Is that the new FUD? I don't keep up with the scare program, but since the thing with Autism fizzled, is now the new spin that we get addicted to vaccinations?
In a world where people attach no price tag to their time, you're right. That's not the case in a professional environment where everyone's time literally does have a price tag. I sell my time to my company. And if I have to figure something out myself, it can easily cost more money than hiring the person who wrote the software to teach me how to use it.
This is, by the way, the reason why Linux took off mostly as an OS for server systems and in other areas that are mostly used in an environment where you will more likely hire some knowledgeable person to teach you than to fiddle around with it for hours to figure it out.
Because in our world it's not the better product that sells but the one with the better marketing. And Linux has had pretty much zero marketing behind it until just very recently.
You know what school shootings are? Revenge acts. Nothing else.
Why do they shoot up schools? If you're after a body count, go shoot up a mall on a busy weekend. Way more people to off there. Invariably, though, they go to a school. And not just any school, but their school. And they don't shoot just anyone but very specific people.
It's revenge. And you don't influence this by computer games, movies or anything else outside the school. You influence this by fighting bullying.
Everyone knows that this is a problem and that it might let Chaos triumph, yet everyone's afraid to be accused of heresy if they dare to voice their concerns...
Convenience does. People are very willing to pay for getting their stuff easily, painlessly and without having to tinker and toy. Steam is a good example for it, it's easy to use, painless, works well and delivers what people want.
The only thing that kills torrents is aggressive prosecution and snooping without warrants on people who upload a lot.
Really? Odd. I thought that's pretty much what has been done the past decades, and with, let's be generous, limited success.
I have this sneaking suspicion that Amazon eyes closely what people enjoy watching, then take it off prime when they suddenly and miraculously just so happen to offer a DVD collection of that show as a new item.
It's the ever changing offer. Today you have Series A on Streaming Service A. Tomorrow, on Service B. Then it vanishes entirely. Only to resurface on C next week. Maybe. And heaven forbid you want to see more than one show. Because one thing you can be almost certain of: It is on another streaming service. Or will be. Or will no longer be once you subscribed to that other service for exactly this one show, but now you're tied to it for a year.
Especially that last bit gets people pissed. Streaming services could be a killer for torrents if, and only if, they become at least halfway reliable. Else, torrents are simply less hassle.
Walmart will find a few companies that crank out cheap and sub-par games for them so they can offer a cheap and sub-par game service to their cheap and used to sub-par products customers.
In the end, I'd guess what we'll see is something along the lines of dressed up flash games with some cellphone game clones mixed in.
Or rather, why do you think ISPs will need anyone else? Large ISPs can easily launch their own Netflix clone, and the elimination of net neutrality means that they can easily offer an inferior product and get away with it simply by degrading the quality of data delivery of anyone competing with them.
Well, an AOA indicator warning of a stall that gets ignored is bad for me. An AOA indicator that doesn't warn of a stall plus a pilot that never got training to avoid it by himself is bad for me.
Provided I'm in that plane and the ground is closer than stall recovery permits.
Saddam and Ozzy are mostly former allies that became a liability. Saddam was a useful tool when that towelhead took over Iran along with all that super cool bleeding-edge war gear the US sold to the Shah before. To put it into perspective, until 1979, the Iran was the strongest ally the US had in the middle east. And they stuffed so much military hardware into the country (in exchange for oil, well, you didn't expect those F-14 and Phoenix missiles to be a gift, did ya?) until it had the fourth largest army on the planet. The fourth largest army. Technologically on par with the US. And all that great war gear now in the hands of that mullah. Who is anything but buddy-buddy with the US.
Waging war there? That would've been WW2 all over again. And since WW2 the US never fought a war against an enemy that had even remotely the same technological level. The bloodshed would have been enormous. So what did the US do? Hire a likable local tinpot dictator of course. That was Saddam. The idea was, they send him some war gear and Saddam wages war against Iran to trash all those nice weapons. And Saddam did as he was ordered. First gulf war, 1980 to 1988. Afterwards, both countries were basically fucked and the Iran's weapon arsenal was no longer a threat.
Threat?
