I don't know how they did it, but somehow Apple gathered up all the people willing to pay per click for content and sold them all a device and a distribution system which caters to this willingness.
Despite what people say, this does indeed change everything about the publishing world.
Will it kill all paper? No, of course not. Just like TV didn't kill movies, or how movies didn't kill the stage. It's just another medium to add to the collection. It'll certainly change the share of attention/profit between the various mediums, and some people will certainly lose their jobs while other job sectors expand, but in the end, that's not the big deal here.
That's the first thing.
The second is that it was already starting to happen on its own. I know a few people who sell content for fairly respectable dollar values to companies who use it to gain click-exposure in Google's search ranking system. (That is, if for instance you have a website selling lawn care products and you want to increase search relevance, then you hire a writer to research and write articles on lawn-mowing. If you pay the writer $250 for an article and it nets you a week of search exposure which turns into $2000 worth of sales, then suddenly web content becomes a real value worth paying well for; Being a writer is a real job again.)
The problem was that News doesn't sell directly any product, which means that knowledge of current events in the world and how we collect that knowledge is changing. I actually think that this isn't a bad thing at all. Network news programs and magazines like TIME generally suck. Sure, they're slick and well-educated and all that, but honestly, they are glorified authority figures selling lies and propaganda with a thin, (like watery milk with too much growth hormone), stream of truth to keep us hooked. Basically, useless other than a means of population control and manipulation. As such, it will always exist, I know that, but it was nice to see it panicking a little bit with the death of newspapers and all that. (Another medium which will never go away entirely, but which will and has indeed shurnk more than most!)
This iPad caters to people who are so well-programmed that they are willing to pay for a device so they can pay for their daily reality update; their daily bullshit required to stay programmed. The "News" will remain alive and well. Yay.
But it does make things interesting for other content providers. If the world had many more years left, I'd say that we were about to enter another golden age of writers, animators, programmers, actors, etc. I mean. . , small-scale private creative efforts being legitimate source of income? That's pretty cool. It's indy comics all over again, but starring Felicia Day, (as one example).
As such, I can also see one version of reality where magazines hire on a wider variety of creative people, from programmers and animators all the way to actors and musicians to make their pay-wall worth climbing.
As much as I can't stand the iPad, that is pretty cool. Thanks Steve; I'm now conflicted. Ugh.
When you work the peanut gallery nonsense out of your system, please feel free to join the adults in the box seating.
Might take a while though. I hear the Octo-mom thing was unfair and worthy of wasting the time and attention of the entire nation for weeks! But with luck there will be no more imbecilic distractions from the fact that you're being raped.
Grow the fuck up. Oil is just a clever form of taxation.
You, the little people, have to do whatever we tell you to do. We are going to take your crops and your land and whatever else we feel like taking. You owe us everything. We're the landowners. We're the powerful, and the power we have was taken from you and we use it to take more power from you. Okay? That's how it works. You bottom, We Top. Got it?
There are NO rational arguments. You can spin them all day if you want. Point out our hypocrisies, call for legal action. We don't care. Hell, we encourage it! It keeps you idiots occupied, living under the illusion that this is some kind of level playing field. Ha ha! Yeah, go right on thinking that. -Believe that if you work hard enough that you too can be wealthy. Ha ha! Yeah, about that. . , truth is we only let a couple of people up that lottery ladder to keep you idiots mollified, and they're only the psychopaths and other favored sons who know how to play ball. And even they don't get into the inner circles. Now way! Obama and Gates and fucking Schwarzenegger are clowns in the court of the truly wealthy, (who, by the way were, the same families who really WERE stealing your crops a few hundred years ago). Those court jesters are there just to keep you retards happily taking the shit end of the stick. Ha ha! The serfs love their stupid little lotteries. What a bunch of inferior assholes you are! Ha ha!
Now where were we. . ?
Oh yeah. We can do whatever we want, steal, rape and pillage and you can do NOTHING. Got it?
Good. I'm glad we could cut through this bullshit. Have a rotten day.
The cue here is the fact that mankind slowly but surely approaches that deciding point in time where everyone owes everyone else, directly or indirectly, money, but is unable to pay. Just look at U.S. - trillions in debt, everything is just promised back in promises themselves. Everything is in a perpetual state of "I owe you" . That's hardly news, since, ironically, the very natural state of existence is owing eachother. The problem is converting this into real value, and demanding it back. That's the difference part.
Well now, the banks don't appear to owe me a dime.
They DO owe everybody an enormous and rapidly mounting spiritual debt, (and collection will take place in due course), but according to the rules, they rightfully hold all the cash. But "Render unto Caesar", right?
Now, the movement of power would certainly make sense if it were circular, (as you seem to suggest), but it has been hijacked into a pyramid shape with the banks nearer the top, and the slaves and livestock at the bottom with nobody but the Earth and Sun paying them any energy, (and certainly not in cash form!). Of course, there's plenty to go around, but the psychopaths in charge don't see it that way; those spiritual black-holes want it all and so devised the banking system whereby unpayable debt is the product of the machine; a large sucking sound, bigger than all of creation. They're in direct competition with the Earth and Sun for goodness sake! They want to climb back into the womb so badly that they are willing to extinguish all of reality to do it. Stupid fuckers.
The whole thing is only 'natural' in the sense that greed and lack of conscience are naturally occurring forces. But that doesn't mean that they HAVE to organize themselves the way we see them here on our world.
Interestingly, since the pyramid scheme is inherently unstable, it will inevitably reach a point where it collapses leaving us with the option of reorganizing in a less stupid way. But in general, this doesn't happen very often, and I'm not even sure it would be desirable. -Well. . , it would be amazing and comfortable to live on a world like that, but it seems that the lessons young souls need to go through involve growing conscience and giving up greed, and the best way to do that is to live through and experience and the consequences of the various Dharmatic forces (or whatever your want to call them) connected to the big money/usury/slave-keeping scheme. -Greed and stupidity and the big Karma-whammie at the other end.
It's a bit of a pain in the arse, though, even if nobody is kicking you directly. I guess one of the reasons I'm still here is that some days I dearly want to do the kicking.
The tricky part comes now you know about cognitive dissonance, once you catch yourself believing something that conflicts with a fact and you find youself justifying it somehow. Now you know that you probably experienced some cognitive dissonance, and you can either accept that fact and attempt to solve the internal conflict another way or you can blissfully ignore it by accepting the excuse you made up unconsciously... saying to yourself: "it can't have been cognitive dissonance, my reasoning was perfectly valid"... until you find yourself wondering about that statement == Cognitive dissonance ad infinitum!
