It's called the "Dead Sea effect". I've seen it happen in other abusive workplaces, where the employees with the most bargaining power and flexibility leave, leaving only people who are with young families (and can't move) or are complete deadshits (and can't find other work behind).
So a bunch of Dunning-Kruger internet dumbshits download somebody else's half-arsed software to DDoS websites of powerful and well-connected people. And then wonder why they're getting rolled up by the police. Colour me surprised.
For sixteen year olds, this is understandable -- it seems to be the optimum age for thinking you know everything while not actually knowing anything at all. Anybody else, well, you'll be old enough to serve time, which is just as well, because you probably deserve it for being so stupid.
I do respect Anonymous for taking the fight to some very bad, otherwise-untouchable people, like the Scientologists, but at some point, if you don't use your brain and screw up, you have to accept the consequences. And I suspect that the only reason why half of Anonymous do what they do, is because they don't actually appreciate the danger of what they're doing.
Oh yeah, and you need a reactor to burn it in too. Ignore all the stupid internet-crackpot garbage about Lew Rockwell, polywell, cold fusion and rubbish like that -- it's a super hard problem which will take billions of dollars and decades to solve.
Too bad the conservatives are doing their best to defund fusion research and limit the US' involvement in international fusion research.
Double-check your facts. It's helium-3 that's in abundance on the Moon, not tritium. Helium-3 is a byproduct of tritium decay. Tritium has a short halflife and doesn't accumulate over geological timescales.
Tritium can be manufactured on Earth. Future fusion reactors (at least the magnetic confinement type, like ITER), will almost certainly test or operate lithium breeding blankets that'll produce tritium in abundance, and it'll hardly be worth millions of dollars a kilogram to ship a bulky product all the way back to Earth.
After all, BUSINESS is America's business. And as we all know, if it's possible for a law to be repurposed to protect the profits of a private tyranny, it will happen.
Bob Pissant and his friends need a smack in the head for trying yet another corporatist stunt.
Given the choice between the Americans and the mullahs, I think I'd take my chances with the yanks. The Iranians don't get respect from anybody apart from bloodthirsty, brutish dictators, because they are brutish dictators themselves.
Anyway, if they don't like the things the way they are, they need get out of the Islamic habit of blaming whitey for everything, and harden the fuck up.
Stuxnet might've worked if it wasn't for those stupid, selfish loudmouth losers at WikiLeaks.
In case these preening, self-aggrandizing tossers didn't notice -- we're in an ongoing conflict with some very nasty people. These arsehats just couldn't help themselves..
Actually, a developer stuck with antiquated tools that shackle me to a Windows development environment. Not everybody gets their choice of OS. At home, apart from work, I avoid that shit completely.
I know AV is worthless, but it's still better than going naked. I had a legal copy of it lying around, so I went with that. Otherwise, I might've reached for something a bit faster and more reputable, e.g. Sophos, Kaspersky.
I recently had to install Windows 7 at home, and decided to put Norton AV on my machine. I boot up on Windows roughly once every couple of weeks to run a specific application. So I notice Norton AV popping up loads of windows, running it's intrusive update process about bombarding me with scary looking crap prompting me to read about the "latest security threats from cyber-criminals". Hair-raising stuff, especially if you're not a computer specialist.
I'm an IT professional, and _I_ find this behaviour sleazy, unethical, annoying and slightly alarming. This is a product I paid GOOD MONEY FOR. I'm PAYING to be bullied, essentially.
So I can just imagine the average user being bullied and terrified by this crap... which is not only enriching the AV vendors, but also making regular folk like lambs to the slaughter for the forces of evil out there.
I'd say that the consumer, criminals and the AV companies are really inhabitants of one ecosystem: prey, parasites and predators respectively.
Oh, Barcelona is a lovely city -- my partner is from there are we go there all the time. We just never venture out in public (especially interesting touristy/noteworthy or the metro) with anything we can't afford to lose.
The idea goes that people who tend to break big rules tend to also break little rules. So cracking down on minor infractions is supposed to do several things: give the police an opportunity for habitual criminals to become known to them; give them an opportunity to actually catch the bigger fish using minor offences as holding charges; and also drastically reduce "broken windows", or the casual rulebreaking that sends a signal to everybody that "anything goes".
