How about neither?
It's not a dichotomous choice of either frying a bunch of computers or shooting up a building of people. And it's also not like getting revenge in some destructive way was the only option in this case.
You're right, there were there.
I do not count them as musical numbers though. They're ambient stuff. Not something the protagonists are actively partaking in like in Disney cartoons or animations.
Imagine having Harrison Ford and Adam Driver sing and dance the part where Solo is killed. Or Daisy Ridley and Mark Hamil while training on that merchandise for children planet.
Musical numbers is something I'd expect Disney to come up with on their own; not that much from Lucas.
But yes, that would make it even more terrible in my opinion.
I am fairly certain that he could make it worse.
As a thought experiment, think of of Episode 7 and 8 with the addition of Jar Jar Binks and even more little children.
I'd call it natural selection for the few that get lost because they can't verify directions by other means, like the apparent position of the sun or stars.
Of course there is evolution in pathogens. The common cold and influenza are good examples here. Luckily for us humans, both of these are benign in most cases where humans have a working immune system and take some time to rest.
The main difference between our immune system and these antimicrobials is that antimicrobials can not adapt.
These are basically inanimate poisons for the pathogens, which destroy their cell membranes and or otherwise inhibit their ability to reproduce.
Our immune system however is capable of 'learning', it can adapt to new circumstances.
The problematic pathogens we are talking about here are microorganisms that generally can exist outside of a host. Microorganisms whose metabolisms are pretty flexible and they can get their energy (food) from various sources.
Now these kinds of bugs, which can replicate as long as there's food (and water) and some places that weren't sterilized thoroughly enough, are always exposed to the same kind of antagonist. And due to their short replication cycles the likelihood of developing a resistance against that particular antagonist is increased.
This makes the overuse of these antimicrobials concerning, while disinfecting hospital equipment or hospital space in general, when doctors prescribe unnecessary antibiotics for things like inflamed throats because colds or flus (which are caused by viruses), when livestock is unnecessarily fed antibiotics and so forth.
When it comes vaccines you can think of it this way: Pathogens will enter in the human body no matter what. Strengthening the hosts natural immune responses does reduce the time frame in which they can mutate inside a host. It also reduces the time frame during which the host may infect other hosts. Hypothetically a super bug could emerge here as well, we should not deny this possibility. For example if a host was constantly exposed to a significant enough external supply of these pathogens, this may be a plausible scenario.
The big question would be if we're artificially speeding up that evolution with vaccination like with the overuse of antimicrobials or not.
Fortunately empirical evidence with cases like polio or small pox support the assumption that pathogens don't fare as well against a vaccinated adaptive immune system than against these 'static' antimicrobials.
Ah yes, the good old naturalist anti-science post.
I've got news for dumbasses like you. Vaccines are not like antibiotics or other antimicrobals. If you grow a culture of bacteria or fungi in your petri dish and put an appropriate antimicrobal into it, like antibiotics or antifungals, they will kill the cultures.
If you grow a culture of bacteria or fungi or have viruses in your petri dish and you put an appropriate vaccine into there nothing of consequence happens.
Why? This is because vaccines work fundamentally different. For vaccines to work a functioning immune system is required in the first place. Only then a vaccine can work by given the immune system an example of a pathogen to prepare against for future encounters. That's the point of vaccines, they improve the immune system.
Thanks to the definition of "death" and rhetoric you can just say that the primary cause of death is life itself.
Or like some of my more cynical cohorts like to say and being the title of an eastern European drama: "Life as a Fatal Sexually Transmitted Disease".
They way you phrased it here it's akin to saying that our sun will eventually turn into a red giant and kill all life on our planet. So do whatever here on Earth, I guess.
To most of us time frames still matter.
For example based on my current enjoyment of life and the prospect of staying mentally healthy, I'd much rather live to see my 80th birthday and die by the cause of "time", than to kick it at 50 because of some cardiopulmonary disease or diabetes.
