There is clearly some major pressure to build a presentable story to the public if they're floating ideas like these ones. If the PR is successful, Official Culture will soon include passenger jets which will break up from 'excessive' flying.
A significant air blast from one of the increasingly frequent falling rocks from outer space could easily account for this disaster, and could explain some of the more peculiar details.
Within a few days of the crash the first piece of evidence that something other than high technology and weather destroyed AF 447 came in.
A Spanish pilot with Air Comet (which flies from South and Central American countries to Madrid) flying the Lima to Madrid route reported a bright descending light in the region of AF 447's last position:
"Suddenly we saw in the distance a bright intense flash of white light that fell straight down and disappeared in six seconds.
At the time of the sighting, (the copilot and a passenger who was in the front kitchen area of the airplane also saw it), the Air Comet aircraft was located at seven degrees north of the equator and at the 49th meridian West. The estimated location for the A-330-203 until the moment of its disappearance is at the equator and around the 30th meridian West."
It seems reasonable to suggest that an aircraft would not produce a bright and intense white light for six seconds as it fell from the sky. The many dozens of meteorite and fireball sightings over the past few years however are often seen as bright white flashes of descending light.
--Quoted from this article which digs into the idea of this event being another case of "Is it just me ore do there seem to be a lot more ROCKS FROM SPACE falling around our ears lately?".
Why is it that Iran is in the news ALL the time? --And always with a negative spin?
Hmmmmmmmm?
Are we going to fall for this again?
How stupid are we?
I'm betting that the answer is: "Stupid Enough."
So get your flak jackets on; we're going to war! (--And we've not even finished fighting the first. . , ugh! --I can't even remember how many idiotic and morally bankrupt engagements we're still neck-deep in.)
So ask yourself. . . How stupid are you feeling today?
People who are watching adverts on the internet are more likely to buy the products you tell them to buy because they're not smart or willful enough to sculpt their own environment and thus are more easily duped into believing. . .
A) That it is their moral obligation to allow advertisers access to their brains. B) That it's too much effort to figure out how to avoid seeing adverts on the web.
A rube in hand is worth a dozen smart and willful guys in the bush.
Wouldn't such mandatory psychopathy testing end up catching lots of innocent people, too? Psychology/psychiatry is not an exact science.
Hard to say without studying the issue properly. In some cases, there are very clear structural differences in the brain, in others a simple test which show which portions of the brain light up with electrical activity when viewing images of burn victims, etc., shows differences between 'real' people and problem cases.
I'd certainly be wary of any state-funded test which came up today. There's just too much rot already in place for such a thing to be trustworthy. But I don't doubt that it could be done. Brain science isn't nearly as backwater as many think it is.
The universe is a big scary place which must be controlled! Resources must be hoarded and never shared because then Bad Things Will Happen. Fear rules the day, and nothing, no reasoning, not even having this tossed onto your plate will be able to confound that hard wiring in your mind. (Though it is useful to recognize for others so that they can understand the how and why behind freaky conservatives).
It takes work to achieve anything of any value. But once that value has been birthed into the world, why must it be paid for over and over (and over) again? "Oh, but how will the content provider be paid?" The content creator will be frickin' paid if the content is worth a damn. Even if it is 'pirated', the provider of the information will be compensated, more and more often through non-linear means. But it takes a level of insight and fearlessness to see that. Those who create insane, top-down economies like the one which is presently crashing all around our ears, want to criminalize sharing. It is not a so-called "rationalization," as the poster put it, to be offended by such a thing. This is why the Pirate Party describes itself as a political movement, and why they framed their arguments as they did.
The system MUST be crashed for sanity to reign.
And that has some people very, very scared. You'd better learn how to share pronto or you're going to be left out in the cold. Who is going to share with you when your dollars mean nothing? Quick! Better head-trip your kids with guilt and religion so they don't stop feeding you. Only Fear and Control will save you!
The closer you are to an ocean it seems, the less conservative the population. Newfoundland, for instance, is sexually mature and very relaxed and open. The prairies edge closer to the "burning gays in your front yard" end of the scale.