I find it helps to assume that I'm ignorant and try to work backwards from there. Whatever doesn't get burned away in that crucible becomes a barnacle of knowledge on the hull of my life. As I get older, though, I find pattern recognition allows me to jump the line in many discussions when dealing with old questions. But every now and again I hit that wonderful wall where somebody offers up a piece of data I'd not heard before which throws my beliefs into chaos. Those are wonderful and terrible days!
Wish I could burn my moral values away and start over as these guys.
You sound like that creep from the Matrix. "And I wanna be rich. You know, someone important, like an actor."
Or you could get a better job. Sitting on the fence out of fear is worse than not knowing which side you should be on. Ignorance can be cured. Cowardice is usually forever.
Yet, I for one, am able to recognize the existence of real world corruption and abuses of power without necessarily subscribing to paranoid conspiracy theories of a incredibly baroque or byzantine nature.
Really? Good for you. I feel similarly, (although I am not nearly so confident as to be able to declare that I always know the nature of what I am looking at, and I hold a dim view of anybody who claims they do).
What annoys me are those who write off any corruption which cuts too close to their comfort zone as "Paranoid Conspiracy Theory" rather than think about it further to find out if there is any validity to a "Wild Claim" being suggested. I can't count the number of times I've heard what I considered to be a "Wildly unlikely claim" only to have incontrovertible evidence put before me. And I'm not talking about big things. I'm talking about general reality in bland day-to-day phenomena, objects and activities. I've learned that I can't trust my initial reactions, that I can't write off any idea simply because it seems wrong until I've investigated the source material.
After a thorough investigation, you see the reality of a situation. Sometimes its another dumb Fake Moon Landing. Sometimes its a crop circle with microwave damage on every second stalk node and genuine unmarked black helicopters buzzing the field. Sometimes wild ideas become perfectly clear realities, and people resisting them seem perfectly ridiculous because they refuse to look at the evidence. That happens far more frequently than you might think.
Even more peculiar (and telling) is when people DO look at the evidence, become alarmed and confused, glaze over, reboot and continue on as though they'd seen nothing at all. I've seen THAT happen more than once, and I'll tell you, nothing makes me feel more like I'm living among pod-people!
I looked at this story and thought, "Ugh. What utter bullshit. But to explain why and do it in a way which was engaging and readable will take more effort than I currently have to spend. My words are still mushy because the coffee hasn't kicked in yet."
I'm not saying that all altruism is false; it's not. And I bet you anything that there are many people involved in this current project who honestly mean well. But the whole thing is so contrived from the top that this effort is impossible to take seriously. MS? NASA? The World Fucking Bank??? Jeezuz. Those companies have long track records of creepy. (Though NASA has infinitely better PR than the others.) But for goodness sake. If I was a promising young hacker involved in that project, I'd be scared to go to sleep at night for fear of what they'd try to do to my head while I wasn't conscious. I wonder how many of those space-camp kids suffer from missing time. . ?
But whatever. That's too far for most people to deal with and you summed up the preliminaries very well, so we'll just leave it at that.
Yes, corruption doesn't exist, especially if you laugh at it and include genuine bits of silliness nobody really thinks is true in your broad stroke accusations.
Do you feel content once more?
Good for you. The world, however, doesn't share your delusion of fluffy happy safety from people who want make sure you work all of your good hours in some idiotic slave job while you let your mind and spirit atrophy, while of course, preventing you from ever sharing in any of the real power which IS highly coveted in this world and for which people regularly manipulate and kill.
As long as you're laughing to keep yourself feeling safe, you're out of the contest and are in fact part of the prize package.
So do go back to sleep. You are very funny. All is well.
It seems to me that more than half of the people I meed have made a choice at some point in their lives.
When faced with a difficult bit of knowledge such as, "I work for a company which rips people off," it feels bad. A certain type of person when so faced with this kind of truth will spin words cleverly so that the truth goes away and turns into a nice, calming fiction. It's easy to do this! Words are brilliantly mutable. One quickly learns that with a bit of skill in word-craft and a strong enough will to push through the desired version of the false picture of reality while squashing down all others, one can happily get through life without ever having to face any unpleasant truths. -Truths like being an narcissistic asshole.
This is a choice many people make; that they will face adversity with fictions. It removes the need for real work and the pain of ever being wrong or ever having to improve the self in meaningful ways. Why should one? With lies and denial, one is already perfect!
Whereas others, those who have chosen against this method of dealing with reality, are the ones who grow strong for real. It takes work and pain to face hard and unpleasant realities head-on. But when you do, you grow powerful. You reduce the amount of energy being bled away from you via unhealthy systems, you grow skills in actually working with reality; your mind grows sharp as you hone awareness and self-criticism. Little perks show up, like the realization that you no longer lose arguments because you're no longer trying to win; rather, you're trying to get to the bottom of things.
This HP idiot is a puff of smoke. He can spin words but likely has no real strength; because in the course of sculpting his lies to himself and others, he's needed to limit his own awareness; (you can't get along with lies very well if you see all the facts, so your eyes need to be muted.) Strength after strength is cut away, so that there is no ability to react when truths come crashing in through the web of words. When the web fails, there is only paralysis. No ability to absorb and grow from the light of knowledge.
Sometimes it takes a while for a liar to decay, and sometimes you'll meet a very strong one who is near the top of his/her strength curve, but the end result is inevitable. The decay spreads and eventually liars descend into mush while those who look reality dead-on and deal with it and fight to see ever more grow in strength and ability.
That's just how it is.
-FL
Oh yeah, and the answer was. . .
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Lost Ends
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The creators were definitely making things up as they went, but using managerial fit-it-together round table script planning sessions to help themselves make sense of the stuff coursing through their open channel.
In the end, though, it was just a show. Fiction.
But it was a fiction which paid homage to some primary truths about reality. . .
1. Reality isn't linear and it s far weirder than many allow, but there are rules and maths. 2. Gods are just people who know more of those rules and maths than the rest of us. 3. Karma works. If you punch people, you'll get punched. Trust and the Universe will trusting. But don't be stupid. 4. Magic and science are just tools to understand and work within creation. Basically, Instinct and Logic each have their use. 5. The soul is what matters.
The show was self-explanatory by the end. The only question we were left with was, "What was the source of the light and who put it there?"
That's a metaphor for the most basic of basic questions, and there are answers to it, but I've not met anybody who can do anything more than mouth the words, "God's Breath" or somesuch; nobody who really understands. We've got a ways to go before those rules and maths make sense.
And there's no rush.
-FL
I actually liked the thing.
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In a moment of "away from home for two weeks" with nothing but some pets I was supposed to feed and an entire library of DVDs, I found myself working through LOST.
