The supposed dystopia actually looked like quite a pleasant place to live though. Minimal unemployment and crime, a ridiculously high standard of living even for the lowest classes, and minimal need for coercive conformity because the same effects were achieved through social engineering.
With the difference that the Nazi's view of their own superiority was really ideological and their scientific backing was essentially nonexistant... with genetic engineering, we could produce hard data to show superiority.
Not even the worst alarmists propose that humans will face extinction. Floods, hurricanes, mass starvation (well, more so), collapse of a few governments, at worst the loss of costal settlements. But not extinction. People will adapt... or at least those that survive will.
I don't think you could get enough energy from the sunlight on a human to run them, even at a nudist colony alternating between artic circles. It would reduce food requirements though, at least lessening the need.
You know... those incandescent bulbs? They come from China too. And they only last a fraction of the life, so you have to ship a lot more of them, which should easily outweigh the extra trip back for recycling.
Easy. Just invoke the nebulous fair-usage policy. Running a commercial hotspot? Better be paying carrier rates for that backhaul, or expect to be declared a freeloader and charged five dollars for every hundred meg.
A lot of homeless people have mobile phones now. The cheapest pay-as-you-go service and whatever phone they can get second-hand puts it within their price range, and it's really essential for purposes of job-applying.
Why are the infirmed and aged owed anything? If you're going for 'you get what you earn' they should just be left to starve to death or die of exposure. You appear to be allowing *just enough* compassion to appease your conscience.
You can if they want to be decieved. There's a thriving industry of news, both mainstream and niche, that specialises in being biased and maintains an audience by telling them what they want to hear. They turn bias into a business model. How do you think Limbaugh remains so popular, WorldNetDaily keeps pulling in the ad money and Fox News manages to remain the single most popular news channel in the US despite being a frequent object of mockery?
Depends on the situation. Moderators may also be tasked to protect the site's reputation by removing any comments that cast doubt on their version of the story, or and comments that support a non-mainstream position. They may be tasked to enforce an ideological view to give the impression of community cohesion, or just to minimise legal risk by taking out any comments that could be deemed libelous in any way. The moderators enforce the rules, but it's management that makes them.
I think you have it backwards: If the company management isn't willing to do evil, the company will never reach that mass. Sooner or later the time will come when the management must choose between their principles and their duty to maximise profits - they can't have both.
That's because they know the religion isn't serious. It's a game. There may be one or two crazy people who believe the force is real, but really real-world Jedi is just a combination of LARPing and themed costume events.
If one of those one or two crazy people came out as actually believing the force is real and they could achieve telekinetic powers with enough training, you can be sure their fellow Jedi would swiftly try to talk them out of it. Then mock them. Then kick them out the club as a dangerous embarassment.
The extent varies. I gather the US is rather bad due to a combination of a lack of independant oversight and a very close-knit policing culture that encourages the police to protect their own against outside attack. Here in the UK we set up the IPCC to deal with exactly that problem. It doesn't completly solve the problem, but it's better than nothing.
You'd have to see a schematic to be know that - and not only will those be considered a trade secret of the manufacturer, but even trying to obtain a copy could lead to you being considered a terror suspect searching for a way to circumvent the scanners. I don't know about backscatter scanners, but conventional xray machines produce their rays via bombardment of a target with an electron stream - the intensity of the radiation depends on the current in that beam, so it's quite plausible that a faulty component could lead to a serious overcurrent and subsequent irradiation of the passangers.
That, and the tidyness of a ticked conviction box. It looks really bad of a police department has a lot of crimes on record without associated convictions. Someone has to go down to tick that box.
I recall that the US Supreme court is something of a political game now: Whenever one of them dies or retires, the president make sure to appoint someone sympathetic to his ideology to their place - and if congress doesn't approve them, to pick another sympathetic replacement until they do. Both parties do it now, because they each know that to cease this dubious practice would just hand a massive advantage to their opponents.
