The article does sound rather garish, but considering systems within systems, parallel to systems, and funky classifications invented by paranoid department heads and Dick Cheney coming up with his own stamps with his own classifications of, "Shhh. Don't Tell Anyone" I find it hard to believe that things are nearly so well-ordered as you portray.
Do you have any odd memory gaps or personality quirks which you didn't have before you entered the service? Even if there has been zero improvement over the mind control systems used in the Seventies, then chances are you wouldn't even suspect a violation.
After all. . , is posting in widely read public forums to boast about credentials an encouraged activity for a HUMINT Collector?
You're fishy as hell regardless of what your real story happens to be, and if you are what you say you are, then you're probably a lot further gone than you realize. You have my sincere condolences if that's the case.
I have a finite amount of time to go on these kinds of investigations -- and that would be the case under any political system. There are more things to investigate than there is time for. I have already spent enough time looking at religions and political whatnots, so I don't go off on random goose chases.
I was going to leave it here, but two thoughts occurred to me. . .
1. I am the kind of person who finds exploration into such areas fun, and so I do it. I think 'fun' determines much how we spend our finite energies, but in becoming fun, I did wrestle with the following question. . .
2. Being finite, it only makes sense that one should spend one's energies in efforts toward ends which are not based on false premises. One must learn the real game rules before attempting to succeed in life. Running toward the wrong goal posts makes no sense to me. That being said, one's individual mission profile is best achieved by following one's bliss, so to speak. Trust in 'fun'. Not all of us are here to plumb the depths of reality. Some of us are here simply to work on social skills, or various modes of expression, etc. Every soul has a different goal in a given life time, and in some cases, ignorance of certain details is a requirement for full engagement on a given path. Our higher selves, I have found, try in earnest to trick us into certain courses of experience which we might otherwise avoid if full knowledge were available of what we were setting out towards. Some of the most valuable lessons which lead to significant soul growth are by necessity both difficult and painful. Truth can hurt.
While reading the first conversation, I felt a chill of alarm, thinking, "Oh boy! If this is a computer, it's a crafty devil! I'd need to ask some clever questions to figure out if this is an AI. I hope five minutes is enough! How the heck did this technology advance so far without anybody reporting it?"
Then while reading the second conversation, I thought, "Oh. False alarm. Eliza on my old Apple II was this lame."
That's a cool set of observations. --I remember an interview with a girl who had participated as one of the testers in a Turing experiment/demonstartion, and she was such a simple creature herself that she was quite convinced that one of the given AIs was human. "We talked about lots of things. Like our favorite colors and stuff."
I strongly suspect that if the experiments were double-blinded that all of the AI's would pass with flying colors. But then, one of my general theories of reality is that a good portion of the humans walking around are just complex, albeit naturally-formed biological AI's themselves. It would explain numerous of the conversations I've had on-line. Though they are so complex that it's actually quite hard to tell which is 'real' and which isn't
Psychopaths are interesting in that they are missing parts of the human 'program' which the rest of us take for granted, but they are quite able to fool people into thinking that they do have emotions and 'real' reactions. I've heard that Psychopaths are just faulty versions of the basic reaction-machine human which doesn't have all the parts, but which isn't compelled to destroy things and create chaos.
Yet millions of people every day manage to carry on complex tasks that require intelligent thinking. Do you wear a tinfoil hat to keep the waves out?
No, I just stay away from garbage interference, toxins and similar. If tin foil worked, I'd probably use that as well because I'm not threatened by the opinions of others. Intelligent thinking is absolutely affected, but one of the more important things affected is one's ability to sense energy and emotions in others. Perceptive dimensions which most are blind to.
How do I know that you aren't a false signal?
You'd have to take the time to collect numerous streams of information and cross reference to see what cancels out. You're smart; do the work. Another, faster method is to listen to your instincts; the voice of your higher self which knows what's what, and which is in contact right now with my higher self. You have to know how to cut through the static to do that, however, and that takes practice.
You're of the type that give conspiracy theories a bad name.
You don't know that as per your first question, so that's just confusion and fear talking. How you fix that is your problem.
If your life hung in the balance, then yes, you'd like that rigid set of rules. Television dramatizes court because it sells. It sells because courts are part of people's lives. No grand conspiracy needed
It wouldn't be an effective ploy if it weren't paired with a plausible 'simple solution' to keep the muggles feeling comfortable. The problem is that the end result remains true. Judge the tree by the fruit it bears.
That's life. If it were as simple as running out to the backyard, people would do it. If you want to send people out on a wild good chase involving a lot of travel and time, then people will be skeptical, as well they should be. People make up shit all the time, either intentionally or just through naiveté and perception bias. You could spend your whole life investigating bullshit.
Bullshit. "I don't have time to read/learn/experience." Excuses. What could be more important than exploring and understanding the nature of the reality you live in? Make time. It's not that hard. Keep in mind that these systems of social control come with a variety of conveniently available built-in excuses for people to use in order to protect the system.
If you're trying to get some message out to cause an action (which may ultimately benefit you), then it also becomes YOUR problem if the message isn't accepted.
Ha ha. Oh, poor you. Let me soften things; --Because, actually, I do lose in a sense; in that we are all one, that every piece which goes dark is a loss to the whole. But at this layer of reality we exist as separate beings, so at the moment, my only responsibility is to be the best version of myself; to care for my own soul and any which ask for help. Your responsibility is to grow and take care of your soul. If you want to disintegrate, that's your choice and that's how it has to be and I simply can't be bothered to waste energy on cowards and lost causes. I'm not obligated to do your work for you. In fact, it would be a violation.
Or, alternatively, there is no grand conspiracy that orchestrates are lives in some sinister symphony. Do you really think when television was invented it was by "Elitists" to control the masses, using a strobe effect? Do you really think wireless cell phones were invented to replace television for mind control?
Sorry. All the evidence I have explored, (in many different forms), doesn't point to a benign state of affairs. Not at all! --And yes, I do absolutely believe that television was invented for the reasons stated, as were the currents running through our power distribution system chosen. --There is a great deal of knowledge out there which is not contested, but simply buried. I have accessed information you have clearly not sought out, and so you are speculating with extremely limited reso
Uh. . . So it has a.2% chance of missing the Earth, but if it doesn't miss, then it is known for certain exactly when and where it will strike. And that place just happens to be a geo-political hot zone?
So what is that exactly? Stupid math? Stupid reporting? Or. . ?
If I wanted to nuke somebody but not get blamed for it. . . Or if I wanted people to think that I'd nuked you and was trying to cover my tracks. Or if I wanted to muddy the waters with incomplete ideas and raise the state of confusion and alarm another notch closer to the breaking point. . .
Confusion is the method; nobody gets any straight answers, attention is diffused so no positive steps can be taken --but the stress-level is successfully raised and the dark deed accomplished.