Well, yes. To understand this, take a closer look at this map here: Notice something? Well, towelhead isn't towelhead, ya know? There's two (ok, more, but two big) groups of Muslims. Sunnite and Shiite. And they like each other about as much as Catholics liked Protestants about 500 years ago.
Can you imagine who was a tad bit worried when the Iran was turned into a theocracy AND had a bigger weapon arsenal than the rest of the Arab world combined? That Red Sea isn't that wide and modern planes can easily cross it...
But I digress. Anyway, Saddam was a useful tool to trash that stockpile of weapons. But when he noticed that he can't get in (well, duh...) and turned around to invade Qatar, that wasn't part of the deal. So just like the Iran, he turned from best buddy to armpit of evil over night.
Similar with Ozzy. He was pretty useful back when he and his religious fanatics fought Soviets in Afghanistan. The US bankrolled him and shoved weapons his way. Remember Rambo III? Remember the original ending credit crawl? If not, here's a quick reminder. It changed when Osama found out that he's been had and decided to turn against the US when he found out that he was simply used as a convenient idiot to do the US' dirty work.
Guess what, for the longest time we didn't know asbestos is bad to us. Still, we got rid of the stuff. Take a wild guess why. Hint: It wasn't the whining. More the coughing.
Germany was on the brink of bankruptcy at the onset of the war. Basically the war was a necessity so they could avoid being called on their international debt.
And, well, ya know, today it's no longer really ok to borrow money and then when you can't pay it back try to kill your lender. The IMF kinda frowns upon that.
The difference is that I can opt to not drive at 250mph and hence not need those additional airbags and crash safety because at 55mph the security features my car offers are adequate to give me ample chances to survive even a head-on crash.
What you have here is the equivalent of not even having what's considered the standard level of security to survive a non-standard situation in everyday operation.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm pretty sure you can point to some sort of eviden... hell, I take a harebrained speculation at this point.
Is that the new FUD? I don't keep up with the scare program, but since the thing with Autism fizzled, is now the new spin that we get addicted to vaccinations?
In a world where people attach no price tag to their time, you're right. That's not the case in a professional environment where everyone's time literally does have a price tag. I sell my time to my company. And if I have to figure something out myself, it can easily cost more money than hiring the person who wrote the software to teach me how to use it.
This is, by the way, the reason why Linux took off mostly as an OS for server systems and in other areas that are mostly used in an environment where you will more likely hire some knowledgeable person to teach you than to fiddle around with it for hours to figure it out.
Because in our world it's not the better product that sells but the one with the better marketing. And Linux has had pretty much zero marketing behind it until just very recently.
You know what school shootings are? Revenge acts. Nothing else.
Why do they shoot up schools? If you're after a body count, go shoot up a mall on a busy weekend. Way more people to off there. Invariably, though, they go to a school. And not just any school, but their school. And they don't shoot just anyone but very specific people.
It's revenge. And you don't influence this by computer games, movies or anything else outside the school. You influence this by fighting bullying.
lack of respect of the eldars, etc etc etc.
Everyone knows that this is a problem and that it might let Chaos triumph, yet everyone's afraid to be accused of heresy if they dare to voice their concerns...
And it never happened that you suddenly wound up on a different plane, with exactly zero chance to insist in being transported by the "correct" plane?
Yes, you're usually told what kind of plane they plan to stuff you into. No, you don't have any right to THIS plane, or even the type.
Nothing ever beats "free".
Convenience does. People are very willing to pay for getting their stuff easily, painlessly and without having to tinker and toy. Steam is a good example for it, it's easy to use, painless, works well and delivers what people want.
The only thing that kills torrents is aggressive prosecution and snooping without warrants on people who upload a lot.
Really? Odd. I thought that's pretty much what has been done the past decades, and with, let's be generous, limited success.
I have this sneaking suspicion that Amazon eyes closely what people enjoy watching, then take it off prime when they suddenly and miraculously just so happen to offer a DVD collection of that show as a new item.
It's the ever changing offer. Today you have Series A on Streaming Service A. Tomorrow, on Service B. Then it vanishes entirely. Only to resurface on C next week. Maybe. And heaven forbid you want to see more than one show. Because one thing you can be almost certain of: It is on another streaming service. Or will be. Or will no longer be once you subscribed to that other service for exactly this one show, but now you're tied to it for a year.