The perplexing part to me was that I could see plenty of Romanian people buying a that overpriced stuff in large quantities. Shopping carts stuffed with junk food like Chio Chips (German brand) and soft drinks like Fanta (German origin) and Coca Cola. This was in one of the Kauflands in Sibiu or like we Transylvanian Saxons are calling it - Hermannstadt.
I know that at least some of them work in Germany for a couple of months and then head back home to spend money there, while others certainly have to manage to get by on Romanian wages, which can be about as low as 300€ per month. And they still spend money on those products.
This opened my eyes to two things: It looks like we've successfully turned them into crafty consumers of our western products.
And if they fully embrace the western lifestyle it's actually more affordable for them to just stay in Germany. Although I already helped a couple of families to integrate into German society over the course of the last decade, I never dared to ask for reasons to choose permanent residence here.
Wouldn't that be socialism? And isn't that what people are already complaining about so much?
Sarcasm aside, I've actually been in Romania last year, visiting my place of birth and some relatives that moved back to their homestead/farm, because they like the climate there more than in Germany.
When shopping in one of the bigger cities I noticed that German supermarket chains have sprouted all over the place there.
There They have a lot of products that are originally from western European states like Germany or France or the UK. At least some of these products appear to be produced locally to be sold for the local market. There are also some differences in the properties of the products.
For example I brought some body wash with me from Germany and saw the same product there in the shelves. Because I was interested I bought a bottle. When I looked at the prices I was already baffled. Things don't only cost more in terms of the purchasing power of Romanian people, things cost even more than the same brand at the same quantities costs in Germany for example.
Then when I was back at the farm I compared both.
While the bottles looked nearly identical, besides of the printed labels (they used Romanian of course), after I opened the bottle I already noticed the different smell. Applied to my skin the gels even felt a bit different. I can't say much about the quality because of low sample size and little objective ways of comparison, although I do not expect the Romanian product to be superior here or at least proportionally better to justify the higher price.
Platforms like Netflix have to struggle with different issues like licensing the series, which can work differently for each country. If there are TV channels that already are a licence holder in that specific country this becomes even more complicated.
The EU would first have to unify the licensing market in some way, or the member states would have to reach some consensus through other means, before this can happen.
That is unlikely to begin with.
The main problem of cloud based gaming is having issues with latencies and especially inconsistent lattencies (jitter).
We don't have any technology that can effectively compensate for these phenomenon, which would be a requirement to enable remote gameplay with the responsiveness of a local gaming PC or gaming console.
A lot of the games kids play these days are fast paced. And while many of them are multiplayers that work over the internet, these games still have to use a predictive 'netcode' to deliver the smooth and responsive gamplay on the client machines that people have come to expect.
The tricky thing about these predictive networking solutions is that they have to be implemented on the client side as well as on the server side (if applicable, because it may just as well be a P2P network). And for them to work properly, the client side predictions also have to be done on the client side, which again requires hardware powerful enough to do this on the client side.
My educated guess here is that unless we revolutionize the way the internet works or find communication methods that are multiple times as fast as what we have now over tethered copper or fibre optics, there will always be some place for gaming PCs and consoles. Although we might see this place shrinking down over time.
Atheism is as much a religion as turning off the TV is a TV channel.
The official religion of Communism, which has pretty much all the qualities of a religion, is Communism itself.
This is pretty evident by the fact that virtually all of the great communist leaders have had themselves elevated to a godlike status as the fathers of the nation. They created huge personality cults around themselves, which celebrated them in various ways not unlike some kind of religious guru figure.
This is probably also the main reason why communist leaders persecuted other religion, because they wanted citizens to have no other gods besides of themselves.
I usually avoid these topics. But allow me a bit of whataboutery here (well not exactly that).
These are the post 9/11 reactionary measures that governments are pushing all around the world after being empowered by such tragedies. A most disgusting method if you ask me.
And in the face of such events, where fear is still at its peak, it is also the best situation for political parties and or governments to propose and push through the erosion of our liberties. People are likely to cheer for them and shut up critical discourse with platitudes.