But there is a solution.
Enough attention and postulation subverts dark plans because a correct postulation gives predictive power and respect to the postulator, and this is a danger. --A couple of correct postulations in a row, and then people have a reason to act pre-emptively. And since it's always the same villain responsible, they can't have that. Conversely, an incorrect postulation means that the speaker loses respect and personal confidence and power. And that's a good thing from the perspective of a control freak.
But. . . What they don't get is that when the ego is detached from the process, there is no diminishing of confidence or personal power. Logical predictions based on observations of the possible leads to a kind of dis-arming of the event. Stay alert; if you know and see the danger, if you look it in the eyes and experience the result in-vitro as it were, the chances are much reduced of an actual event taking place. That's been my experience in events large and small. Plan for the worst and the worst never happens. Funny, that. Knowledge protects, eh?
--You know. Where script kiddies use dumb hacks to effectively ruin the experience for everyone. Where you hear, "But if you want to win, you ALSO have to cheat!"
This proves it. America has the mentality of a 12 year-old video game brat.
You don't see this shit to the same crazy degree in more mature countries. If that ignorant twit, Palin, is allowed to become the next president, the U.S. will not only deserve to be turned into black glass, but it may well be required by the rest of the planet simply for yhe continued viability of the human race.
Yeah, I know, men in boardrooms sit around and say "today let's direct media to give conspiracy theory a negative connotation".
Sure. Why not? All manner of advertising and political agendas are effectively served through deliberate efforts to sculpt public perception. It would be silly to assume that other subject matter is not similarly managed, especially when it can so dramatically affect the course of human endeavor. COINTELPRO has a long and sordid history as is evidenced by the mountains of documentation retrieved by diligent researchers through the FOIA. Just the stuff we know about is quite startling.
It should also be remembered that television is a medium exceptionally designed for the purpose of managing public perception. EEG measurements demonstrate that the light strobe effects of the humble CRT knock the brain of the viewer into a trance state whereby audio and visual messages can be planted very deeply into the subconscious. It is for this reason that it is often so hard to remember what was viewed only a minute previously during a commercial break. This is no secret, but it is rarely discussed. With the advent of flat-screen technology, which has a different effect upon the brain that in tandem we have witnessed the rise of wireless microwave technologies which have a somewhat similar deleterious effect upon awareness. Most people in the West spend a great deal of time with their brains quite fuzzed. This is not accidental.
Not that there aren't, at any time, any number of conspiracy theories floating around, many of which give themselves bad names. There are also conspiracy theories popularized by the media and believed by the public.
The idea of media is basically a good one; a means for broad communication, and there are indeed attempts at positive messages designed to spread knowledge. But the medium itself is largely corrupted. As Mcluhan was insistent upon repeating, "The medium is the message." -- But few heed that message, or indeed understand its implications. The internet is so cool precisely because it is different, with much power being given to the viewer. As such, the systems for controlling perception are by necessity different. I have found that in many areas which count, there is a great deal of garbage, false signal injected which serves to muddy the waters. I would say that the efforts have been rather effective, judging by the general public response to alternative news and ways of thinking. Knee-jerk negative emotional reactions to whole areas of research are not uncommon. Several of the higher profile sources on the internet have, upon investigation, been found to have links to some rather shady beginnings. It's a fascinating world to plumb, but few have the capacity to do so. Automatic negative emotional reactions to otherwise benign ideas are, I think, a powerful indicator of deliberate perception sculpting.
If you believe in a Illuminati-type conspiracy, complete with the idea that big media prevents people from seeing it, then show the evidence that everybody is missing because they are watching too much TV. I mean it must be blindingly obvious if it's just a matter of too much TV.
This is one of the more brilliant con-jobs. The 'burden of proof' dilemma.
There is a reason there have been SO many court room dramas featured on television over the years, instilling in people a rigid set of rules for the acceptable manner through which knowledge may be collected and conveyed. The school system has similarly worked to hammer home these rules, through reductionist science, which while valid in certain ways, are woefully insufficient in certain other areas.
Example. ..
If I were to report that I had just witnessed something amazing in the backyard, a child would say, "Really? I want to see too!" and they would run to look. An adult, however, whose mind has been effectively programmed through years of non-stop conditioning, is far more likely to respond with questions and demands f
It sounds to me that you take a bunch of random conspiracy theories as true. I'm not sure what TV has to do with it -- you can watch TV and believe in conspiracy theories at the same time.
TV directs you to respect arbitrary boundaries of reality. "Conspiracy theory" is only a dirty term to those who are so managed. "Conspiracy theory" is a term constantly re-invented and propagated, and most importantly, given negative emotional connotation by the media. Your own observations are colored by this. That is what TV has to do with it.
Look and you will see. The crime isn't that people are instructed not to look; free choice in this regard cannot be abridged. The crime is that from birth, people are given a false map of reality and are instructed that to look beyond its edges is foolery. The only cure is to look, but the common man has been henpecked through various means to fear their own powers of observation. Pathetic. Sinister.
The Media is one of the three voices compelling this restricted behavior. Consider; I would guess that you would hold conspiracy theory and religion to be closely related phenomena, yet conspiracy theory is marginalized while religion is widespread. Both exist within the realm of media, and yet only one serves the elite and thus thrives and shapes the world. The false map describes arbitrary boundaries, but the means of presenting the map is anything but arbitrary. Clever, no?
Right, how dare there be a class of people that gain more than others. I worked for this real elitist bastard, totally rich. Oh sure, he started his own company and used his intelligence, vision, and dedication to make it work, and sold it for millions and then started another company. But what an elitist bastard!
He's not even close to 'elite'. He's what we call an, 'iddy-biddy puffing floor manager'. Just to get the definitions nailed down, the 'Elite' create and own the money supply and thus the world. They also own the extensive underground bunkers, (otherwise known as 'cities'). While you and I are enjoying the 1% of not-lame media, (and yes, I love a good story, but seriously. . 10%? In book form maybe. . , and maybe from years ago, but in theaters and on television and in newspapers today? Saying that 1% is worth anything other than mis-directing, bullshit crappola is being exceedingly generous. But that's my opinion. Like I said, what you see as gold is gold, so do enjoy.), but while you and I are running around looking for the next bit of nonsense, the big stuff unfolding today is far more intriguing and sensitive to the actions of aware people. --Seriously, none of the stuff which has been happening since about 1995 is a surprise. Want to know what happens next? I'll tell you! --A bit more sideways zig-zig shuffle toward the finish line, and then down, down, down --with a surprise rain of rocks from space. . , among other goodies. But I'll be damned if those bastards aren't actually going to use all that barbed wire. Fifteen years ago I didn't buy it. I said, "No way! People simply aren't there. Mass-hatred and mass-destruction of all Semitic blood-lines? (That's Jew and non-Jew in case I'm over-assuming a commonality in definitions here.) Sorry. I just don't see it. The public is just too. . , balanced and happy. Everybody watches Star Trek, for goodness sake! I know TV is bullshit, but Picard has got to count for something!"