I perfered the original ending to I, Robot. In which a group of engineers discover that there is indeed an AI scheme to take over the world and initially try to find a way to stop this invasion - up until the point they realise that the world is being taken over by superintelligent minds that feel no greed or lust for power, never make mistakes, are entirely selfless and physically incapable of not acting in the best interests of mankind. They conclude that it'd be better to forget they ever discovered anything and just let the AIs win.
The site I'm not naming is a tracker, so you can't browse others - it sounds like you are discussing something like a secret dc++ hub. There must be a great many secret services like that.
That might work if this was just about sniffing, but the situation is more complex than that. It's also about the rise of corporate surveilance rather than government - they don't care overly if you are just being subversive, but they'd love to go through all your emails and browsing history to determine how best to flog you crap you don't need. It's about the use of search to make available to the masses the type of background checking that once would have been available only to governments and those willing to hire a PI - and so your friends, family and employer being able to dig up every tiny speck of dirt from your past, including that time a few years ago you joked that if fundamentalist-religious-types believe they are going to heaven we really should just kill them all. Encrypting all conversations is a requirement for restoring some semblence of privacy, but it is far from a complete solution. Really, the big problem is that most people just don't *care* about privacy.
It's also a way political correctness may be enforced in future. Never say anything offensive or contriversial to or about anyone anywhere under your real name or anything that can be linked to your real name... ten years down the line a potential employer might find it while googling you, judge you a potential liability or source of workplace discord and throw your application in the bin.
I can assure you that one does exist, at least, as I'm on it... but it's one of those 'first rule of fight club' things, and even if I told you registration has been closed for a long time now.
The server number was originally practical: It just says which number it is physically in the row. That way if server number three acts up so badly we can't remote in, we know to count to the third server from the left and reboot it.
Slashdot Mirror
The supposed dystopia actually looked like quite a pleasant place to live though. Minimal unemployment and crime, a ridiculously high standard of living even for the lowest classes, and minimal need for coercive conformity because the same effects were achieved through social engineering.
With the difference that the Nazi's view of their own superiority was really ideological and their scientific backing was essentially nonexistant... with genetic engineering, we could produce hard data to show superiority.
Not even the worst alarmists propose that humans will face extinction. Floods, hurricanes, mass starvation (well, more so), collapse of a few governments, at worst the loss of costal settlements. But not extinction. People will adapt... or at least those that survive will.
I don't think you could get enough energy from the sunlight on a human to run them, even at a nudist colony alternating between artic circles. It would reduce food requirements though, at least lessening the need.
You know... those incandescent bulbs? They come from China too. And they only last a fraction of the life, so you have to ship a lot more of them, which should easily outweigh the extra trip back for recycling.
Easy. Just invoke the nebulous fair-usage policy. Running a commercial hotspot? Better be paying carrier rates for that backhaul, or expect to be declared a freeloader and charged five dollars for every hundred meg.
A lot of homeless people have mobile phones now. The cheapest pay-as-you-go service and whatever phone they can get second-hand puts it within their price range, and it's really essential for purposes of job-applying.
Why are the infirmed and aged owed anything? If you're going for 'you get what you earn' they should just be left to starve to death or die of exposure. You appear to be allowing *just enough* compassion to appease your conscience.
You can if they want to be decieved. There's a thriving industry of news, both mainstream and niche, that specialises in being biased and maintains an audience by telling them what they want to hear. They turn bias into a business model. How do you think Limbaugh remains so popular, WorldNetDaily keeps pulling in the ad money and Fox News manages to remain the single most popular news channel in the US despite being a frequent object of mockery?
"Censorship is not American. "
"Nick "Hitler" Denton, wants control over media and free speech....What a patriot."
"seriously!!! what else is there to talk about when baseball is only 23 days away!"
"Like cruddy old people music. We should ban that, just because I want to."
"Obama's fault."
"i am not reading that novel." (In response to a three-paragraph comment)
"Where can i get the cliff notes to this post?" (Likewise)
"Go PHILLIES!!!!"