At first the J.J. Abrams stench ("See? Torture Works!") episodes were stupid and disgusting, worth writing the show off entirely for. But early on he went off to "greener" pastures and left the show in the hands of the emotionally/spiritually squishy Damon Lindelof and Jeffrey Lieber. I don't know what either of those two light-weights feel about torture, and it probably doesn't matter because I'm sure you could convince them either way and back again over lunch. That's the impression I got from them; Open and easily convinced and bearing few opinions strong enough to resist change, but deep down, good people with positive intentions who play the long game; they'll get there eventually and know the score. And in the end, that's what made the show strong.
They were channeling some pretty extravagant ideas, and by the time the last season rolled around, they had recognized that evil is evil and that it is a choice, not a default setting. That by itself was surprising, and a nice reward for sitting through far too many hours of that show all by myself in the middle of nowhere when I really expected Hollywood to just do its regular bullshit thing where it supports greed and empire and whatever flavor of propaganda happens to be in vogue. (Which, don't get me wrong, LOST did its share of, but without lasting effect because every other message was allowed air time as well.)
How many stories in popular media explore multi-dimensionality, time loops, the soul, science and human behavior? I mean, without bible-as-fact idiocy, without dogmatic "science" as king? Just doesn't happen. I mean, the show visited the inside of laboratories, lunatic asylums and religion and didn't pronounce any of them as correct; just facets of awareness and our striving to understand the great mystery of creation. That's what we call openness and a willingness to explore, and you just can't get anywhere in life if you don't explore with your eyes open. So yeah, LOST is going to piss off those who simply cannot work up the courage to live in a world where we simply aren't going to have all the answers, ever; who refuse to look or even consider beyond the confines of whatever artificial system of explanations they use to pretend control over their personal reality.
But the best part. . . My favorite character; Hugo. . , man, he was the one guy who trusted openly, who didn't engage in all the paranoia and violence and manipulations. They put the guy in a crazy house for it, (well, the writers did, anyway), "You have to be crazy if you trust the universe!" And I was shouting, "But he's the only one who has a clue!" But by the end, holy smokes! They made him into a minor deity because he'd figured out the secret of Karma. I really didn't think the writers were sophisticated enough to do that, but what do you know? A show that started off with Abrams torture episodes managed to shed that crap, choose between good and evil, and evolve.
How often does that happen?
But sorry, it's true, the characters never really rose above 2-dimensions for me. The creators and actors tried hard, but it was still very thin on that front. But then, most real people walk around in a state of "Flat", so it's not like they weren't being accurate.
All in all, LOST was a pleasant surprise and it planted some ideas which are vital to understanding what is going on in the world right now. Nice job!
Despite what you may have been told when you were a kid, your level of approval holds approximately zero value for anybody.
But do go on fortifying your stick in the mud. We'll leave it right where it is. Promise.
Anyway, the point here was "Fun," I believe. As much as Google's monolithic structure worries me, they do know how to let their employees out to stretch their Happy! That improves the world.
So Thumbs Up. I just spent fifteen minutes eating dots and loving it!
Because I feel someone else should be telling me I should talk on a phone in a public place I'm narcissistic?
Wow. On a couple of levels, that sentence is worrisome. With this type of creep, grammar is one of the first indications that something is wrong. Kind of a, "put food on your family" moment.
Seriously. Stop posting for the night, take a deep breath, and swallow your damned pills.
Normally I advise people to get off anti-depressants, but in some cases it keeps the rest of us safe.
Discussing these issues in detail would require a lot more than a short slashdot comment.
No worries. That's enough to get the gist.
I'm still reading the thing in scattershot, but thus far I'm having trouble disagreeing with anything I've found. But I live in a belief paradigm which is so far outside the norm and so often dismissed that his observations really resonate. But I've not worked out yet if that's just some part of me saying, "Fucking A" or if it's just plain true. As sometimes happens in philosophy, I've found Kuhn's work is the sort which can be read by an individual and then taken to verify ideas which run in exactly the opposite direction from the author's intent.
Bias against the notion that the universe contains only one person?
Confirmed.
Did your anti-psychotics roll under the couch or something? Your poise is melting. Again. (What was that you said just a moment ago about knifing people?)
This is a classic example of a twit in denial using ill-suited science lingo to squash an idea offensive to his tiny and ridiculous personal belief structure. Sorry, but everybody else on the planet knows exactly what their five senses and personal awareness are complaining about wrt cell phone idiots. I enjoyed this clip.
I think he's incorrect but it is a very enjoyable read and one get's to learn a lot of neat historical facts that are often overlooked or not discussed in standard pop explanations of the history of science.
This may have been modded "Insightful". Clearly whoever posted it can "see in". But I can't make head or tails of what he is talking about and I doubt the moderators could either. What I see is word blather and then some dumb quip about competition which everybody responds to with perked up ears.
And no, competition is clearly NOT a good thing for everyone. There are a lot of people who joined the game and who now live in their cars. There are a lot of people working far too hard in honest work but who are still sliding into debt without doing anything fundamentally wrong other than living in the U.S.
Competition is only good within limits. Too much of anything applied inappropriately will kill you every time.
The way we think about moving energy around, about how to ask for and give help and resources shapes the human world. The money system in the U.S. is clearly broken beyond words. Everything crashed as badly as they did due to flat-out corruption, (which is simply an effective form of competition), but rather jail the perps, they were rewarded. They still have the same jobs as before. That's the system. That's the result of unbridled competition, because the rules of the game have been allowed to extend into government, into owning presidents and cabinets.
The money trading system is a complete farce and it seems to me that this poster is so utterly immersed in it that he can't see just how big a Douglas Adams bit of infernal humor it has become. HFT isn't a good thing. People aren't whining and complaining about something they simply don't understand, (and by extension should just shut up). It's the same old bullshit; People not making anything but rather spinning greased wheels in a giant con-job machine. No, sorry, I'm wrong. They DO make things. They make Two things; Slaves and Confusing arguments. But the end result. . .
You are if you use Open Source as a reason why Firefox is superior to Chrome, which is what it looked like in your comment above.
Ehn? No. I didn't research a point before stating it as a fact. That's shortsighted tomfoolery well worth squashing. However, thinking that Open Source has valid advantages over closed software is a non-falsifiable opinion, and it's a damned solid one with a few billion words written in its defense. It's not a black and white issue by any means, and there are provisos to be dropped all over the place, but I doubt you're capable of getting me to retract it unless you're sitting on some kind of data bombshell I've managed to never hear about or consider over the last decade. Best to stay on less shaky ground when you call names.
To be fair, Firefox has become dramatically better in recent releases. But I think the damage has already been done, at least as far as I'm concerned. Unless Chromium takes a sudden turn for the worse, I'm already a convert.