Interestingly, you might do better in the middle of the country. The more tightly wound people are, the more likely they are to explode and jump into odd experiments with complete strangers willy nilly. Doesn't sound very nice, though, but that's just a personal opinion.
Of course, that's a very wide brush I'm painting with. But I just had this conversation last night, so it was on my mind when I read your question just now.
Hits all the same neural pathways and you don't have to risk life or limb.
TV has killed us. This is not a funny story. It's a pathetic foot note.
Think: If everybody went on strike for one week, clear across the country, the government would beg us to go back to work. They'd give us anything. It works in France. The government coffers won't last long without regular tax uptake.
Let's all strike. Eat out of cans for ten days. Block the streets. No violence. Just a total shutdown. Let the Rich people's toilets stop flushing and see how long it takes to close Guantanamo.
Of course, it won't happen if you own and watch a TV. (Though it'd be funny trying to see Fox spin the whole thing like the desperate stuffed shirts they are.)
So I can be part of the feel-good advertising which taps into tribal/herd-programming and thus live in a warm fuzzy bubble of self-congratulatory somethingorother until MS decides that my system is old and busted and in need of an upgrade.
Ahhhh.
So fuzzy. So warm.
I wonder if there will be Bob Dylan music this time?
If that's true, then all I have to say is. . . Well, actually, I can only blink in stunned silence. (And type here on slashdot, natch.)
Basically, if I understand it correctly, the media claim is that in a passenger jet plane, one of the few devices in this day and age which are safety tested and numbered down to each individual pop rivet, that when it comes to the plumbing, standards and oversight are thrown, (literally) overboard so that hatches can accidentally 'blow' on a fairly regular basis and it's not seen as a particularly big deal.
Even with as little faith as I have in humanity, this I cannot buy. Human error is obviously at fault, but I'm willing to bet that it lies at the feet of the public relations and press corps and not at the feet of air craft engineers.
Can we just hang all the politicians and get on with building our wind/solar/geothermal powered wonderland already?
I'm tired of all the starving, bombing, genocide and general stupidity.
No? Not going to happen? That whole, "So long as Advertising works, Democracy cannot" maxim?
Oh. Great.
Stupid, Stupid Monkey Creatures. You deserve every last iota of misery being dished out because you are too stupid to hang your politicians and install mandatory psychopathy testing. The last U.S. Administration wouldn't have passed. And the current one wouldn't either. Guantanamo is still open and your downloads will land you in prison one day soon.
The dumber and more embarrassing the various bits of conspiracy nonsense in evidence, the bigger and more remarkable the secret being covered up by the dissemination of said ridiculous bits of conspiracy nonsense. . .
The best way to make people look the other way is to make them cringe.
Their trouble is that they didn't give this job to the pure propagandists, (you know, guys like Westwood and. . , well Hollywood).
Heck, I'd only be half surprised if this wasn't a failure-by-design to make the military look useless and all "Beatle Bailey" in the eyes of the public while the real recruitment officers, (the News, for instance), do the dirty work.
Of course, it could also simply be the result of endless wishful thinking; you know. . . Imperial Rot and Decay before the Mongol Hoards come to raze the Empire.
I know! --It's beyond cartoonish. It's beyond silly. But people actually eat this stuff up.
"Mission Accomplished!" --Bush in flight gear. It's SO dumb, but so are the people it's being aimed at, so yes, it will work.
Iranian civilians will be piled up in smoldering mountains of twisted limbs thanks to the 19 year-olds quivering with patriotic pride who will be dropping American bombs on them.
This stupid shit works for the same reason that people's mouths fill with gobs of Pavlovian saliva when they see a big yellow 'M'.
The Master Model: Ego-maniacal evil super-geek genius builds a kind of cool but scarily 'wrong' empire with no moral center, which woos the sheeple into obedience and generally locks down the whole of creation, apparently because lots of people being free and happy is a bad thing. I'm sure there's at least one world-spanning all-mighty software company out there which follows this model, but it is better not to utter its name aloud. . .