Depends on the situation. Moderators may also be tasked to protect the site's reputation by removing any comments that cast doubt on their version of the story, or and comments that support a non-mainstream position. They may be tasked to enforce an ideological view to give the impression of community cohesion, or just to minimise legal risk by taking out any comments that could be deemed libelous in any way. The moderators enforce the rules, but it's management that makes them.
I think you have it backwards: If the company management isn't willing to do evil, the company will never reach that mass. Sooner or later the time will come when the management must choose between their principles and their duty to maximise profits - they can't have both.
That's because they know the religion isn't serious. It's a game. There may be one or two crazy people who believe the force is real, but really real-world Jedi is just a combination of LARPing and themed costume events.
If one of those one or two crazy people came out as actually believing the force is real and they could achieve telekinetic powers with enough training, you can be sure their fellow Jedi would swiftly try to talk them out of it. Then mock them. Then kick them out the club as a dangerous embarassment.
Different organisation, same abbreviation. Coincidence.
The extent varies. I gather the US is rather bad due to a combination of a lack of independant oversight and a very close-knit policing culture that encourages the police to protect their own against outside attack. Here in the UK we set up the IPCC to deal with exactly that problem. It doesn't completly solve the problem, but it's better than nothing.
You'd have to see a schematic to be know that - and not only will those be considered a trade secret of the manufacturer, but even trying to obtain a copy could lead to you being considered a terror suspect searching for a way to circumvent the scanners. I don't know about backscatter scanners, but conventional xray machines produce their rays via bombardment of a target with an electron stream - the intensity of the radiation depends on the current in that beam, so it's quite plausible that a faulty component could lead to a serious overcurrent and subsequent irradiation of the passangers.
That, and the tidyness of a ticked conviction box. It looks really bad of a police department has a lot of crimes on record without associated convictions. Someone has to go down to tick that box.
I recall that the US Supreme court is something of a political game now: Whenever one of them dies or retires, the president make sure to appoint someone sympathetic to his ideology to their place - and if congress doesn't approve them, to pick another sympathetic replacement until they do. Both parties do it now, because they each know that to cease this dubious practice would just hand a massive advantage to their opponents.
I perfered the original ending to I, Robot. In which a group of engineers discover that there is indeed an AI scheme to take over the world and initially try to find a way to stop this invasion - up until the point they realise that the world is being taken over by superintelligent minds that feel no greed or lust for power, never make mistakes, are entirely selfless and physically incapable of not acting in the best interests of mankind. They conclude that it'd be better to forget they ever discovered anything and just let the AIs win.
The site I'm not naming is a tracker, so you can't browse others - it sounds like you are discussing something like a secret dc++ hub. There must be a great many secret services like that.
That might work if this was just about sniffing, but the situation is more complex than that. It's also about the rise of corporate surveilance rather than government - they don't care overly if you are just being subversive, but they'd love to go through all your emails and browsing history to determine how best to flog you crap you don't need. It's about the use of search to make available to the masses the type of background checking that once would have been available only to governments and those willing to hire a PI - and so your friends, family and employer being able to dig up every tiny speck of dirt from your past, including that time a few years ago you joked that if fundamentalist-religious-types believe they are going to heaven we really should just kill them all. Encrypting all conversations is a requirement for restoring some semblence of privacy, but it is far from a complete solution. Really, the big problem is that most people just don't *care* about privacy.
It's also a way political correctness may be enforced in future. Never say anything offensive or contriversial to or about anyone anywhere under your real name or anything that can be linked to your real name... ten years down the line a potential employer might find it while googling you, judge you a potential liability or source of workplace discord and throw your application in the bin.
I can assure you that one does exist, at least, as I'm on it... but it's one of those 'first rule of fight club' things, and even if I told you registration has been closed for a long time now.
The server number was originally practical: It just says which number it is physically in the row. That way if server number three acts up so badly we can't remote in, we know to count to the third server from the left and reboot it.
Until someone mishears that as 'Phallus' and you have to deal with a claim of sexual harassment.