Well, it certainly sounds like you've found a rewarding browser which has solved a lot of problems that irritated you in the past. There's a lot of value in that. I'd use Chrome too if it allowed me to sculpt the GUI according to my taste, didn't crash or freeze up frequently, (literally my experience), offered speed increases in areas where I find things to actually be too slow, (which I don't), and was made by people who don't have an ulterior motive which involves me clicking on a lot of adverts. The whole Chrome experience is laced with both subtle and not-so-subtle attention channeling. It has to be. That's its purpose. I just don't like feeling manipulated.
You're insane. Firefox has the slowest Javascript performance of all major browsers, and frankly, even Slashdot loads faster in Chromium than in Firefox. I have plenty of machine, too, to the point where hardware definitely is not the problem.
I've honestly not noticed any Javascript speed issues with FF. What are people expecting exactly? By the time the images have finished loading, a whole page is up and running and I can read it. What should I be unhappy about here?
And the MOST annoying part of this is that Firefox will take away a partially loaded page that I'm currently reading and replace it with an error message. That is the most abusive thing a web browser has ever done to me,
Hm. That IS irritating. I seem to recall that happening to me before. A long time ago. Maybe I just visit inherently more stable sites than you. I have a fairly low tolerance for wait times and buggy software, but FF long ago rose beyond that margin for me. I've long considered it a 'done' technology with only minor bits of polishing necessary as well as updates as new requirements come along, (like HTML video).
Chrome just fails to impress me as much as the fanfare implies that it should, and most of the complaints about FF seem to stem from the fact that it doesn't deliver a satisfying experience when it comes to having lots of adverts flashing on the page. This just seems like a weird complaint which I solved by simply making them go away. But then, I'm a bad consumer. I try to do as little of it as possible.
But as I said; I like innovation. If Chrome is doing some good things with refinement, then that's great. If it spurs FF into better shape, just as long as they don't fix what ain't broke, then that's great too. I just don't have any problems which need fixing. Everything I want to work, works.
I'm really sorry to offend, but for goodness sake. . !
If you don't use some form of adblock and flashblock then you deserve to have a slow browser.
"Gee! Advertisers are abusing my trust but I'm too daft to recognize it. Why is my browser crawling? Mozilla sucks!"
Jeez! What are you? An Apple user? That's like complaining about your "slow" hardware while at the same time hosting a stack of botnet/malware software you were too stupid to avoid installing. Yes. It's the SAME thing. -A bunch of crap code on your system trying to separate fools from their money and you let it put itself there.
When it comes to technology, I'm all for new innovation, so upon hearing how great Chrome was, I gave it a shot.
I didn't notice any speed increase at all. Hardly surprising.
What I DID notice was that Chrome was prone to freezing and that it lacked the ability for me to configure the damned GUI according to my tastes. If you don't like where buttons are placed, tough-luck buck, because there's no way to change them.
All told, it made me feel claustrophobic.
I tried Chrome TWICE. After a week, I thought I must have been hallucinating. Code produced by the greatest public collection of computer geniuses on the planet couldn't possibly be that lame; it must be me. So I gave it my all. There was one feature I liked; one of their add-ons was noticeably more refined than the Firefox version, but that's third party stuff and has no reflection on Mozilla. But again, the browser froze and died on the third page I tried accessing, (I was trying to read a review over on Gamespot a friend insisted I read. This was a good test for both browsers because I never visit that site so neither FF or Chrome had any of Gamespot's code heavy bullshit in either of their caches). Chrome choked and froze, and FF cut through it with no problem. That by itself is enough to end this debate, but it was the lack of control over the Chrome GUI which I found most annoying; it made me feel like an Apple user. And just to reiterate; when you use Flash and Ad blocking, there's zero speed difference between the two browsers. None that I could notice, anyway.
The one bit of kudos I'll offer Chrome is that the options menu wasn't Appled down to nothing, but the fact that I even need to mention this is retarded. It's like saying, "Oh, you have both arms! Good for you!" I could still do most of what FF offers, but the buggy execution and the total lack of GUI control said to me, "Beta. Come back when you're done".
And now that I think of it. . .
Evil or not, Google is a profit-motivated organization, and its primary business is not giving you a great browser. It's primary business is delivering advertising to you. The two things might run a parallel course past many points, but don't ever forget that Google is not your friend; when all is said and done, you are the john and money is changing hands. An open source browser is the only truly trustworthy browser out there. FF doesn't ever feel like it's trying to bullshit me. (It's real love!)
I'd rather have buggy open-source software than have perfect software which I can't see through. And the fact that FF gives me basically perfect performance is a very big deal. It took a long time and a lot of work to get Mozilla's browser this good. Why the hell would I want to jump to some ad-company's free calculator? The thing doesn't even work properly.
First they came for the pedophilia collectors. . .
But seriously, you've touched on a really valid question.
I don't know about the guy in question, but psychopaths cannot be rehabilitated, and so to release them back into the wild is a bad idea. The problem is that the system itself is infested with psychopaths in suits and they're often the ones at the switch. Only the lowest level of psychopaths tend to be incarcerated, while many regular humans are simply those driven to prison via the mechanisms of economic and class warfare. I'd not feel confident at ALL allowing the state to simply lock people up and throw away the key because we know that power will be abused. We simply know it. -I don't trust the authorities because the authorities have proven themselves time and again to be unworthy of public trust. I'd like it to be otherwise; we all would I think, but it's simply not possible today, (not without a dose of permanent brain damage, that is!)
Also, given your points about definitions, this recent item gives me pause. (Shrinks broadening the definition of what it means to be crazy).
Hm. It just struck me how interesting it is that cigar smoking should be as illegal as it is today.
Sure, the players involved all think it's real, but the whole game is nothing more than a means of squeezing an extra bit of stress reaction from the population.
TV and general media opiate is such a fantastically successful means of keeping people asleep that it will not go away until it is rendered redundant by guns, barbed wire and processing plants. The copyright thing is a means of turning everybody into a criminal, and thus gives a valid excuse to introduce those guns, barbed wire and processing plants. -Because milking the human race for anxiety is all fine and nice for the aliens, but greed and stupidity dictate the necessity for a huge whollop of energy which can only be extracted through physical trauma on a planetary scale. A couple of senseless wars here and there just don't cut it.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know how they did it, but somehow Apple gathered up all the people willing to pay per click for content and sold them all a device and a distribution system which caters to this willingness.
Despite what people say, this does indeed change everything about the publishing world.
Will it kill all paper? No, of course not. Just like TV didn't kill movies, or how movies didn't kill the stage. It's just another medium to add to the collection. It'll certainly change the share of attention/profit between the various mediums, and some people will certainly lose their jobs while other job sectors expand, but in the end, that's not the big deal here.