As for the Cyberman Model. . . A design ethic which envisions Smooth, Sleek, Uniform technology with the mission-statement of dumbing down and alleviating humanity of having to think about anything difficult through the use of simple but elegant ear pods? Whoever can pull off con jobs of that size and scope must also be an evil genius super-geek, though probably one who is somewhat easier to sympathize with. After all, he just wants to remove suffering and complexity from the human equation.
Open Source is very Doctor Who. Cobbled together from shared resources by a rag-tag team of unpaid geniuses who seem to derive altogether too much enjoyment from life while spreading the fruits of their labors far and wide.
There is a VAST difference between commuting and driving/cruising/racing.
Granted. I prefer to cycle. You can move with much grater freedom and nobody but you is in any danger. But I wouldn't waste my time with a biking simulation. Flight sims are even worse; you'd think that they would be interesting because so few people ever get to fly, but once you're 'up' there, you realize it's also incredibly boring. Unless you have missiles. And then it's still boring, but now you have to go line up dots on your screen while trying to pilot a damned air craft. Still, I at least understand flight sims.
Though, I suppose if you feel pent up in a car, driving to and from work every day, you might wish for some kind of reckless release. Maybe driving games are for those people, which I suppose is a lot of people. But my response was simply to stop going to work and find something where I didn't have to drive a car. Much more satisfying.
But it is true. Some people love to drive. Fair enough. Just because I don't get it doesn't invalidate it.
The video on the story page looked really neat. The Sun moving across a big digital world? How cool!
I thought, "Wow! Is this some sort of interactive game set in a futuristic city? Oh, well, it's not futuristic. Okay. Whatever. It still looks really fantastic. That sun moving across the sky looks wonderful. Er. . , but this video is beginning to look like it's all some dippy driving game. No. It can't be. All this work for a dippy driving game?"
And then I realized, "Yes, actually! --This whole giant coding and hardware effort IS all because people want to pretend to drive. Driving; one of THE most boring activities available in the wide library of Human Experiences. I HATE driving. Why the hell would I want to simulate an experience I already find tiresome and annoying? Moving around while sitting on my ass? Ugh. Unless I'm going to end up somewhere interesting, then I'd rather just avoid the whole thing. And in these games is just driving in circles."
Oh well. Each to their own, I know, but this seems to be my week of childishly judging activities which other people are engrossed by. I apologize.
Quarantine procedures are also, at times, completely justified. Not saying they are in this case, but in some cases they are. When you become a hazard to others, we (the people) have the right to remove you until you no longer are a hazard. This isn't tyranny, this is the social contract in its purest form.
Yes, I'd agree with that. It's a very rational position to take.
My problem is that this rational argument is being used to get away with calling people, "cheaters" who happened to 'defeat' a (probably secret) infrared camera system at an airport; people who did so almost certainly without any kind of nefarious intentions, simply because they happened to be taking over the counter cold remedies because they didn't want to feel like crap when they landed. . , that smacks to me of fear-mongering by whoever wrote the article when perhaps the article should have been about how the government is watching people with sneak-o-vision cameras while trying to guilt us into submission through the use of fear-mongering propaganda articles like the one in evidence here. The fact that it happened to be about this specific virus is just a nice coincidence for the P.R. department as I would bet that the camera system was put in place long before this whole Swine Flu thing started getting any media traction.
Still, I was wrong to come down hard on you, and I apologize for that, but seriously, this is either a ploy, or it is the result of a journalists who has been so well programmed that he doesn't even realize he's become part of the problem.
Every time the fascist controls are screwed in a notch tighter, the action will be accompanied by a very reasonable explanation. Any seasoned debater will tell you that 'logic' is a very twisty thing indeed which can be used to justify and defend any damned fool position you choose to take --and that winning a debate has far more to do with charisma, wit and processor speed than it does with actually being correct.
That is what is happening here -in spades-, and you, mister, it is YOUR job to not get hoodwinked. You fail. The government is smarter than you.