Especially that last bit gets people pissed. Streaming services could be a killer for torrents if, and only if, they become at least halfway reliable. Else, torrents are simply less hassle.
Cellphone-Apps.
It has less to do with being old per se. Only with having seen a lot of fads, scams and get-rich-quick schemes come and go...
Basic "admit what you can't deny any longer" strategy.
Yes, the things they sell to advertisers.
Users? You mean products, I guess?
Walmart will find a few companies that crank out cheap and sub-par games for them so they can offer a cheap and sub-par game service to their cheap and used to sub-par products customers.
In the end, I'd guess what we'll see is something along the lines of dressed up flash games with some cellphone game clones mixed in.
Whoever gets them on board.
Or rather, why do you think ISPs will need anyone else? Large ISPs can easily launch their own Netflix clone, and the elimination of net neutrality means that they can easily offer an inferior product and get away with it simply by degrading the quality of data delivery of anyone competing with them.
What other privacy destroying abuse of their data do they know already know about that will only surface in the weeks or months to come ... or never?
Well, an AOA indicator warning of a stall that gets ignored is bad for me. An AOA indicator that doesn't warn of a stall plus a pilot that never got training to avoid it by himself is bad for me.
Provided I'm in that plane and the ground is closer than stall recovery permits.
I do know that much.
Saddam and Ozzy are mostly former allies that became a liability. Saddam was a useful tool when that towelhead took over Iran along with all that super cool bleeding-edge war gear the US sold to the Shah before. To put it into perspective, until 1979, the Iran was the strongest ally the US had in the middle east. And they stuffed so much military hardware into the country (in exchange for oil, well, you didn't expect those F-14 and Phoenix missiles to be a gift, did ya?) until it had the fourth largest army on the planet. The fourth largest army. Technologically on par with the US. And all that great war gear now in the hands of that mullah. Who is anything but buddy-buddy with the US.
Waging war there? That would've been WW2 all over again. And since WW2 the US never fought a war against an enemy that had even remotely the same technological level. The bloodshed would have been enormous. So what did the US do? Hire a likable local tinpot dictator of course. That was Saddam. The idea was, they send him some war gear and Saddam wages war against Iran to trash all those nice weapons. And Saddam did as he was ordered. First gulf war, 1980 to 1988. Afterwards, both countries were basically fucked and the Iran's weapon arsenal was no longer a threat.
Threat?
Well, yes. To understand this, take a closer look at this map here: Notice something? Well, towelhead isn't towelhead, ya know? There's two (ok, more, but two big) groups of Muslims. Sunnite and Shiite. And they like each other about as much as Catholics liked Protestants about 500 years ago.
Can you imagine who was a tad bit worried when the Iran was turned into a theocracy AND had a bigger weapon arsenal than the rest of the Arab world combined? That Red Sea isn't that wide and modern planes can easily cross it...
But I digress. Anyway, Saddam was a useful tool to trash that stockpile of weapons. But when he noticed that he can't get in (well, duh...) and turned around to invade Qatar, that wasn't part of the deal. So just like the Iran, he turned from best buddy to armpit of evil over night.
Similar with Ozzy. He was pretty useful back when he and his religious fanatics fought Soviets in Afghanistan. The US bankrolled him and shoved weapons his way. Remember Rambo III? Remember the original ending credit crawl? If not, here's a quick reminder. It changed when Osama found out that he's been had and decided to turn against the US when he found out that he was simply used as a convenient idiot to do the US' dirty work.
Guess what, for the longest time we didn't know asbestos is bad to us. Still, we got rid of the stuff. Take a wild guess why. Hint: It wasn't the whining. More the coughing.
Germany was on the brink of bankruptcy at the onset of the war. Basically the war was a necessity so they could avoid being called on their international debt.
And, well, ya know, today it's no longer really ok to borrow money and then when you can't pay it back try to kill your lender. The IMF kinda frowns upon that.
The difference is that I can opt to not drive at 250mph and hence not need those additional airbags and crash safety because at 55mph the security features my car offers are adequate to give me ample chances to survive even a head-on crash.
What you have here is the equivalent of not even having what's considered the standard level of security to survive a non-standard situation in everyday operation.
Take a step back and you might notice that they become indistinguishable.
Money?