffer the atrocity of a devaluation of my car. And I can simply take it off when it's convenient.
but it was a hell of a lot better decade than the one now ending.
I'll drink to that. Well, if not to it, then at least at it. Fuckin' A, it's hard to look back at the 'ought years. Good years for me personally, I guess, but damn depressing when I look around.
Of course, the 80's had their fair share of issues as well.
Buying youth sex slaves isn't a "horrible thing"? Wake up yourself. That ain't normal. Grow a fucking heart.
But your post brings up an important point. A lot to most of the information in these leaks was obvious to the people in the know. Usually reports about them would be waved away as being unsubstantiated and based on rumor. The leaks, however, provide EVIDENCE of wrong doing.
At least on the USA side. Everyone here should have known that it was the Chinese government behind the hacks on Google. Duh. And the leaks show that even the Feds think it was China. But that's USA saying that China is guilty, not China saying China is guilty.
You say that these sort of dirty underhanded backroom actions are "normal". Sadly, I'd have to agree with you. Doesn't that strike you as odd? Doesn't it strike you as bad anymore? Are you so jaded to the bullshit that you no longer care?
Well I still care about this country, and this shit needs to be fixed.
Yup, read the fine print: "up to 8 Mbps"
Asked for metrics about what they actually delivered. Like what the average speed was for a request. What their uptime was. The mean-time to fix. Got transferred around a little bit until a tech started talking to me. His answer: "We don't keep track of that".
"So you'll deliver between zero and eight Mbps, and I just gotta hope that it's greater then zero"
"Well, we'll do our best to..." blah blah blah
"I guess we'll find out"
Turns out, that when I bought "up to 8", I really only ever got 3, and often got 0.
And so now I'm on DSL that gets me about 93% of what they sold me, and I'm ok with that. But I sure would like to pay a little more for a fatter pipe.
You can dance and prance around your legal fine print all you want, but I paid for 8, and got screwed. That's bad business. If you try to sell me that shit, you're a bad businessman.
And while I myself haven't fallen for what goes by the legal definition of false advertising in this particular market, they have, as you mentioned, pulled this crap before. That's also bad business. I'm not a fan.
-They're moving prisoners out of Guantanamo to foreign prisons.
-Under reporting deaths in Afghanistan. It's not going nearly as well as they've said it has.
-Strong-arm tactics regarding the Copenhagen Accord. Spying, bribing, threats, and cutting off millions of dollars to Ecuador and Bolivia. Politics as usual, sure, but it's still corruption.
-Shoving US-style IP laws down Spain's throat.
-Diplomats know that the Saudi Arabians are the primary donors to Al-Queada. Aren't they an ally? Isn't our "strong military presence" in the area supposed to stop that sort of thing?
-The CIA pressured Spain into dropping investigations into the killing of José Couso, a Spanish journalist, in Iraq by American troops.
That's, you know, our government doing horrible things of various levels. There's a BOATLOAD of details about others doing horrible things. For example:
The Shell Oil Company claimed it had inserted staff into all the main ministries of the Nigerian government, giving it access to every movement of politicians. Ann Pickard, then Shell's vice-president for sub-Saharan Africa boasted that the Nigerian government had "forgotten" about the extent of Shell's infiltration and was unaware of how much the company knew about its deliberations.
But they don't build an extra lane for that, they simply carve an express lane out of the plebeian lanes.
Instead of having an incentive to build more lanes, they just have to annoy the plebes enough so they cough up some more dough.
That's probably going to hurt Julian in the long run. Michael Moore is kind of the Rush Limbaugh of the Liberals, and as odd as it is, it seems that the two-party system here has decided that Wikileaks is on the liberal side. So this will only re-enforce that.
I'm still confused why the people that are supposed to be for a smaller government would be nay saying evidence that big government is doing horrible things behind our backs.
Comcast is a business designed to make profit yes?
I see this argument way too much. It's very true, but it's entirely irrelevant. We don't CARE if they want to make profit. It's no excuse. It's like saying that it's run by a sociopath sadist that just wants to hurt you, so it's perfectly fine when he breaks your kneecaps. And that simile isn't that far off, "making profit" is at the expense of the customer.
What I care about is getting the damn thing I paid for.
And the false advertising, that bugs me too.