Of course, I couldn't pin down the details, but the direction and intent is always the same. --Though it's only just now entering a phase of uncertainty, which is the part I find really exciting! I know the bad guys fail in their bid for the planet, but I'm not sure if it happens on this side of the reality curtain or the next or what form failure will take. One thing I do know; it's not going to happen without a lot of death and dancing around, so the only thing which counts in the end is awareness and intent. And if any of that makes sense to you, then perhaps I'm wrong about the whole TV thing, but I'm betting most would blink at me and say, "wahthefuh?" --TV and all the related control mechanisms are a much bigger problem than people realize. So no fence-sitting. Make your choices now. Fence sitters are perhaps the worst-screwed, cuz the whole point of being here is to choose to be selfish or to not, which actually links right back to the whole copyright question and the peculiarity which is TPB. Avoiding the question means you haven't made it, and that means you get to spin the wheel and go through this whole yarn yet again.
Ha ha. You get to be a black man or hold an equivalent social position in your next life. Guaranteed. You can tell yourself it isn't true, but in those dark, private moments when you're not so sure. . , that's when truth is calling. It's called 'Karama', dude, and you're racking up a helluva debt. Don't believe in Karma? Doesn't matter. You are screwed and deep (deep) down inside, you know I'm right.
Humanity has always been in a mess. I don't think getting rid of Hollywood will lead to Utopia.
Not Utopia, but certainly fewer glassy eyes. Video games must go as well.
Government is probably more worried about keeping people employed than "drugging" the masses.
You might have been watching too much TV.
Besides that, on a personal level there are plenty of quality music, movies, and shows that I would miss without an industry supported by copyright.
You have definitely been watching too much TV.
It's not up to you to decide what people find entertaining.
Of course it is and I call it crap. You can call it gold if you want to, and that's YOUR decision which is yours only to make. But then you also think the government is more interested in creating jobs than in keeping people under thumb, and I didn't say government, did I? I said 'Elite'. Big difference.
TPB is very large and well into the profit making range for an advertising based web site.
Fair enough. --After looking more closely, I must admit that I am amazed by the kind of figures bandied about by advertising companies!
I'd also read through this with some interest. But without official figures, believing the assertions of TPB guys themselves as opposed to the media, it's hard to figure out who is telling the truth.
I guess it will all come out in the wash. I'll be waiting, like everybody else, with bated breath to find out what the real story is.
For my part, I wouldn't be heart-broken in the slightest to see Hollywood, the Networks and Big Music come crashing down in a spectacular fireball of snowstorming TV sets as a result of TPB, and television and computer screens go blank from lack of funding. I despise 99% of the brain-rotting garbage produced as news and entertainment today, and consider it to be largely responsible for the mess the human race is currently in. And it is for this exact reason that I really don't think there is any danger of the flow of televised brain-rot ever diminishing. It is simply far too valuable an asset to the elite. Opiate of the masses, and all that. --Keeping the masses well-drugged is a vital ingredient in successful global control, so it hardly matters how the brain-rot is distributed. I take that to be a self-evident truth, and as such, all this nonsense about copyright and intellectual property theft is a giant, stupid laugh. A total, nonsense distraction at best, and at worst, yet another excuse to ratchet up the level of oppressive population control.
I can see two basic likely outcomes; 1. Successful oppressive control over the internet. Or 2., TPB model evolve into a sort of profit-sharing system emerge for the most-often downloaded items. It'd be nice to see the middlemen bypassed and money actually accrue to the artists. With TPB, that might just have a sliver of a chance of happening, but it's not terribly likely. Greed tends to dominate.
Asus eeepc1000. I'm using the one with the hard drive. It's a solidly built machine with a 10" screen and a battery life which is about double that of the nearest competitor. They're going for $460 on some order sites.
If you can live with a slightly smaller screen and if battery life isn't terribly important, then the Aspire One looks like a pretty great deal with a lot of happy users and an 8Gb SSD.
I find writing on the eee1000H really easy. Nice, big keyboard, and a decent screen size. If the machine were any bigger and it wouldn't be comfortable or easy to use, any smaller, it would feel limiting. (I've owned a couple of other small machines over the years, and I find a good screen size is vital for comfort in writing; I don't know how it is for coding, but I find I need to see more than just the immediate line of text I'm working on to write effectively. SSD seems like a good idea, but the laptop hard drive in the Asus works just fine. A friend of mine dropped one while it was playing a video and it didn't skip a beat. --Though I don't know if that would be such a good idea if it was trying to write at the time, but then I don't drop my hardware.
I don't know if it's food poisoning or what. . . I ate some grocery store chocolate chip cookies from a box and I've had a head-ache for two straight days since while hurricane Ike or whoever has been raging outside my window playing hell with the barometrics, and the economy and politics and everything slipped past some kind of breakpoint. . .
The whole illusion of 'normal' has been filled with glitches for a long while now, but it's been really bad lately. All this week, in fact. --Partly because while looking over that whole "The Fed Borrows All Money From a Private Consortium at Interest" thing, and wondered if it applied in Canada as well. (It does, just with a little more complexity, because I think Canadians are slightly harder to fool than their American counter-parts. Not because they're any smarter, but they've just had better mind-resources.) Anyway, it's a whole giant scam, this money thing, designed to create debt-slavery.
But then I realize that there is a level above even that. Just another illusion.
--Because, you see, it's not just banks which create money out of thin air. Everybody does. Farmers create wealth out of the ground, and people eating food destroy that wealth, or convert it into potential, but the paper stuff continues to exist regardless of the state of the material wealth it has been attached to. It struck me that there are two economies; one made out of actual energy and material wealth, and a second one made of paper money and bank-data which is supposed to track with and serve the real economy. Right? Economics 101. But the second economy, which has never been able to keep up with the ineffable reality of true energy and wealth, has flown out of control into its own daydream, and now a nightmare. And now it is crashing, or so we're told. But so what? The material wealth is still there, right? We still grow food and eat food and do all the things we do in between, we live, but the daydream world is spinning and drowning in it's own visions. Will people starve? Will they riot and die? Why should any of that happen? Because of an illusion?
So the head-ache floats around the back of my skull and the air pressure jumps and sinks every thirty seconds, and none of it seems particularly real.