While we dream away into the digital haze, our greed-based economy drives hell-bent toward entropy.
What did we think would happen?
Rolling blackouts and hospitals dumping patients, levees bursting, corruption, corruption, corruption. . . Guantanamo is still in business and the populace is apparently cool with that. Corporate America in action. But do we purge the nation of the scum? Nope. Hell, most people can't even see who the scum is, so hopped up on religion and propaganda and so dumbed down on toxic food and poisons in the water and the air and the EM spectrum. . . They blame the left or the right, the slaves blame the slaves when they should be tarring and feathering the psychotic lunatics who are actually pulling the switches, robbing the public blind. But nobody can seem to reach consensus because there are enough stupid slaves still believing the lies. And so we play our video games and drive on third world roads and generally pretend we're not in a state of decay. Marvelous.
Me, though. . . I'm a lot more pissed off than I need to be. Fed up on other people's self-destructive stupidity. I have trouble accepting that kids need to burn themselves in order to learn. I have trouble distancing myself emotionally from the giant mess all the muggle/hobbits have made of the world.
I cannot count the number of times I've been using somebody's home or office computer for a few minutes only to stop whatever I was doing to ask if I could fix their screen properties so that the bloody thing would stop flickering at 10 htz or whatever the slowest out of the box refresh rate happened to be when their machine was first installed a decade earlier.
Actually, I quite enjoy it now. --I say, "Okay, seriously. You're going to love this! --Check it out. .."
Then I set the screen to its highest available frequency and the image turns rock-steady. The owner/user, (depending on how long they've been sitting in front of the offending CRT perhaps?), will either shrug and say, "Yeah, that looks better, I guess." Or they will drop their jaw and say, "Oh my god! It could have always been like that?!"
I KNOW most of you have run into this exact same scenario at least once before. If that isn't a huge design flaw, then I don't know what is. It only seems to have been solved by the advent of flat-screen technology.
Slashdot Mirror
Okay. That's just silly.
There is clearly some major pressure to build a presentable story to the public if they're floating ideas like these ones. If the PR is successful, Official Culture will soon include passenger jets which will break up from 'excessive' flying.
A significant air blast from one of the increasingly frequent falling rocks from outer space could easily account for this disaster, and could explain some of the more peculiar details.
--Quoted from this article which digs into the idea of this event being another case of "Is it just me ore do there seem to be a lot more ROCKS FROM SPACE falling around our ears lately?".
-FL
Why is it that Iran is in the news ALL the time? --And always with a negative spin?
Hmmmmmmmm?
Are we going to fall for this again?
How stupid are we?
I'm betting that the answer is: "Stupid Enough."
So get your flak jackets on; we're going to war! (--And we've not even finished fighting the first. . , ugh! --I can't even remember how many idiotic and morally bankrupt engagements we're still neck-deep in.)
So ask yourself. . . How stupid are you feeling today?
-FL
Think of it this way also. . .
People who are watching adverts on the internet are more likely to buy the products you tell them to buy because they're not smart or willful enough to sculpt their own environment and thus are more easily duped into believing. . .
A) That it is their moral obligation to allow advertisers access to their brains.
B) That it's too much effort to figure out how to avoid seeing adverts on the web.
A rube in hand is worth a dozen smart and willful guys in the bush.
Hallelujah.
-FL
Wouldn't such mandatory psychopathy testing end up catching lots of innocent people, too? Psychology/psychiatry is not an exact science.
Hard to say without studying the issue properly. In some cases, there are very clear structural differences in the brain, in others a simple test which show which portions of the brain light up with electrical activity when viewing images of burn victims, etc., shows differences between 'real' people and problem cases.
I'd certainly be wary of any state-funded test which came up today. There's just too much rot already in place for such a thing to be trustworthy. But I don't doubt that it could be done. Brain science isn't nearly as backwater as many think it is.
-FL
You were simply never breast fed as a child.