That's the first thing.
The second is that it was already starting to happen on its own. I know a few people who sell content for fairly respectable dollar values to companies who use it to gain click-exposure in Google's search ranking system. (That is, if for instance you have a website selling lawn care products and you want to increase search relevance, then you hire a writer to research and write articles on lawn-mowing. If you pay the writer $250 for an article and it nets you a week of search exposure which turns into $2000 worth of sales, then suddenly web content becomes a real value worth paying well for; Being a writer is a real job again.)
The problem was that News doesn't sell directly any product, which means that knowledge of current events in the world and how we collect that knowledge is changing. I actually think that this isn't a bad thing at all. Network news programs and magazines like TIME generally suck. Sure, they're slick and well-educated and all that, but honestly, they are glorified authority figures selling lies and propaganda with a thin, (like watery milk with too much growth hormone), stream of truth to keep us hooked. Basically, useless other than a means of population control and manipulation. As such, it will always exist, I know that, but it was nice to see it panicking a little bit with the death of newspapers and all that. (Another medium which will never go away entirely, but which will and has indeed shurnk more than most!)
This iPad caters to people who are so well-programmed that they are willing to pay for a device so they can pay for their daily reality update; their daily bullshit required to stay programmed. The "News" will remain alive and well. Yay.
But it does make things interesting for other content providers. If the world had many more years left, I'd say that we were about to enter another golden age of writers, animators, programmers, actors, etc. I mean. . , small-scale private creative efforts being legitimate source of income? That's pretty cool. It's indy comics all over again, but starring Felicia Day, (as one example).
As such, I can also see one version of reality where magazines hire on a wider variety of creative people, from programmers and animators all the way to actors and musicians to make their pay-wall worth climbing.
As much as I can't stand the iPad, that is pretty cool. Thanks Steve; I'm now conflicted. Ugh.
Just some thoughts.
-FL
Oh jeez.
When you work the peanut gallery nonsense out of your system, please feel free to join the adults in the box seating.
Might take a while though. I hear the Octo-mom thing was unfair and worthy of wasting the time and attention of the entire nation for weeks! But with luck there will be no more imbecilic distractions from the fact that you're being raped.
Grow the fuck up. Oil is just a clever form of taxation.
-FL
You, the little people, have to do whatever we tell you to do. We are going to take your crops and your land and whatever else we feel like taking. You owe us everything. We're the landowners. We're the powerful, and the power we have was taken from you and we use it to take more power from you. Okay? That's how it works. You bottom, We Top. Got it?
There are NO rational arguments. You can spin them all day if you want. Point out our hypocrisies, call for legal action. We don't care. Hell, we encourage it! It keeps you idiots occupied, living under the illusion that this is some kind of level playing field. Ha ha! Yeah, go right on thinking that. -Believe that if you work hard enough that you too can be wealthy. Ha ha! Yeah, about that. . , truth is we only let a couple of people up that lottery ladder to keep you idiots mollified, and they're only the psychopaths and other favored sons who know how to play ball. And even they don't get into the inner circles. Now way! Obama and Gates and fucking Schwarzenegger are clowns in the court of the truly wealthy, (who, by the way were, the same families who really WERE stealing your crops a few hundred years ago). Those court jesters are there just to keep you retards happily taking the shit end of the stick. Ha ha! The serfs love their stupid little lotteries. What a bunch of inferior assholes you are! Ha ha!
Now where were we. . ?
Oh yeah. We can do whatever we want, steal, rape and pillage and you can do NOTHING. Got it?
Good. I'm glad we could cut through this bullshit. Have a rotten day.
-The Mgt.
The cue here is the fact that mankind slowly but surely approaches that deciding point in time where everyone owes everyone else, directly or indirectly, money, but is unable to pay. Just look at U.S. - trillions in debt, everything is just promised back in promises themselves. Everything is in a perpetual state of "I owe you" . That's hardly news, since, ironically, the very natural state of existence is owing eachother. The problem is converting this into real value, and demanding it back. That's the difference part.
Well now, the banks don't appear to owe me a dime.
They DO owe everybody an enormous and rapidly mounting spiritual debt, (and collection will take place in due course), but according to the rules, they rightfully hold all the cash. But "Render unto Caesar", right?
Now, the movement of power would certainly make sense if it were circular, (as you seem to suggest), but it has been hijacked into a pyramid shape with the banks nearer the top, and the slaves and livestock at the bottom with nobody but the Earth and Sun paying them any energy, (and certainly not in cash form!). Of course, there's plenty to go around, but the psychopaths in charge don't see it that way; those spiritual black-holes want it all and so devised the banking system whereby unpayable debt is the product of the machine; a large sucking sound, bigger than all of creation. They're in direct competition with the Earth and Sun for goodness sake! They want to climb back into the womb so badly that they are willing to extinguish all of reality to do it. Stupid fuckers.
The whole thing is only 'natural' in the sense that greed and lack of conscience are naturally occurring forces. But that doesn't mean that they HAVE to organize themselves the way we see them here on our world.
Interestingly, since the pyramid scheme is inherently unstable, it will inevitably reach a point where it collapses leaving us with the option of reorganizing in a less stupid way. But in general, this doesn't happen very often, and I'm not even sure it would be desirable. -Well. . , it would be amazing and comfortable to live on a world like that, but it seems that the lessons young souls need to go through involve growing conscience and giving up greed, and the best way to do that is to live through and experience and the consequences of the various Dharmatic forces (or whatever your want to call them) connected to the big money/usury/slave-keeping scheme. -Greed and stupidity and the big Karma-whammie at the other end.
It's a bit of a pain in the arse, though, even if nobody is kicking you directly. I guess one of the reasons I'm still here is that some days I dearly want to do the kicking.
-FL
The tricky part comes now you know about cognitive dissonance, once you catch yourself believing something that conflicts with a fact and you find youself justifying it somehow. Now you know that you probably experienced some cognitive dissonance, and you can either accept that fact and attempt to solve the internal conflict another way or you can blissfully ignore it by accepting the excuse you made up unconsciously... saying to yourself: "it can't have been cognitive dissonance, my reasoning was perfectly valid"... until you find yourself wondering about that statement == Cognitive dissonance ad infinitum!
I find it helps to assume that I'm ignorant and try to work backwards from there. Whatever doesn't get burned away in that crucible becomes a barnacle of knowledge on the hull of my life. As I get older, though, I find pattern recognition allows me to jump the line in many discussions when dealing with old questions. But every now and again I hit that wonderful wall where somebody offers up a piece of data I'd not heard before which throws my beliefs into chaos. Those are wonderful and terrible days!
-FL
Wish I could burn my moral values away and start over as these guys.