The voting system is a mess. Everybody knows that. And everybody also knows that even if it worked properly, neither candidate is up to the task of facing reality. Is Obama going to declare, "That's it. --We're printing our own money at zero interest from now on to break the chains of debt-slavery held in the fists of the old super-wealthy families which run the world! Heck, let's declare war on them. And while we're at it, let's break our ties to Israel; it's insane that our military might should be controlled by the Zionist desire to kill everybody who isn't a Jew! Heck, while we're at it, let's ditch this whole insane religion thing altogether. It's clearly making everybody nuts. Let's pull back the camera and look at what's actually happening on this globe of ours."?
Not going to happen. All the two candidates are battling over is the better way to re-establish the illusion of 'normal'.
But I'm tired of illusions! What good is an illusion? We'd all just have another few weeks, months, years to do what? Play video games and watch TV? To fart around and wish for love and the next cool gadget. Well, it looks like I'll be getting my wish. As one illusion morphs into the next, there are all these little tears and exit points where you can see what's really happening. Not that illusions are bad. They can be fun; There has been a lot of neat stuff to do here. I just don't understand why so many people are so angry, why they want their guns and their versions of their daft religions at all costs. Why the missiles, and the psychotic people, and the greed and mean-spirited behavior? If that's what they want, then fine, let the whole thing crash, because I don't want to put up with it anymore.
Heck all I really want is for life to be a happy place. With better cookies.
The amazing thing here is not your information, (which is actually pretty interesting), but the fact that you were able to squeeze it all through the stupid little keyhole-sized comment window on these dippy idle pages.
Ultrasonics and microwave tech is THE technology which nobody must ever pay attention to, and so idiots like this wine guy are perfect for making a whole area of science look silly in the public eye.
But how could they get a guy to come up with an idea like that and market it all on his own? Gee, that would take some kind of whack technology nobody must ever know about. . .
Sorry, TPB guys, but I don't believe you're not making a *phenomenal* amount of money from this thing.
Oh yeah? How much money have you given them? Did you buy a tee-shirt or something? If its just a matter of selling ad banners, then I can see them perhaps doing as they say; breaking even. TPB isn't Google by a long stretch. It also sounds like they're paying tax on their income. And anyway, aren't the criminals those who download stuff? I guess the Swedish government could nail the TPB guys for being an accessory to a crime. If it's even a crime to share data, which has yet to be properly established as far as I can see.
Still, I wouldn't be surprised if these guys eventually went to prison. The Swedish government has already invested significant time and resources in their destruction, and after a while it's no longer about who's right and wrong, it's about satisfying egos and justifying one's job. And not being an embarrassment on the world stage. The TPB guys are playing with fire. If the Swedes are ineffective, then I can see private agents 'removing' the problem. Everybody knows Hollywood has no soul.
Morals? Dude, the fact that you're even worrying about that means you actually HAVE morals. I see little-to-no problem with your actions; discarded goods turns rapidly into a finders-keepers kind of scenario.
The only area where you might change things is, (if you hold any love or loyalty to your employer), to try to explain to somebody in higher management that you could be better employed as a computer parts re-seller, or perhaps to lose those two people you described who are basically responsible for spending company money so wastefully.
Also, I'd be very careful, as you probably are, to make sure that any and all items taken are not going to be later noticed missing from any lists. It sounds like they're not; the take-away companies don't sound like they track stuff very well. Because if somebody ever does pin you down, then you could very easily wind up like the guy in the linked story. Jailed. All it takes is a security camera to notice you hauling gear to your car several times over the course of a year, or some suspicious employees given a secret directive to track your actions for a period of time. The trick to successful 'keeping' is knowing when to quit, or transform the activity into something legal.
As a kid, I once stole a lot of money from my employer. I won't describe how, but it was mostly to see if a very clever idea was really all that clever. Turns out it was. I should also add that my employer was a well-respected bottom feeder; every penny they made was done by exploiting the baser human instincts. Kinda like today's story about the scareware vendors. I hated working for them, and felt very justified in my theft. But it WAS theft. There was no way I could argue, like you are able to, that it was a squishy kind of liberation of goods.
Now as clever as my scheme was, I knew that I couldn't get away with it more than a few times before somebody noticed a pattern. Once would be fine. Twice maybe. Three times would be pushing it, and four. . ?
So I knew to stop after doing it just once. The thing I noticed was that it took a gargantuan amount of will-power to actually only do it once. Nearly a cold-sweat kind of thing, but not quite. I remembered Columbo or somebody saying, "The criminal always returns to the scene of the crime," and realized what was being said. So will-power is the other key ingredient in successful crime. Never leave a pattern.
Also, there's another kind of payment you have to make. The fear of being caught, if valued in dollars, can become quite the expense. If I see an opportunity to steal from somebody who is richly deserving, I might go ahead and do it. But mostly, I don't care about money or wealth so long as I'm fed and sheltered, so the motivation generally has to be pretty unique. So long as you're having fun and you don't get lazy with it and ignore possible patterns, you should be okay. The moment greed takes over, then you're courting trouble, because that will sully your intentions, engaging your self-serving side. For some reason this always skews one's perceptive abilities, which means you can leave patterns and not notice it. Don't know why this is, but evil is always self-blinding.
When going through the step-by-step in the article, (which is pretty awesome, btw), it appears that there is no character recognition being employed, but rather the security is being defeated by a fairly hacky work-around.
Hacky work-arounds can be defeated simply by programming smarter, (less sloppily?). There's no graphic-reading AI involved, which means the basic fundamentals of the CAPTCHA system remain sound.
While I find CAPTCHAs a little annoying when signing up for stuff, I recognize their necessity and actually kind of grin while doing them, thinking, "Hh ha! Look at this monkey, all smarter than a dumb computer. This must be frustrating for spammers. Ho ho!"
Coincidence? I think not. Clearly it takes unbalanced chaotic systems and collapses them into the state most likely to actualize. The cloud of dreams which has been our economy since Reagan began inflating it with voodoo has been begging to collapse for some time. Thank-you Higgs Boson! Clearly, the LHC is a kind of Probability Drive.
I look forward to seeing what will happen next when they get it up and running again. If they run it in reverse, maybe it will turn missiles into potted plants and whales.
The public signage which always made me chuckle was the one for "tourist information" used in some of the cities I've visited.
The sign is a big question mark with an arrow pointing off in some direction.
I actually had to follow one of them to figure out what the heck it was all about, and found myself up the street standing in front of a tourist information bureau, thinking, "Ah. But golly, that's hardly intuitive!"
Slashdot Mirror
Thank-you for the clarification.
Cheers!
-FL
The article does sound rather garish, but considering systems within systems, parallel to systems, and funky classifications invented by paranoid department heads and Dick Cheney coming up with his own stamps with his own classifications of, "Shhh. Don't Tell Anyone" I find it hard to believe that things are nearly so well-ordered as you portray.