Given what I've seen of France (and much of southern Europe) though, casual rulebreaking and low-level disorder is everywhere, and makes for a very uncomfortable environment. Organised crime thrives in the south of France (always has), and the lax and overly tolerant attitudes of the authorities in Barcelona and Madrid have made them hazardous places indeed, since the morons there think that effective law enforcement == Franco.
What we're seeing here is a new form of tribalism. The Right, in particular, are a set of tribes, and everything they see in the world is framed in that knuckle-dragging tribal mindset.
Science is prestigious and has authority, but interestingly, the stupid and retarded amongst it are happy to disregard its conclusions if it contradicts any of their tribal beliefs. Likewise, conservatives are all about sticking to social mores and obeying authority, but ONLY when that authority (science in this case) doesn't challenge their tribal beliefs.
This stupid braindead tribal worldview manifests themselves in other ways -- the Tea Party have driven a massive uptick in the sales of books by rightwing "philosophers" like Joseph Hayek. Most of the tea partiers bought their copies of "The Road to Serfdom" only because Glenn Beck told them to, not because they actually have the brainpower to read Hayek and understand his conclusions. Not unlike the Little Black Book or Mein Kampf, which sold in the millions but for the most part, remained unread.
Am I the only impression that the people who write for (and read) SingularityHub are either clueless attention whores like Jon Katz, or basement-dwelling nerds with a tenuous grip on reality (at best) fapping off to science fiction?
I just absolutely love the American nutjob libertoon Right and their obsession with moral hazard.
So these firefighters let the house burn, abandoning those poor animals inside to an agonizing, slow death, because drooling idiot teabaggers are terrified, that some poor person somewhere MIGHT get a free ride.
Ask them about moral hazard and bailouts for the bankster spivs on Wall Street? Crickets and tumbleweeds.
This is why I loathe rightwing libertarians. The hypocrisy stinks to high heaven.
I see ISPs charging to rat out their subscribers as a good thing. For starters, it cuts down on morally bankrupt ambulance-chasers wasting everyone's time with pointless fishing expeditions. Remember, we're talking ACS:Law, the kings of all ambulance chasers -- they'll happily try and make a buck at somebody else's expense, including your ISP (who'll happily pass on the cost) for a few squalid pounds.
That bastard has already ridden the wave and he's now a very old man. He's had a lifetime to cause trouble and enjoy his mostly-ill-gotten gains, and is now even worse, because he retains his power, while going senile.
Profit does not have to be the only motivation for making shit up. I suspect that the industrial-grade crazies of the world (like Hulda Clark), are motivated less by cash, than by a desire to be recognised as a maverick genius, etc.
... and the mark of a good skeptic, is somebody who understands that they realistically cannot know all that much of anything, and to defer to the judgement of experts -- and not just ANY experts, but recognised experts.
And I disagree that scientific skeptics are (as) susceptible to the Dunning Kruger Effect as the cranks and New Agers. At least the skeptics don't pretend they know more than people who've been to university (and have at least a basic enough grounding in physics and medicine that they know NOTHING about it).
The idea that my Granddad -- who thinks he has magic TK powers -- is practicing some kind of science beyond my comprehension, is not very plausible.
There surely has to be a Rule 34 for pseudoscientific crap.
"If it exists, there is woo of it".
There's physics and quantum woo (Deepak Chopra), food and nutrition woo, health woo, laundry woo, automotive woo, fortune-telling and divination woo, religious woo.... wouldn't stupid and silly ideas like hard AI and the singularity count as "IT woo"?
And once the power of the incoming beam exceeds a certain threshold, the reflective surface doesn't do much good anyway. Ablative coatings would burn away too fast and add too much weight. From the POV of the attacker, all they need to do is increase power and/or dwell time.
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It's called the "Dead Sea effect". I've seen it happen in other abusive workplaces, where the employees with the most bargaining power and flexibility leave, leaving only people who are with young families (and can't move) or are complete deadshits (and can't find other work behind).