The universe is a big scary place which must be controlled! Resources must be hoarded and never shared because then Bad Things Will Happen. Fear rules the day, and nothing, no reasoning, not even having this tossed onto your plate will be able to confound that hard wiring in your mind. (Though it is useful to recognize for others so that they can understand the how and why behind freaky conservatives).
It takes work to achieve anything of any value. But once that value has been birthed into the world, why must it be paid for over and over (and over) again? "Oh, but how will the content provider be paid?" The content creator will be frickin' paid if the content is worth a damn. Even if it is 'pirated', the provider of the information will be compensated, more and more often through non-linear means. But it takes a level of insight and fearlessness to see that. Those who create insane, top-down economies like the one which is presently crashing all around our ears, want to criminalize sharing. It is not a so-called "rationalization," as the poster put it, to be offended by such a thing. This is why the Pirate Party describes itself as a political movement, and why they framed their arguments as they did.
The system MUST be crashed for sanity to reign.
And that has some people very, very scared. You'd better learn how to share pronto or you're going to be left out in the cold. Who is going to share with you when your dollars mean nothing? Quick! Better head-trip your kids with guilt and religion so they don't stop feeding you. Only Fear and Control will save you!
Pathetic.
-FL
The closer you are to an ocean it seems, the less conservative the population. Newfoundland, for instance, is sexually mature and very relaxed and open. The prairies edge closer to the "burning gays in your front yard" end of the scale.
Interestingly, you might do better in the middle of the country. The more tightly wound people are, the more likely they are to explode and jump into odd experiments with complete strangers willy nilly. Doesn't sound very nice, though, but that's just a personal opinion.
Of course, that's a very wide brush I'm painting with. But I just had this conversation last night, so it was on my mind when I read your question just now.
-FL
We can agree on two things here.
You're sick and tired.
-FL
Metaphor in action.
"And all the king's horses and all the king's men. . ."
-FL
Hits all the same neural pathways and you don't have to risk life or limb.
TV has killed us. This is not a funny story. It's a pathetic foot note.
Think: If everybody went on strike for one week, clear across the country, the government would beg us to go back to work. They'd give us anything. It works in France. The government coffers won't last long without regular tax uptake.
Let's all strike. Eat out of cans for ten days. Block the streets. No violence. Just a total shutdown. Let the Rich people's toilets stop flushing and see how long it takes to close Guantanamo.
Of course, it won't happen if you own and watch a TV. (Though it'd be funny trying to see Fox spin the whole thing like the desperate stuffed shirts they are.)
-FL
So I can be part of the feel-good advertising which taps into tribal/herd-programming and thus live in a warm fuzzy bubble of self-congratulatory somethingorother until MS decides that my system is old and busted and in need of an upgrade.
Ahhhh.
So fuzzy. So warm.
I wonder if there will be Bob Dylan music this time?
-FL
Where on earth did you read that?
If that's true, then all I have to say is. . . Well, actually, I can only blink in stunned silence. (And type here on slashdot, natch.)
Basically, if I understand it correctly, the media claim is that in a passenger jet plane, one of the few devices in this day and age which are safety tested and numbered down to each individual pop rivet, that when it comes to the plumbing, standards and oversight are thrown, (literally) overboard so that hatches can accidentally 'blow' on a fairly regular basis and it's not seen as a particularly big deal.
Even with as little faith as I have in humanity, this I cannot buy. Human error is obviously at fault, but I'm willing to bet that it lies at the feet of the public relations and press corps and not at the feet of air craft engineers.
-FL
Can we just hang all the politicians and get on with building our wind/solar/geothermal powered wonderland already?
I'm tired of all the starving, bombing, genocide and general stupidity.
No? Not going to happen? That whole, "So long as Advertising works, Democracy cannot" maxim?
Oh. Great.
Stupid, Stupid Monkey Creatures. You deserve every last iota of misery being dished out because you are too stupid to hang your politicians and install mandatory psychopathy testing. The last U.S. Administration wouldn't have passed. And the current one wouldn't either. Guantanamo is still open and your downloads will land you in prison one day soon.
And the oil still flows.