Do you have any odd memory gaps or personality quirks which you didn't have before you entered the service? Even if there has been zero improvement over the mind control systems used in the Seventies, then chances are you wouldn't even suspect a violation.
After all. . , is posting in widely read public forums to boast about credentials an encouraged activity for a HUMINT Collector?
You're fishy as hell regardless of what your real story happens to be, and if you are what you say you are, then you're probably a lot further gone than you realize. You have my sincere condolences if that's the case.
-FL
I have a finite amount of time to go on these kinds of investigations -- and that would be the case under any political system. There are more things to investigate than there is time for. I have already spent enough time looking at religions and political whatnots, so I don't go off on random goose chases.
I was going to leave it here, but two thoughts occurred to me. . .
1. I am the kind of person who finds exploration into such areas fun, and so I do it. I think 'fun' determines much how we spend our finite energies, but in becoming fun, I did wrestle with the following question. . .
2. Being finite, it only makes sense that one should spend one's energies in efforts toward ends which are not based on false premises. One must learn the real game rules before attempting to succeed in life. Running toward the wrong goal posts makes no sense to me. That being said, one's individual mission profile is best achieved by following one's bliss, so to speak. Trust in 'fun'. Not all of us are here to plumb the depths of reality. Some of us are here simply to work on social skills, or various modes of expression, etc. Every soul has a different goal in a given life time, and in some cases, ignorance of certain details is a requirement for full engagement on a given path. Our higher selves, I have found, try in earnest to trick us into certain courses of experience which we might otherwise avoid if full knowledge were available of what we were setting out towards. Some of the most valuable lessons which lead to significant soul growth are by necessity both difficult and painful. Truth can hurt.
Cheers and good luck on your chosen path!
-FL
My definition for intelligence is having the ability to modify the entities in ones environment to further ones own agenda.
Hm. By that standard, an shopping mall escalator is intelligent. (Must move people up/down!)
And so is Palin.
-FL
While reading the first conversation, I felt a chill of alarm, thinking, "Oh boy! If this is a computer, it's a crafty devil! I'd need to ask some clever questions to figure out if this is an AI. I hope five minutes is enough! How the heck did this technology advance so far without anybody reporting it?"
Then while reading the second conversation, I thought, "Oh. False alarm. Eliza on my old Apple II was this lame."
-FL
That's a cool set of observations. --I remember an interview with a girl who had participated as one of the testers in a Turing experiment/demonstartion, and she was such a simple creature herself that she was quite convinced that one of the given AIs was human. "We talked about lots of things. Like our favorite colors and stuff."
I strongly suspect that if the experiments were double-blinded that all of the AI's would pass with flying colors. But then, one of my general theories of reality is that a good portion of the humans walking around are just complex, albeit naturally-formed biological AI's themselves. It would explain numerous of the conversations I've had on-line. Though they are so complex that it's actually quite hard to tell which is 'real' and which isn't
Psychopaths are interesting in that they are missing parts of the human 'program' which the rest of us take for granted, but they are quite able to fool people into thinking that they do have emotions and 'real' reactions. I've heard that Psychopaths are just faulty versions of the basic reaction-machine human which doesn't have all the parts, but which isn't compelled to destroy things and create chaos.
-FL
Yet millions of people every day manage to carry on complex tasks that require intelligent thinking. Do you wear a tinfoil hat to keep the waves out?
No, I just stay away from garbage interference, toxins and similar. If tin foil worked, I'd probably use that as well because I'm not threatened by the opinions of others. Intelligent thinking is absolutely affected, but one of the more important things affected is one's ability to sense energy and emotions in others. Perceptive dimensions which most are blind to.
How do I know that you aren't a false signal?
You'd have to take the time to collect numerous streams of information and cross reference to see what cancels out. You're smart; do the work. Another, faster method is to listen to your instincts; the voice of your higher self which knows what's what, and which is in contact right now with my higher self. You have to know how to cut through the static to do that, however, and that takes practice.
You're of the type that give conspiracy theories a bad name.
You don't know that as per your first question, so that's just confusion and fear talking. How you fix that is your problem.
If your life hung in the balance, then yes, you'd like that rigid set of rules. Television dramatizes court because it sells. It sells because courts are part of people's lives. No grand conspiracy needed
It wouldn't be an effective ploy if it weren't paired with a plausible 'simple solution' to keep the muggles feeling comfortable. The problem is that the end result remains true. Judge the tree by the fruit it bears.
That's life. If it were as simple as running out to the backyard, people would do it. If you want to send people out on a wild good chase involving a lot of travel and time, then people will be skeptical, as well they should be. People make up shit all the time, either intentionally or just through naiveté and perception bias. You could spend your whole life investigating bullshit.
Bullshit. "I don't have time to read/learn/experience." Excuses. What could be more important than exploring and understanding the nature of the reality you live in? Make time. It's not that hard. Keep in mind that these systems of social control come with a variety of conveniently available built-in excuses for people to use in order to protect the system.
If you're trying to get some message out to cause an action (which may ultimately benefit you), then it also becomes YOUR problem if the message isn't accepted.
Ha ha. Oh, poor you. Let me soften things; --Because, actually, I do lose in a sense; in that we are all one, that every piece which goes dark is a loss to the whole. But at this layer of reality we exist as separate beings, so at the moment, my only responsibility is to be the best version of myself; to care for my own soul and any which ask for help. Your responsibility is to grow and take care of your soul. If you want to disintegrate, that's your choice and that's how it has to be and I simply can't be bothered to waste energy on cowards and lost causes. I'm not obligated to do your work for you. In fact, it would be a violation.
Or, alternatively, there is no grand conspiracy that orchestrates are lives in some sinister symphony. Do you really think when television was invented it was by "Elitists" to control the masses, using a strobe effect? Do you really think wireless cell phones were invented to replace television for mind control?
Sorry. All the evidence I have explored, (in many different forms), doesn't point to a benign state of affairs. Not at all! --And yes, I do absolutely believe that television was invented for the reasons stated, as were the currents running through our power distribution system chosen. --There is a great deal of knowledge out there which is not contested, but simply buried. I have accessed information you have clearly not sought out, and so you are speculating with extremely limited reso
Uh. . . So it has a .2% chance of missing the Earth, but if it doesn't miss, then it is known for certain exactly when and where it will strike. And that place just happens to be a geo-political hot zone?
So what is that exactly? Stupid math? Stupid reporting? Or. . ?
If I wanted to nuke somebody but not get blamed for it. . . Or if I wanted people to think that I'd nuked you and was trying to cover my tracks. Or if I wanted to muddy the waters with incomplete ideas and raise the state of confusion and alarm another notch closer to the breaking point. . .
Confusion is the method; nobody gets any straight answers, attention is diffused so no positive steps can be taken --but the stress-level is successfully raised and the dark deed accomplished.