So a bunch of Dunning-Kruger internet dumbshits download somebody else's half-arsed software to DDoS websites of powerful and well-connected people. And then wonder why they're getting rolled up by the police. Colour me surprised.
For sixteen year olds, this is understandable -- it seems to be the optimum age for thinking you know everything while not actually knowing anything at all. Anybody else, well, you'll be old enough to serve time, which is just as well, because you probably deserve it for being so stupid.
I do respect Anonymous for taking the fight to some very bad, otherwise-untouchable people, like the Scientologists, but at some point, if you don't use your brain and screw up, you have to accept the consequences. And I suspect that the only reason why half of Anonymous do what they do, is because they don't actually appreciate the danger of what they're doing.
Oh yeah, and you need a reactor to burn it in too. Ignore all the stupid internet-crackpot garbage about Lew Rockwell, polywell, cold fusion and rubbish like that -- it's a super hard problem which will take billions of dollars and decades to solve.
Too bad the conservatives are doing their best to defund fusion research and limit the US' involvement in international fusion research.
Double-check your facts. It's helium-3 that's in abundance on the Moon, not tritium. Helium-3 is a byproduct of tritium decay. Tritium has a short halflife and doesn't accumulate over geological timescales.
Tritium can be manufactured on Earth. Future fusion reactors (at least the magnetic confinement type, like ITER), will almost certainly test or operate lithium breeding blankets that'll produce tritium in abundance, and it'll hardly be worth millions of dollars a kilogram to ship a bulky product all the way back to Earth.
Julian Assange is _special_, so little niceties like laws, rules and regulations don't apply to him.
After all, BUSINESS is America's business. And as we all know, if it's possible for a law to be repurposed to protect the profits of a private tyranny, it will happen.
Bob Pissant and his friends need a smack in the head for trying yet another corporatist stunt.
Given the choice between the Americans and the mullahs, I think I'd take my chances with the yanks. The Iranians don't get respect from anybody apart from bloodthirsty, brutish dictators, because they are brutish dictators themselves.
Anyway, if they don't like the things the way they are, they need get out of the Islamic habit of blaming whitey for everything, and harden the fuck up.
Stuxnet might've worked if it wasn't for those stupid, selfish loudmouth losers at WikiLeaks.
In case these preening, self-aggrandizing tossers didn't notice -- we're in an ongoing conflict with some very nasty people. These arsehats just couldn't help themselves..
Actually, a developer stuck with antiquated tools that shackle me to a Windows development environment. Not everybody gets their choice of OS. At home, apart from work, I avoid that shit completely.
[rimshot]
I know AV is worthless, but it's still better than going naked. I had a legal copy of it lying around, so I went with that. Otherwise, I might've reached for something a bit faster and more reputable, e.g. Sophos, Kaspersky.
Colour me surprised.
I recently had to install Windows 7 at home, and decided to put Norton AV on my machine. I boot up on Windows roughly once every couple of weeks to run a specific application. So I notice Norton AV popping up loads of windows, running it's intrusive update process about bombarding me with scary looking crap prompting me to read about the "latest security threats from cyber-criminals". Hair-raising stuff, especially if you're not a computer specialist.
I'm an IT professional, and _I_ find this behaviour sleazy, unethical, annoying and slightly alarming. This is a product I paid GOOD MONEY FOR. I'm PAYING to be bullied, essentially.
So I can just imagine the average user being bullied and terrified by this crap... which is not only enriching the AV vendors, but also making regular folk like lambs to the slaughter for the forces of evil out there.
I'd say that the consumer, criminals and the AV companies are really inhabitants of one ecosystem: prey, parasites and predators respectively.
Oh, Barcelona is a lovely city -- my partner is from there are we go there all the time. We just never venture out in public (especially interesting touristy/noteworthy or the metro) with anything we can't afford to lose.
The idea goes that people who tend to break big rules tend to also break little rules. So cracking down on minor infractions is supposed to do several things: give the police an opportunity for habitual criminals to become known to them; give them an opportunity to actually catch the bigger fish using minor offences as holding charges; and also drastically reduce "broken windows", or the casual rulebreaking that sends a signal to everybody that "anything goes".