-FL
Airlines don't dump toilet waste.
This was something else.
-FL
The dumber and more embarrassing the various bits of conspiracy nonsense in evidence, the bigger and more remarkable the secret being covered up by the dissemination of said ridiculous bits of conspiracy nonsense. . .
The best way to make people look the other way is to make them cringe.
Psyche 1 oh 1.
-FL
Ha ha ha ha!
Their trouble is that they didn't give this job to the pure propagandists, (you know, guys like Westwood and. . , well Hollywood).
Heck, I'd only be half surprised if this wasn't a failure-by-design to make the military look useless and all "Beatle Bailey" in the eyes of the public while the real recruitment officers, (the News, for instance), do the dirty work.
Of course, it could also simply be the result of endless wishful thinking; you know. . . Imperial Rot and Decay before the Mongol Hoards come to raze the Empire.
-FL
I know! --It's beyond cartoonish. It's beyond silly. But people actually eat this stuff up.
"Mission Accomplished!" --Bush in flight gear. It's SO dumb, but so are the people it's being aimed at, so yes, it will work.
Iranian civilians will be piled up in smoldering mountains of twisted limbs thanks to the 19 year-olds quivering with patriotic pride who will be dropping American bombs on them.
This stupid shit works for the same reason that people's mouths fill with gobs of Pavlovian saliva when they see a big yellow 'M'.
-FL
The Master Model: Ego-maniacal evil super-geek genius builds a kind of cool but scarily 'wrong' empire with no moral center, which woos the sheeple into obedience and generally locks down the whole of creation, apparently because lots of people being free and happy is a bad thing. I'm sure there's at least one world-spanning all-mighty software company out there which follows this model, but it is better not to utter its name aloud. . .
As for the Cyberman Model. . . A design ethic which envisions Smooth, Sleek, Uniform technology with the mission-statement of dumbing down and alleviating humanity of having to think about anything difficult through the use of simple but elegant ear pods? Whoever can pull off con jobs of that size and scope must also be an evil genius super-geek, though probably one who is somewhat easier to sympathize with. After all, he just wants to remove suffering and complexity from the human equation.
Open Source is very Doctor Who. Cobbled together from shared resources by a rag-tag team of unpaid geniuses who seem to derive altogether too much enjoyment from life while spreading the fruits of their labors far and wide.
The Doctor is Dead, Long Live the Doctor!
-FL
There is a VAST difference between commuting and driving/cruising/racing.
Granted. I prefer to cycle. You can move with much grater freedom and nobody but you is in any danger. But I wouldn't waste my time with a biking simulation. Flight sims are even worse; you'd think that they would be interesting because so few people ever get to fly, but once you're 'up' there, you realize it's also incredibly boring. Unless you have missiles. And then it's still boring, but now you have to go line up dots on your screen while trying to pilot a damned air craft. Still, I at least understand flight sims.
Though, I suppose if you feel pent up in a car, driving to and from work every day, you might wish for some kind of reckless release. Maybe driving games are for those people, which I suppose is a lot of people. But my response was simply to stop going to work and find something where I didn't have to drive a car. Much more satisfying.
But it is true. Some people love to drive. Fair enough. Just because I don't get it doesn't invalidate it.
-FL
The video on the story page looked really neat. The Sun moving across a big digital world? How cool!
I thought, "Wow! Is this some sort of interactive game set in a futuristic city? Oh, well, it's not futuristic. Okay. Whatever. It still looks really fantastic. That sun moving across the sky looks wonderful. Er. . , but this video is beginning to look like it's all some dippy driving game. No. It can't be. All this work for a dippy driving game?"
And then I realized, "Yes, actually! --This whole giant coding and hardware effort IS all because people want to pretend to drive. Driving; one of THE most boring activities available in the wide library of Human Experiences. I HATE driving. Why the hell would I want to simulate an experience I already find tiresome and annoying? Moving around while sitting on my ass? Ugh. Unless I'm going to end up somewhere interesting, then I'd rather just avoid the whole thing. And in these games is just driving in circles."