But there is a solution.
Enough attention and postulation subverts dark plans because a correct postulation gives predictive power and respect to the postulator, and this is a danger. --A couple of correct postulations in a row, and then people have a reason to act pre-emptively. And since it's always the same villain responsible, they can't have that. Conversely, an incorrect postulation means that the speaker loses respect and personal confidence and power. And that's a good thing from the perspective of a control freak.
But. . . What they don't get is that when the ego is detached from the process, there is no diminishing of confidence or personal power. Logical predictions based on observations of the possible leads to a kind of dis-arming of the event. Stay alert; if you know and see the danger, if you look it in the eyes and experience the result in-vitro as it were, the chances are much reduced of an actual event taking place. That's been my experience in events large and small. Plan for the worst and the worst never happens. Funny, that. Knowledge protects, eh?
-FL
--You know. Where script kiddies use dumb hacks to effectively ruin the experience for everyone. Where you hear, "But if you want to win, you ALSO have to cheat!"
This proves it. America has the mentality of a 12 year-old video game brat.
You don't see this shit to the same crazy degree in more mature countries. If that ignorant twit, Palin, is allowed to become the next president, the U.S. will not only deserve to be turned into black glass, but it may well be required by the rest of the planet simply for yhe continued viability of the human race.
-FL
Yeah, I know, men in boardrooms sit around and say "today let's direct media to give conspiracy theory a negative connotation".
Sure. Why not? All manner of advertising and political agendas are effectively served through deliberate efforts to sculpt public perception. It would be silly to assume that other subject matter is not similarly managed, especially when it can so dramatically affect the course of human endeavor. COINTELPRO has a long and sordid history as is evidenced by the mountains of documentation retrieved by diligent researchers through the FOIA. Just the stuff we know about is quite startling.
It should also be remembered that television is a medium exceptionally designed for the purpose of managing public perception. EEG measurements demonstrate that the light strobe effects of the humble CRT knock the brain of the viewer into a trance state whereby audio and visual messages can be planted very deeply into the subconscious. It is for this reason that it is often so hard to remember what was viewed only a minute previously during a commercial break. This is no secret, but it is rarely discussed. With the advent of flat-screen technology, which has a different effect upon the brain that in tandem we have witnessed the rise of wireless microwave technologies which have a somewhat similar deleterious effect upon awareness. Most people in the West spend a great deal of time with their brains quite fuzzed. This is not accidental.
Not that there aren't, at any time, any number of conspiracy theories floating around, many of which give themselves bad names. There are also conspiracy theories popularized by the media and believed by the public.
The idea of media is basically a good one; a means for broad communication, and there are indeed attempts at positive messages designed to spread knowledge. But the medium itself is largely corrupted. As Mcluhan was insistent upon repeating, "The medium is the message." -- But few heed that message, or indeed understand its implications. The internet is so cool precisely because it is different, with much power being given to the viewer. As such, the systems for controlling perception are by necessity different. I have found that in many areas which count, there is a great deal of garbage, false signal injected which serves to muddy the waters. I would say that the efforts have been rather effective, judging by the general public response to alternative news and ways of thinking. Knee-jerk negative emotional reactions to whole areas of research are not uncommon. Several of the higher profile sources on the internet have, upon investigation, been found to have links to some rather shady beginnings. It's a fascinating world to plumb, but few have the capacity to do so. Automatic negative emotional reactions to otherwise benign ideas are, I think, a powerful indicator of deliberate perception sculpting.
If you believe in a Illuminati-type conspiracy, complete with the idea that big media prevents people from seeing it, then show the evidence that everybody is missing because they are watching too much TV. I mean it must be blindingly obvious if it's just a matter of too much TV.
This is one of the more brilliant con-jobs. The 'burden of proof' dilemma.
There is a reason there have been SO many court room dramas featured on television over the years, instilling in people a rigid set of rules for the acceptable manner through which knowledge may be collected and conveyed. The school system has similarly worked to hammer home these rules, through reductionist science, which while valid in certain ways, are woefully insufficient in certain other areas.
Example. . .
If I were to report that I had just witnessed something amazing in the backyard, a child would say, "Really? I want to see too!" and they would run to look. An adult, however, whose mind has been effectively programmed through years of non-stop conditioning, is far more likely to respond with questions and demands f
It sounds to me that you take a bunch of random conspiracy theories as true. I'm not sure what TV has to do with it -- you can watch TV and believe in conspiracy theories at the same time.
TV directs you to respect arbitrary boundaries of reality. "Conspiracy theory" is only a dirty term to those who are so managed. "Conspiracy theory" is a term constantly re-invented and propagated, and most importantly, given negative emotional connotation by the media. Your own observations are colored by this. That is what TV has to do with it.
Look and you will see. The crime isn't that people are instructed not to look; free choice in this regard cannot be abridged. The crime is that from birth, people are given a false map of reality and are instructed that to look beyond its edges is foolery. The only cure is to look, but the common man has been henpecked through various means to fear their own powers of observation. Pathetic. Sinister.
The Media is one of the three voices compelling this restricted behavior. Consider; I would guess that you would hold conspiracy theory and religion to be closely related phenomena, yet conspiracy theory is marginalized while religion is widespread. Both exist within the realm of media, and yet only one serves the elite and thus thrives and shapes the world. The false map describes arbitrary boundaries, but the means of presenting the map is anything but arbitrary. Clever, no?
-FL
Right, how dare there be a class of people that gain more than others. I worked for this real elitist bastard, totally rich. Oh sure, he started his own company and used his intelligence, vision, and dedication to make it work, and sold it for millions and then started another company. But what an elitist bastard!
He's not even close to 'elite'. He's what we call an, 'iddy-biddy puffing floor manager'. Just to get the definitions nailed down, the 'Elite' create and own the money supply and thus the world. They also own the extensive underground bunkers, (otherwise known as 'cities'). While you and I are enjoying the 1% of not-lame media, (and yes, I love a good story, but seriously. . 10%? In book form maybe. . , and maybe from years ago, but in theaters and on television and in newspapers today? Saying that 1% is worth anything other than mis-directing, bullshit crappola is being exceedingly generous. But that's my opinion. Like I said, what you see as gold is gold, so do enjoy.), but while you and I are running around looking for the next bit of nonsense, the big stuff unfolding today is far more intriguing and sensitive to the actions of aware people. --Seriously, none of the stuff which has been happening since about 1995 is a surprise. Want to know what happens next? I'll tell you! --A bit more sideways zig-zig shuffle toward the finish line, and then down, down, down --with a surprise rain of rocks from space. . , among other goodies. But I'll be damned if those bastards aren't actually going to use all that barbed wire. Fifteen years ago I didn't buy it. I said, "No way! People simply aren't there. Mass-hatred and mass-destruction of all Semitic blood-lines? (That's Jew and non-Jew in case I'm over-assuming a commonality in definitions here.) Sorry. I just don't see it. The public is just too. . , balanced and happy. Everybody watches Star Trek, for goodness sake! I know TV is bullshit, but Picard has got to count for something!"