Given what I've seen of France (and much of southern Europe) though, casual rulebreaking and low-level disorder is everywhere, and makes for a very uncomfortable environment. Organised crime thrives in the south of France (always has), and the lax and overly tolerant attitudes of the authorities in Barcelona and Madrid have made them hazardous places indeed, since the morons there think that effective law enforcement == Franco.
What we're seeing here is a new form of tribalism. The Right, in particular, are a set of tribes, and everything they see in the world is framed in that knuckle-dragging tribal mindset.
Science is prestigious and has authority, but interestingly, the stupid and retarded amongst it are happy to disregard its conclusions if it contradicts any of their tribal beliefs. Likewise, conservatives are all about sticking to social mores and obeying authority, but ONLY when that authority (science in this case) doesn't challenge their tribal beliefs.
This stupid braindead tribal worldview manifests themselves in other ways -- the Tea Party have driven a massive uptick in the sales of books by rightwing "philosophers" like Joseph Hayek. Most of the tea partiers bought their copies of "The Road to Serfdom" only because Glenn Beck told them to, not because they actually have the brainpower to read Hayek and understand his conclusions. Not unlike the Little Black Book or Mein Kampf, which sold in the millions but for the most part, remained unread.
e.g. "SCIENCE!!111one some dweeb measures the action potentials in 15 rat neurons, THE SINGULARITY IS HERE *fap* *fap* *fap*
Am I the only impression that the people who write for (and read) SingularityHub are either clueless attention whores like Jon Katz, or basement-dwelling nerds with a tenuous grip on reality (at best) fapping off to science fiction?
I just absolutely love the American nutjob libertoon Right and their obsession with moral hazard.
So these firefighters let the house burn, abandoning those poor animals inside to an agonizing, slow death, because drooling idiot teabaggers are terrified, that some poor person somewhere MIGHT get a free ride.
Ask them about moral hazard and bailouts for the bankster spivs on Wall Street? Crickets and tumbleweeds.
This is why I loathe rightwing libertarians. The hypocrisy stinks to high heaven.
I see ISPs charging to rat out their subscribers as a good thing. For starters, it cuts down on morally bankrupt ambulance-chasers wasting everyone's time with pointless fishing expeditions. Remember, we're talking ACS:Law, the kings of all ambulance chasers -- they'll happily try and make a buck at somebody else's expense, including your ISP (who'll happily pass on the cost) for a few squalid pounds.
That bastard has already ridden the wave and he's now a very old man. He's had a lifetime to cause trouble and enjoy his mostly-ill-gotten gains, and is now even worse, because he retains his power, while going senile.
He should have been dealt with decades ago.
Profit does not have to be the only motivation for making shit up. I suspect that the industrial-grade crazies of the world (like Hulda Clark), are motivated less by cash, than by a desire to be recognised as a maverick genius, etc.
... and the mark of a good skeptic, is somebody who understands that they realistically cannot know all that much of anything, and to defer to the judgement of experts -- and not just ANY experts, but recognised experts.
And I disagree that scientific skeptics are (as) susceptible to the Dunning Kruger Effect as the cranks and New Agers. At least the skeptics don't pretend they know more than people who've been to university (and have at least a basic enough grounding in physics and medicine that they know NOTHING about it).
The idea that my Granddad -- who thinks he has magic TK powers -- is practicing some kind of science beyond my comprehension, is not very plausible.
You've indirectly described the Dunning Kruger Effect.
There surely has to be a Rule 34 for pseudoscientific crap.
"If it exists, there is woo of it".
There's physics and quantum woo (Deepak Chopra), food and nutrition woo, health woo, laundry woo, automotive woo, fortune-telling and divination woo, religious woo.... wouldn't stupid and silly ideas like hard AI and the singularity count as "IT woo"?
Kurtzweil is just the latest in a long line. How do you think publications like Fast Company and Wired get written?
And does anybody remember JonKatz?
And once the power of the incoming beam exceeds a certain threshold, the reflective surface doesn't do much good anyway. Ablative coatings would burn away too fast and add too much weight. From the POV of the attacker, all they need to do is increase power and/or dwell time.