Oh well. Each to their own, I know, but this seems to be my week of childishly judging activities which other people are engrossed by. I apologize.
-FL
Quarantine procedures are also, at times, completely justified. Not saying they are in this case, but in some cases they are. When you become a hazard to others, we (the people) have the right to remove you until you no longer are a hazard. This isn't tyranny, this is the social contract in its purest form.
Yes, I'd agree with that. It's a very rational position to take.
My problem is that this rational argument is being used to get away with calling people, "cheaters" who happened to 'defeat' a (probably secret) infrared camera system at an airport; people who did so almost certainly without any kind of nefarious intentions, simply because they happened to be taking over the counter cold remedies because they didn't want to feel like crap when they landed. . , that smacks to me of fear-mongering by whoever wrote the article when perhaps the article should have been about how the government is watching people with sneak-o-vision cameras while trying to guilt us into submission through the use of fear-mongering propaganda articles like the one in evidence here. The fact that it happened to be about this specific virus is just a nice coincidence for the P.R. department as I would bet that the camera system was put in place long before this whole Swine Flu thing started getting any media traction.
Still, I was wrong to come down hard on you, and I apologize for that, but seriously, this is either a ploy, or it is the result of a journalists who has been so well programmed that he doesn't even realize he's become part of the problem.
-FL
Every time the fascist controls are screwed in a notch tighter, the action will be accompanied by a very reasonable explanation. Any seasoned debater will tell you that 'logic' is a very twisty thing indeed which can be used to justify and defend any damned fool position you choose to take --and that winning a debate has far more to do with charisma, wit and processor speed than it does with actually being correct.
That is what is happening here -in spades-, and you, mister, it is YOUR job to not get hoodwinked. You fail. The government is smarter than you.
-FL
While we dream away into the digital haze, our greed-based economy drives hell-bent toward entropy.
What did we think would happen?
Rolling blackouts and hospitals dumping patients, levees bursting, corruption, corruption, corruption. . . Guantanamo is still in business and the populace is apparently cool with that. Corporate America in action. But do we purge the nation of the scum? Nope. Hell, most people can't even see who the scum is, so hopped up on religion and propaganda and so dumbed down on toxic food and poisons in the water and the air and the EM spectrum. . . They blame the left or the right, the slaves blame the slaves when they should be tarring and feathering the psychotic lunatics who are actually pulling the switches, robbing the public blind. But nobody can seem to reach consensus because there are enough stupid slaves still believing the lies. And so we play our video games and drive on third world roads and generally pretend we're not in a state of decay. Marvelous.
Me, though. . . I'm a lot more pissed off than I need to be. Fed up on other people's self-destructive stupidity. I have trouble accepting that kids need to burn themselves in order to learn. I have trouble distancing myself emotionally from the giant mess all the muggle/hobbits have made of the world.
-FL
I cannot count the number of times I've been using somebody's home or office computer for a few minutes only to stop whatever I was doing to ask if I could fix their screen properties so that the bloody thing would stop flickering at 10 htz or whatever the slowest out of the box refresh rate happened to be when their machine was first installed a decade earlier.
Actually, I quite enjoy it now. --I say, "Okay, seriously. You're going to love this! --Check it out. . ."
Then I set the screen to its highest available frequency and the image turns rock-steady. The owner/user, (depending on how long they've been sitting in front of the offending CRT perhaps?), will either shrug and say, "Yeah, that looks better, I guess." Or they will drop their jaw and say, "Oh my god! It could have always been like that?!"
I KNOW most of you have run into this exact same scenario at least once before. If that isn't a huge design flaw, then I don't know what is. It only seems to have been solved by the advent of flat-screen technology.
-FL
Sheesh, you may want to reconsider your search terms when doing video/image searches.
Hush now. Back to sleep. Everything is fine.
-FL
Trolled into dust, oh my!
There are two kinds of moderator. Those who are brave enough to be honest with themselves and those who are not.
And I guess there is a third. The Bumpkin.
-FL