You sound like that creep from the Matrix. "And I wanna be rich. You know, someone important, like an actor."
Or you could get a better job. Sitting on the fence out of fear is worse than not knowing which side you should be on. Ignorance can be cured. Cowardice is usually forever.
-FL
Yet, I for one, am able to recognize the existence of real world corruption and abuses of power without necessarily subscribing to paranoid conspiracy theories of a incredibly baroque or byzantine nature.
Really? Good for you. I feel similarly, (although I am not nearly so confident as to be able to declare that I always know the nature of what I am looking at, and I hold a dim view of anybody who claims they do).
What annoys me are those who write off any corruption which cuts too close to their comfort zone as "Paranoid Conspiracy Theory" rather than think about it further to find out if there is any validity to a "Wild Claim" being suggested. I can't count the number of times I've heard what I considered to be a "Wildly unlikely claim" only to have incontrovertible evidence put before me. And I'm not talking about big things. I'm talking about general reality in bland day-to-day phenomena, objects and activities. I've learned that I can't trust my initial reactions, that I can't write off any idea simply because it seems wrong until I've investigated the source material.
After a thorough investigation, you see the reality of a situation. Sometimes its another dumb Fake Moon Landing. Sometimes its a crop circle with microwave damage on every second stalk node and genuine unmarked black helicopters buzzing the field. Sometimes wild ideas become perfectly clear realities, and people resisting them seem perfectly ridiculous because they refuse to look at the evidence. That happens far more frequently than you might think.
Even more peculiar (and telling) is when people DO look at the evidence, become alarmed and confused, glaze over, reboot and continue on as though they'd seen nothing at all. I've seen THAT happen more than once, and I'll tell you, nothing makes me feel more like I'm living among pod-people!
-FL
Well said.
I looked at this story and thought, "Ugh. What utter bullshit. But to explain why and do it in a way which was engaging and readable will take more effort than I currently have to spend. My words are still mushy because the coffee hasn't kicked in yet."
I'm not saying that all altruism is false; it's not. And I bet you anything that there are many people involved in this current project who honestly mean well. But the whole thing is so contrived from the top that this effort is impossible to take seriously. MS? NASA? The World Fucking Bank??? Jeezuz. Those companies have long track records of creepy. (Though NASA has infinitely better PR than the others.) But for goodness sake. If I was a promising young hacker involved in that project, I'd be scared to go to sleep at night for fear of what they'd try to do to my head while I wasn't conscious. I wonder how many of those space-camp kids suffer from missing time. . ?
But whatever. That's too far for most people to deal with and you summed up the preliminaries very well, so we'll just leave it at that.
-FL
Ha ha ha!
Yes, corruption doesn't exist, especially if you laugh at it and include genuine bits of silliness nobody really thinks is true in your broad stroke accusations.
Do you feel content once more?
Good for you. The world, however, doesn't share your delusion of fluffy happy safety from people who want make sure you work all of your good hours in some idiotic slave job while you let your mind and spirit atrophy, while of course, preventing you from ever sharing in any of the real power which IS highly coveted in this world and for which people regularly manipulate and kill.
As long as you're laughing to keep yourself feeling safe, you're out of the contest and are in fact part of the prize package.
So do go back to sleep. You are very funny. All is well.
-FL
It seems to me that more than half of the people I meed have made a choice at some point in their lives.
When faced with a difficult bit of knowledge such as, "I work for a company which rips people off," it feels bad. A certain type of person when so faced with this kind of truth will spin words cleverly so that the truth goes away and turns into a nice, calming fiction. It's easy to do this! Words are brilliantly mutable. One quickly learns that with a bit of skill in word-craft and a strong enough will to push through the desired version of the false picture of reality while squashing down all others, one can happily get through life without ever having to face any unpleasant truths. -Truths like being an narcissistic asshole.
This is a choice many people make; that they will face adversity with fictions. It removes the need for real work and the pain of ever being wrong or ever having to improve the self in meaningful ways. Why should one? With lies and denial, one is already perfect!
Whereas others, those who have chosen against this method of dealing with reality, are the ones who grow strong for real. It takes work and pain to face hard and unpleasant realities head-on. But when you do, you grow powerful. You reduce the amount of energy being bled away from you via unhealthy systems, you grow skills in actually working with reality; your mind grows sharp as you hone awareness and self-criticism. Little perks show up, like the realization that you no longer lose arguments because you're no longer trying to win; rather, you're trying to get to the bottom of things.
This HP idiot is a puff of smoke. He can spin words but likely has no real strength; because in the course of sculpting his lies to himself and others, he's needed to limit his own awareness; (you can't get along with lies very well if you see all the facts, so your eyes need to be muted.) Strength after strength is cut away, so that there is no ability to react when truths come crashing in through the web of words. When the web fails, there is only paralysis. No ability to absorb and grow from the light of knowledge.
Sometimes it takes a while for a liar to decay, and sometimes you'll meet a very strong one who is near the top of his/her strength curve, but the end result is inevitable. The decay spreads and eventually liars descend into mush while those who look reality dead-on and deal with it and fight to see ever more grow in strength and ability.
That's just how it is.
-FL
The creators were definitely making things up as they went, but using managerial fit-it-together round table script planning sessions to help themselves make sense of the stuff coursing through their open channel.
In the end, though, it was just a show. Fiction.
But it was a fiction which paid homage to some primary truths about reality. . .
1. Reality isn't linear and it s far weirder than many allow, but there are rules and maths.
2. Gods are just people who know more of those rules and maths than the rest of us.
3. Karma works. If you punch people, you'll get punched. Trust and the Universe will trusting. But don't be stupid.
4. Magic and science are just tools to understand and work within creation. Basically, Instinct and Logic each have their use.
5. The soul is what matters.
The show was self-explanatory by the end. The only question we were left with was, "What was the source of the light and who put it there?"
That's a metaphor for the most basic of basic questions, and there are answers to it, but I've not met anybody who can do anything more than mouth the words, "God's Breath" or somesuch; nobody who really understands. We've got a ways to go before those rules and maths make sense.
And there's no rush.
-FL
In a moment of "away from home for two weeks" with nothing but some pets I was supposed to feed and an entire library of DVDs, I found myself working through LOST.
At first the J.J. Abrams stench ("See? Torture Works!") episodes were stupid and disgusting, worth writing the show off entirely for. But early on he went off to "greener" pastures and left the show in the hands of the emotionally/spiritually squishy Damon Lindelof and Jeffrey Lieber. I don't know what either of those two light-weights feel about torture, and it probably doesn't matter because I'm sure you could convince them either way and back again over lunch. That's the impression I got from them; Open and easily convinced and bearing few opinions strong enough to resist change, but deep down, good people with positive intentions who play the long game; they'll get there eventually and know the score. And in the end, that's what made the show strong.