It's gonna run super-a-muc
I was honestly just thinking of this article from El Pais. Is El Pais any good?
Sorry, by "boy sex toy", I meant a young male sex-slave. A "sex toy" that is a boy.
Also, if it were simply biometrics, I'd honestly understand that. You know, from a simply verification standpoint. Gotta fight off the pod people somehow. But they were instructed to get PASSWORDS and ENCRYPTION KEYS. So the biometric part is that much more wrong.
Two afghan police, and nine afghan civvies got charged. Maybe.
What exactly happened to the private security firm (DynCorp, btw)? or the US citizen working for them who bought the boy prostitute?
Hmmm. True. I should have said "A private defense contractor, funded by USA taxpayers, bought Afghan cops a boy sex toy.
But while it was obvious and the leak irrelevant that the Chinese government was behind the hacks into Google, the leaks about US wrongdoings is very relevant to me. It's evidence of illegal activity. We're (supposed to be) a civilized country. Wrong-doings get punished.
-USA taxpayers paid a private defense contractor to buy Afghan cops a boy sex toy. Apparently it's a pre-taliban tradition.
-Our diplomates were instructed to get the U.N. leader Ban Ki-Moons biometrics, passwords, and encryption keys.
-We've pushed our own IP laws onto Spain
But holy cow, you may just want to take your pick of anything on the wiki page. There's plenty there. Most of it is, yeah, stupid things like candid descriptions by diplomats. But some of is examples of people in power abusing said power.
I asked the same question in one of these thread. Someone actually had a response and linked to the original cable to prove it. I can't name him as the cable didn't include his name, but it referred to him as part of a wealthy family and professional fencer out of a specific city in Iran. He was a minor informant or he assisted the US embassy in some way.
The Iranian counter-intelligence could probably find out who he was, and his life might be rough after that. They may even kill him.
And so that's one. Maybe. But you know what? It's a small price to pay to keep a behemoth like the USA honest and legit. Transparency is almost always a good thing. So a toast to this Iranian fencer, and the hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis, may their deaths be not in vain.
So if they don't pay for it, it's ok?
Nethack, and a lot of the rogue-likes use every key they can get their hands onto
also, X-pilot
Yeah, apparently monkeedude was a bit rash with that whole "WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE" bit, so thanks for the correction.
On a side note though, Dad used to be the guy at the power company keeping the lights on, and he has some horror stories about the frailty of our power grid. There was one oversubscribed power-line in Jersey and a suicidal squirrel that caused a rolling blackout that got to Chicago.
The joys of deregulation.
So, a global event that mucked about with the power grid? It could be more like a week, depending how things go.
Of course, Dad is pretty cynical about human nature. He said that 3 days without street lights and people revert to animal-like tribes. I chaulk that up to the fact that he had to talk to all the nut-jobs bitching about their power being out.
Well, I was going more for funny commentary on the interactive nature of games with some references to Nethack, which usually go down well around here. But I guess I got carried away at the end there.
You ever ascended in nethack? Fun game.
Huh.
How dead? Like, everyone day-side gets cancer, or the lithosphere gets scrapped off?
Now, for a comet or meteroid, we could theoretically nudge it out of our path with a nuke,
if we got lucky enough to see it beforehand,
and the rocket scientists with the slide rulers didn't botch the deep-space billiards,
but is there anything at all we could do to survive this?
Even, say, with 50 years warning and mankind's unified effort?
Read the first line of my post.
Now read the second.
Give it a second to sink in
Now, having fully groked my post, what in the world would make you think I'd know of any technical issue with java portability?
I've no idea if you're right or not,
I just wanted to make a joke about java kool-aid, which now that I think about it...
Nope, still sounds putrid.
Hey now, I put my heart and soul into that tourist. He had gotten further then any of his slain, crushed, drowned, poisoned, petrified, and de-brained brethren. By hook or by crook I had wrested Mjolnir and Whisperfeet from the powers that be. And with those, he was on a roll. Nigh unstoppable, this tiny god of death strode through the dungeon of doom.
...Until the fateful day he choked to death on a tin of spinach. SPINACH! One little tin. He hadn't eaten a bite in forever. His own success was his downfall, for lo, upon his left ring, these words appeared:
SUSTENANCE.