Of course, I couldn't pin down the details, but the direction and intent is always the same. --Though it's only just now entering a phase of uncertainty, which is the part I find really exciting! I know the bad guys fail in their bid for the planet, but I'm not sure if it happens on this side of the reality curtain or the next or what form failure will take. One thing I do know; it's not going to happen without a lot of death and dancing around, so the only thing which counts in the end is awareness and intent. And if any of that makes sense to you, then perhaps I'm wrong about the whole TV thing, but I'm betting most would blink at me and say, "wahthefuh?" --TV and all the related control mechanisms are a much bigger problem than people realize. So no fence-sitting. Make your choices now. Fence sitters are perhaps the worst-screwed, cuz the whole point of being here is to choose to be selfish or to not, which actually links right back to the whole copyright question and the peculiarity which is TPB. Avoiding the question means you haven't made it, and that means you get to spin the wheel and go through this whole yarn yet again.
-FL
in light of the up-and-coming nigger president
Ha ha. You get to be a black man or hold an equivalent social position in your next life. Guaranteed. You can tell yourself it isn't true, but in those dark, private moments when you're not so sure. . , that's when truth is calling. It's called 'Karama', dude, and you're racking up a helluva debt. Don't believe in Karma? Doesn't matter. You are screwed and deep (deep) down inside, you know I'm right.
-FL
Humanity has always been in a mess. I don't think getting rid of Hollywood will lead to Utopia.
Not Utopia, but certainly fewer glassy eyes. Video games must go as well.
Government is probably more worried about keeping people employed than "drugging" the masses.
You might have been watching too much TV.
Besides that, on a personal level there are plenty of quality music, movies, and shows that I would miss without an industry supported by copyright.
You have definitely been watching too much TV.
It's not up to you to decide what people find entertaining.
Of course it is and I call it crap. You can call it gold if you want to, and that's YOUR decision which is yours only to make. But then you also think the government is more interested in creating jobs than in keeping people under thumb, and I didn't say government, did I? I said 'Elite'. Big difference.
-FL
TPB is very large and well into the profit making range for an advertising based web site.
Fair enough. --After looking more closely, I must admit that I am amazed by the kind of figures bandied about by advertising companies!
I'd also read through this with some interest. But without official figures, believing the assertions of TPB guys themselves as opposed to the media, it's hard to figure out who is telling the truth.
I guess it will all come out in the wash. I'll be waiting, like everybody else, with bated breath to find out what the real story is.
For my part, I wouldn't be heart-broken in the slightest to see Hollywood, the Networks and Big Music come crashing down in a spectacular fireball of snowstorming TV sets as a result of TPB, and television and computer screens go blank from lack of funding. I despise 99% of the brain-rotting garbage produced as news and entertainment today, and consider it to be largely responsible for the mess the human race is currently in. And it is for this exact reason that I really don't think there is any danger of the flow of televised brain-rot ever diminishing. It is simply far too valuable an asset to the elite. Opiate of the masses, and all that. --Keeping the masses well-drugged is a vital ingredient in successful global control, so it hardly matters how the brain-rot is distributed. I take that to be a self-evident truth, and as such, all this nonsense about copyright and intellectual property theft is a giant, stupid laugh. A total, nonsense distraction at best, and at worst, yet another excuse to ratchet up the level of oppressive population control.
I can see two basic likely outcomes; 1. Successful oppressive control over the internet. Or 2., TPB model evolve into a sort of profit-sharing system emerge for the most-often downloaded items. It'd be nice to see the middlemen bypassed and money actually accrue to the artists. With TPB, that might just have a sliver of a chance of happening, but it's not terribly likely. Greed tends to dominate.
-FL
Asus eeepc1000. I'm using the one with the hard drive. It's a solidly built machine with a 10" screen and a battery life which is about double that of the nearest competitor. They're going for $460 on some order sites.
If you can live with a slightly smaller screen and if battery life isn't terribly important, then the Aspire One looks like a pretty great deal with a lot of happy users and an 8Gb SSD.
I find writing on the eee1000H really easy. Nice, big keyboard, and a decent screen size. If the machine were any bigger and it wouldn't be comfortable or easy to use, any smaller, it would feel limiting. (I've owned a couple of other small machines over the years, and I find a good screen size is vital for comfort in writing; I don't know how it is for coding, but I find I need to see more than just the immediate line of text I'm working on to write effectively. SSD seems like a good idea, but the laptop hard drive in the Asus works just fine. A friend of mine dropped one while it was playing a video and it didn't skip a beat. --Though I don't know if that would be such a good idea if it was trying to write at the time, but then I don't drop my hardware.
-FL
"Strange Days"
Well, here we are.
I don't know if it's food poisoning or what. . . I ate some grocery store chocolate chip cookies from a box and I've had a head-ache for two straight days since while hurricane Ike or whoever has been raging outside my window playing hell with the barometrics, and the economy and politics and everything slipped past some kind of breakpoint. . .
The whole illusion of 'normal' has been filled with glitches for a long while now, but it's been really bad lately. All this week, in fact. --Partly because while looking over that whole "The Fed Borrows All Money From a Private Consortium at Interest" thing, and wondered if it applied in Canada as well. (It does, just with a little more complexity, because I think Canadians are slightly harder to fool than their American counter-parts. Not because they're any smarter, but they've just had better mind-resources.) Anyway, it's a whole giant scam, this money thing, designed to create debt-slavery.
But then I realize that there is a level above even that. Just another illusion.
--Because, you see, it's not just banks which create money out of thin air. Everybody does. Farmers create wealth out of the ground, and people eating food destroy that wealth, or convert it into potential, but the paper stuff continues to exist regardless of the state of the material wealth it has been attached to. It struck me that there are two economies; one made out of actual energy and material wealth, and a second one made of paper money and bank-data which is supposed to track with and serve the real economy. Right? Economics 101. But the second economy, which has never been able to keep up with the ineffable reality of true energy and wealth, has flown out of control into its own daydream, and now a nightmare. And now it is crashing, or so we're told. But so what? The material wealth is still there, right? We still grow food and eat food and do all the things we do in between, we live, but the daydream world is spinning and drowning in it's own visions. Will people starve? Will they riot and die? Why should any of that happen? Because of an illusion?
So the head-ache floats around the back of my skull and the air pressure jumps and sinks every thirty seconds, and none of it seems particularly real.