They were channeling some pretty extravagant ideas, and by the time the last season rolled around, they had recognized that evil is evil and that it is a choice, not a default setting. That by itself was surprising, and a nice reward for sitting through far too many hours of that show all by myself in the middle of nowhere when I really expected Hollywood to just do its regular bullshit thing where it supports greed and empire and whatever flavor of propaganda happens to be in vogue. (Which, don't get me wrong, LOST did its share of, but without lasting effect because every other message was allowed air time as well.)
How many stories in popular media explore multi-dimensionality, time loops, the soul, science and human behavior? I mean, without bible-as-fact idiocy, without dogmatic "science" as king? Just doesn't happen. I mean, the show visited the inside of laboratories, lunatic asylums and religion and didn't pronounce any of them as correct; just facets of awareness and our striving to understand the great mystery of creation. That's what we call openness and a willingness to explore, and you just can't get anywhere in life if you don't explore with your eyes open. So yeah, LOST is going to piss off those who simply cannot work up the courage to live in a world where we simply aren't going to have all the answers, ever; who refuse to look or even consider beyond the confines of whatever artificial system of explanations they use to pretend control over their personal reality.
But the best part. . . My favorite character; Hugo. . , man, he was the one guy who trusted openly, who didn't engage in all the paranoia and violence and manipulations. They put the guy in a crazy house for it, (well, the writers did, anyway), "You have to be crazy if you trust the universe!" And I was shouting, "But he's the only one who has a clue!" But by the end, holy smokes! They made him into a minor deity because he'd figured out the secret of Karma. I really didn't think the writers were sophisticated enough to do that, but what do you know? A show that started off with Abrams torture episodes managed to shed that crap, choose between good and evil, and evolve.
How often does that happen?
But sorry, it's true, the characters never really rose above 2-dimensions for me. The creators and actors tried hard, but it was still very thin on that front. But then, most real people walk around in a state of "Flat", so it's not like they weren't being accurate.
All in all, LOST was a pleasant surprise and it planted some ideas which are vital to understanding what is going on in the world right now. Nice job!
-FL
Despite what you may have been told when you were a kid, your level of approval holds approximately zero value for anybody.
But do go on fortifying your stick in the mud. We'll leave it right where it is. Promise.
Anyway, the point here was "Fun," I believe. As much as Google's monolithic structure worries me, they do know how to let their employees out to stretch their Happy! That improves the world.
So Thumbs Up. I just spent fifteen minutes eating dots and loving it!
-FL
Because I feel someone else should be telling me I should talk on a phone in a public place I'm narcissistic?
Wow. On a couple of levels, that sentence is worrisome. With this type of creep, grammar is one of the first indications that something is wrong. Kind of a, "put food on your family" moment.
Seriously. Stop posting for the night, take a deep breath, and swallow your damned pills.
Normally I advise people to get off anti-depressants, but in some cases it keeps the rest of us safe.
-FL
Discussing these issues in detail would require a lot more than a short slashdot comment.
No worries. That's enough to get the gist.
I'm still reading the thing in scattershot, but thus far I'm having trouble disagreeing with anything I've found. But I live in a belief paradigm which is so far outside the norm and so often dismissed that his observations really resonate. But I've not worked out yet if that's just some part of me saying, "Fucking A" or if it's just plain true. As sometimes happens in philosophy, I've found Kuhn's work is the sort which can be read by an individual and then taken to verify ideas which run in exactly the opposite direction from the author's intent.
-FL
That looks like a list of bias confirmations.
Well done.
Bias against the notion that the universe contains only one person?
Confirmed.
Did your anti-psychotics roll under the couch or something? Your poise is melting. Again. (What was that you said just a moment ago about knifing people?)
This is a classic example of a twit in denial using ill-suited science lingo to squash an idea offensive to his tiny and ridiculous personal belief structure. Sorry, but everybody else on the planet knows exactly what their five senses and personal awareness are complaining about wrt cell phone idiots. I enjoyed this clip.
-FL
Don't bother.
That creep is about as narcissistic as they come. I don't honestly think it can grasp what you are talking about.
-FL
I think he's incorrect but it is a very enjoyable read and one get's to learn a lot of neat historical facts that are often overlooked or not discussed in standard pop explanations of the history of science.
What do you think he's incorrect about?
-FL
This may have been modded "Insightful". Clearly whoever posted it can "see in". But I can't make head or tails of what he is talking about and I doubt the moderators could either. What I see is word blather and then some dumb quip about competition which everybody responds to with perked up ears.
And no, competition is clearly NOT a good thing for everyone. There are a lot of people who joined the game and who now live in their cars. There are a lot of people working far too hard in honest work but who are still sliding into debt without doing anything fundamentally wrong other than living in the U.S.
Competition is only good within limits. Too much of anything applied inappropriately will kill you every time.
The way we think about moving energy around, about how to ask for and give help and resources shapes the human world. The money system in the U.S. is clearly broken beyond words. Everything crashed as badly as they did due to flat-out corruption, (which is simply an effective form of competition), but rather jail the perps, they were rewarded. They still have the same jobs as before. That's the system. That's the result of unbridled competition, because the rules of the game have been allowed to extend into government, into owning presidents and cabinets.
The money trading system is a complete farce and it seems to me that this poster is so utterly immersed in it that he can't see just how big a Douglas Adams bit of infernal humor it has become. HFT isn't a good thing. People aren't whining and complaining about something they simply don't understand, (and by extension should just shut up). It's the same old bullshit; People not making anything but rather spinning greased wheels in a giant con-job machine. No, sorry, I'm wrong. They DO make things. They make Two things; Slaves and Confusing arguments. But the end result. . .
Slaves.
And this asshole is "Insightful"?
A moderator and his mod points are soon parted.
-FL
You are if you use Open Source as a reason why Firefox is superior to Chrome, which is what it looked like in your comment above.
Ehn? No. I didn't research a point before stating it as a fact. That's shortsighted tomfoolery well worth squashing. However, thinking that Open Source has valid advantages over closed software is a non-falsifiable opinion, and it's a damned solid one with a few billion words written in its defense. It's not a black and white issue by any means, and there are provisos to be dropped all over the place, but I doubt you're capable of getting me to retract it unless you're sitting on some kind of data bombshell I've managed to never hear about or consider over the last decade. Best to stay on less shaky ground when you call names.
To be fair, Firefox has become dramatically better in recent releases. But I think the damage has already been done, at least as far as I'm concerned. Unless Chromium takes a sudden turn for the worse, I'm already a convert.
Well, it certainly sounds like you've found a rewarding browser which has solved a lot of problems that irritated you in the past. There's a lot of value in that. I'd use Chrome too if it allowed me to sculpt the GUI according to my taste, didn't crash or freeze up frequently, (literally my experience), offered speed increases in areas where I find things to actually be too slow, (which I don't), and was made by people who don't have an ulterior motive which involves me clicking on a lot of adverts. The whole Chrome experience is laced with both subtle and not-so-subtle attention channeling. It has to be. That's its purpose. I just don't like feeling manipulated.
But each to their own.
-FL
Don't be a total toolbag.
Wow. Chrome is opensource. I'm a total toolbag.
You're insane. Firefox has the slowest Javascript performance of all major browsers, and frankly, even Slashdot loads faster in Chromium than in Firefox. I have plenty of machine, too, to the point where hardware definitely is not the problem.
I've honestly not noticed any Javascript speed issues with FF. What are people expecting exactly? By the time the images have finished loading, a whole page is up and running and I can read it. What should I be unhappy about here?
And the MOST annoying part of this is that Firefox will take away a partially loaded page that I'm currently reading and replace it with an error message. That is the most abusive thing a web browser has ever done to me,
Hm. That IS irritating. I seem to recall that happening to me before. A long time ago. Maybe I just visit inherently more stable sites than you. I have a fairly low tolerance for wait times and buggy software, but FF long ago rose beyond that margin for me. I've long considered it a 'done' technology with only minor bits of polishing necessary as well as updates as new requirements come along, (like HTML video).
Chrome just fails to impress me as much as the fanfare implies that it should, and most of the complaints about FF seem to stem from the fact that it doesn't deliver a satisfying experience when it comes to having lots of adverts flashing on the page. This just seems like a weird complaint which I solved by simply making them go away. But then, I'm a bad consumer. I try to do as little of it as possible.
But as I said; I like innovation. If Chrome is doing some good things with refinement, then that's great. If it spurs FF into better shape, just as long as they don't fix what ain't broke, then that's great too. I just don't have any problems which need fixing. Everything I want to work, works.
-FL
I'm really sorry to offend, but for goodness sake. . !
If you don't use some form of adblock and flashblock then you deserve to have a slow browser.
"Gee! Advertisers are abusing my trust but I'm too daft to recognize it. Why is my browser crawling? Mozilla sucks!"
Jeez! What are you? An Apple user? That's like complaining about your "slow" hardware while at the same time hosting a stack of botnet/malware software you were too stupid to avoid installing. Yes. It's the SAME thing. -A bunch of crap code on your system trying to separate fools from their money and you let it put itself there.
When it comes to technology, I'm all for new innovation, so upon hearing how great Chrome was, I gave it a shot.
I didn't notice any speed increase at all. Hardly surprising.
What I DID notice was that Chrome was prone to freezing and that it lacked the ability for me to configure the damned GUI according to my tastes. If you don't like where buttons are placed, tough-luck buck, because there's no way to change them.
All told, it made me feel claustrophobic.
I tried Chrome TWICE. After a week, I thought I must have been hallucinating. Code produced by the greatest public collection of computer geniuses on the planet couldn't possibly be that lame; it must be me. So I gave it my all. There was one feature I liked; one of their add-ons was noticeably more refined than the Firefox version, but that's third party stuff and has no reflection on Mozilla. But again, the browser froze and died on the third page I tried accessing, (I was trying to read a review over on Gamespot a friend insisted I read. This was a good test for both browsers because I never visit that site so neither FF or Chrome had any of Gamespot's code heavy bullshit in either of their caches). Chrome choked and froze, and FF cut through it with no problem. That by itself is enough to end this debate, but it was the lack of control over the Chrome GUI which I found most annoying; it made me feel like an Apple user. And just to reiterate; when you use Flash and Ad blocking, there's zero speed difference between the two browsers. None that I could notice, anyway.
The one bit of kudos I'll offer Chrome is that the options menu wasn't Appled down to nothing, but the fact that I even need to mention this is retarded. It's like saying, "Oh, you have both arms! Good for you!" I could still do most of what FF offers, but the buggy execution and the total lack of GUI control said to me, "Beta. Come back when you're done".
And now that I think of it. . .
Evil or not, Google is a profit-motivated organization, and its primary business is not giving you a great browser. It's primary business is delivering advertising to you. The two things might run a parallel course past many points, but don't ever forget that Google is not your friend; when all is said and done, you are the john and money is changing hands. An open source browser is the only truly trustworthy browser out there. FF doesn't ever feel like it's trying to bullshit me. (It's real love!)
I'd rather have buggy open-source software than have perfect software which I can't see through. And the fact that FF gives me basically perfect performance is a very big deal. It took a long time and a lot of work to get Mozilla's browser this good. Why the hell would I want to jump to some ad-company's free calculator? The thing doesn't even work properly.
-FL
Ah. Now doesn't that feel better?
It all makes such sense when you only look at the simple flow chart and leave out the real world.
If you find that you must knee-jerk in response to the word "Conspiracy" then try substituting this word instead: "Corruption".
Anybody who doesn't that propaganda and population control exist is either ignorant, a coward or both. It's that simple, I'm afraid.
-FL
First they came for the pedophilia collectors. . .
But seriously, you've touched on a really valid question.
I don't know about the guy in question, but psychopaths cannot be rehabilitated, and so to release them back into the wild is a bad idea. The problem is that the system itself is infested with psychopaths in suits and they're often the ones at the switch. Only the lowest level of psychopaths tend to be incarcerated, while many regular humans are simply those driven to prison via the mechanisms of economic and class warfare. I'd not feel confident at ALL allowing the state to simply lock people up and throw away the key because we know that power will be abused. We simply know it. -I don't trust the authorities because the authorities have proven themselves time and again to be unworthy of public trust. I'd like it to be otherwise; we all would I think, but it's simply not possible today, (not without a dose of permanent brain damage, that is!)
Also, given your points about definitions, this recent item gives me pause. (Shrinks broadening the definition of what it means to be crazy).
Hm. It just struck me how interesting it is that cigar smoking should be as illegal as it is today.
-FL
Sure, the players involved all think it's real, but the whole game is nothing more than a means of squeezing an extra bit of stress reaction from the population.
TV and general media opiate is such a fantastically successful means of keeping people asleep that it will not go away until it is rendered redundant by guns, barbed wire and processing plants. The copyright thing is a means of turning everybody into a criminal, and thus gives a valid excuse to introduce those guns, barbed wire and processing plants. -Because milking the human race for anxiety is all fine and nice for the aliens, but greed and stupidity dictate the necessity for a huge whollop of energy which can only be extracted through physical trauma on a planetary scale. A couple of senseless wars here and there just don't cut it.
Have a nice day.
-FL