The voting system is a mess. Everybody knows that. And everybody also knows that even if it worked properly, neither candidate is up to the task of facing reality. Is Obama going to declare, "That's it. --We're printing our own money at zero interest from now on to break the chains of debt-slavery held in the fists of the old super-wealthy families which run the world! Heck, let's declare war on them. And while we're at it, let's break our ties to Israel; it's insane that our military might should be controlled by the Zionist desire to kill everybody who isn't a Jew! Heck, while we're at it, let's ditch this whole insane religion thing altogether. It's clearly making everybody nuts. Let's pull back the camera and look at what's actually happening on this globe of ours."?
Not going to happen. All the two candidates are battling over is the better way to re-establish the illusion of 'normal'.
But I'm tired of illusions! What good is an illusion? We'd all just have another few weeks, months, years to do what? Play video games and watch TV? To fart around and wish for love and the next cool gadget. Well, it looks like I'll be getting my wish. As one illusion morphs into the next, there are all these little tears and exit points where you can see what's really happening. Not that illusions are bad. They can be fun; There has been a lot of neat stuff to do here. I just don't understand why so many people are so angry, why they want their guns and their versions of their daft religions at all costs. Why the missiles, and the psychotic people, and the greed and mean-spirited behavior? If that's what they want, then fine, let the whole thing crash, because I don't want to put up with it anymore.
Heck all I really want is for life to be a happy place. With better cookies.
My head hurts.
-FL
The amazing thing here is not your information, (which is actually pretty interesting), but the fact that you were able to squeeze it all through the stupid little keyhole-sized comment window on these dippy idle pages.
Maybe you were posting in micro-gravity.
-FL
Ultrasonics and microwave tech is THE technology which nobody must ever pay attention to, and so idiots like this wine guy are perfect for making a whole area of science look silly in the public eye.
But how could they get a guy to come up with an idea like that and market it all on his own? Gee, that would take some kind of whack technology nobody must ever know about. . .
-FL
Sorry, TPB guys, but I don't believe you're not making a *phenomenal* amount of money from this thing.
Oh yeah? How much money have you given them? Did you buy a tee-shirt or something? If its just a matter of selling ad banners, then I can see them perhaps doing as they say; breaking even. TPB isn't Google by a long stretch. It also sounds like they're paying tax on their income. And anyway, aren't the criminals those who download stuff? I guess the Swedish government could nail the TPB guys for being an accessory to a crime. If it's even a crime to share data, which has yet to be properly established as far as I can see.
Still, I wouldn't be surprised if these guys eventually went to prison. The Swedish government has already invested significant time and resources in their destruction, and after a while it's no longer about who's right and wrong, it's about satisfying egos and justifying one's job. And not being an embarrassment on the world stage. The TPB guys are playing with fire. If the Swedes are ineffective, then I can see private agents 'removing' the problem. Everybody knows Hollywood has no soul.
-FL
Morals? Dude, the fact that you're even worrying about that means you actually HAVE morals. I see little-to-no problem with your actions; discarded goods turns rapidly into a finders-keepers kind of scenario.
The only area where you might change things is, (if you hold any love or loyalty to your employer), to try to explain to somebody in higher management that you could be better employed as a computer parts re-seller, or perhaps to lose those two people you described who are basically responsible for spending company money so wastefully.
Also, I'd be very careful, as you probably are, to make sure that any and all items taken are not going to be later noticed missing from any lists. It sounds like they're not; the take-away companies don't sound like they track stuff very well. Because if somebody ever does pin you down, then you could very easily wind up like the guy in the linked story. Jailed. All it takes is a security camera to notice you hauling gear to your car several times over the course of a year, or some suspicious employees given a secret directive to track your actions for a period of time. The trick to successful 'keeping' is knowing when to quit, or transform the activity into something legal.
As a kid, I once stole a lot of money from my employer. I won't describe how, but it was mostly to see if a very clever idea was really all that clever. Turns out it was. I should also add that my employer was a well-respected bottom feeder; every penny they made was done by exploiting the baser human instincts. Kinda like today's story about the scareware vendors. I hated working for them, and felt very justified in my theft. But it WAS theft. There was no way I could argue, like you are able to, that it was a squishy kind of liberation of goods.
Now as clever as my scheme was, I knew that I couldn't get away with it more than a few times before somebody noticed a pattern. Once would be fine. Twice maybe. Three times would be pushing it, and four. . ?
So I knew to stop after doing it just once. The thing I noticed was that it took a gargantuan amount of will-power to actually only do it once. Nearly a cold-sweat kind of thing, but not quite. I remembered Columbo or somebody saying, "The criminal always returns to the scene of the crime," and realized what was being said. So will-power is the other key ingredient in successful crime. Never leave a pattern.
Also, there's another kind of payment you have to make. The fear of being caught, if valued in dollars, can become quite the expense. If I see an opportunity to steal from somebody who is richly deserving, I might go ahead and do it. But mostly, I don't care about money or wealth so long as I'm fed and sheltered, so the motivation generally has to be pretty unique. So long as you're having fun and you don't get lazy with it and ignore possible patterns, you should be okay. The moment greed takes over, then you're courting trouble, because that will sully your intentions, engaging your self-serving side. For some reason this always skews one's perceptive abilities, which means you can leave patterns and not notice it. Don't know why this is, but evil is always self-blinding.
Good luck!
-FL
Perhaps a better question to ask is, "What are YOU doing (or not doing) to your Li-ion batteries so that they last for so long?"
Consider the question asked.
-FL
When going through the step-by-step in the article, (which is pretty awesome, btw), it appears that there is no character recognition being employed, but rather the security is being defeated by a fairly hacky work-around.
Hacky work-arounds can be defeated simply by programming smarter, (less sloppily?). There's no graphic-reading AI involved, which means the basic fundamentals of the CAPTCHA system remain sound.
While I find CAPTCHAs a little annoying when signing up for stuff, I recognize their necessity and actually kind of grin while doing them, thinking, "Hh ha! Look at this monkey, all smarter than a dumb computer. This must be frustrating for spammers. Ho ho!"
-FL
It went on line and the economy crashed.
Coincidence? I think not. Clearly it takes unbalanced chaotic systems and collapses them into the state most likely to actualize. The cloud of dreams which has been our economy since Reagan began inflating it with voodoo has been begging to collapse for some time. Thank-you Higgs Boson! Clearly, the LHC is a kind of Probability Drive.
I look forward to seeing what will happen next when they get it up and running again. If they run it in reverse, maybe it will turn missiles into potted plants and whales.
-FL
The public signage which always made me chuckle was the one for "tourist information" used in some of the cities I've visited.
The sign is a big question mark with an arrow pointing off in some direction.
I actually had to follow one of them to figure out what the heck it was all about, and found myself up the street standing in front of a tourist information bureau, thinking, "Ah. But golly, that's hardly intuitive!"
-FL