Although some contextual translation into "besiegt" (defeated/beaten) or "erwischt" (busted/caught) or "vernichtet" (destroyed/annihilated) are possible here and there, there is no thought concept of "pwned" in the German language that can be associated with a specific word.
Hence someone belonging to the younger generations in Germany would just say "pwned", if it isn't use within the context of a sentence that allows for a different expression to be used. Even then they may still say "pwned" because it's convenient.
Although as of yet it has not been officially adopted into the German language through the Duden, it's certainly on the track to become a loanword.
I am not sure about mass production, but many of these things are already available. Things like (possible multiuse) bamboo plates and cutlery as well as disposable straws, bowls, and cups are easily available all the time here in Germany through Amazon and some times through supermarkets/discounters as well.
I suppose the main problem people have with these is their price. Most bamboo products are more expensive than single use plastic equivalents.
Business as usual, we'll bring it to the Bundesverfassungsgericht.
After all it's their job to clean up the mess our politicians do on a regular basis.
If that part of the separation of powers doen't work any more maybe it's time for pitchforks, torches, and nooses again.
What you mean is called enabling devices.
They are used in fiction to enable certain plot developments in a story.
Here mainstream SciFi TV series have a very bad reputation for throwing these around carelessly, basically using them like magic while burying that magic under a myriad of technobabble.
From a story telling perspective I also have to disagree on the time travel vs. FTL thing. While both may be impossible for all we know, time travel is usually the far more lazy choice for a story writer as an enabling device. Why?
Nobody really understands how time travel into the past would work. It's not something that we can study using physics. So all of our ideas about it rely on works of fiction. Would it work like Back to the Future, where all your actions in the past would somehow affect your future self in the past? Would it work like in the Butterfly Effect, where you can't meet your past self because you are your past self. And where actions in the past affect your future (which may be in alternative timelines), but only when you 'travel back to the future'? Would it work by creating alternative time lines that run in parallel, where you practically remain untouched but only the world around you changes? All while things in other timelines remain to be like they were? This last one also takes care of things many time travel paradoxes.
The bottom line is, who knows? And that is the problem, as a writer can justify pretty much whatever with time travel by inventing their own time travel mechanics/dynamics.
FTL is a different beast. I dare to wager that most people understand the concept for travelling in the 3 dimensions. You want to reach a distant target? It'll take you some time to get there. Divide the distance travelled by the time it took and you get your average velocity. Easy enough.
What FTL does here first and foremost is to reduce travel times by increasing velocities (beyond what we know is possible without losing information in the process).
It's analogous to technological advancements like horse drawn carriages, ships, trains, cars, and eventually aeroplanes. All these advancements helped to reduce travel times, to get humans to distant places in a more timely fashion. This may also be one of the reasons why so many SciFi writers see FTL as a given in the future.
People roughly know what to expect from FTL exactly because of those real world analogies to methods of travelling. It's implied that it requires some kind of engine, which requires certain conditions to work and may not work under other conditions. An engine that can fail or break like any piece of technology. Here a writer can't be as sloppy and or lazy without a higher risk of breaking suspension of disbelief and possibly alienating their audience.
Of course you don't have to use either one of those enabling devices if you're a writer work the money. But I think it's easy to see why FTL is the preferred method for most space sciences fiction.
It would be sooo much more effective if google and facebook did this. Even if it only was for a single day. After all, these will be the companies who are affected by the new laws the most.
Unfortunately they don't seem to value fighting copyright reforms as highly as the profit generated by a single day of regular usage.
Maybe if you enjoy seeing how people who like to think they're among the smart types devolve into hard tribalism, repeating some the lowest of the political rhetoric that you can find.
If it only was about political discourse on a more rational basis. But no, we can't have that. There must always be some who generalize with flame bates like "stupid Americans", "stupid EUians", "stupid Russians", "stupid Nazis (Germans)", and so forth. Other trolls mod them up. Other people feel offended by the statement and come up with equally stupid rebuttals, offending other parties by generalizing and "stupid". Then we enter a shit storm loop with no other exit condition than ad nauseam.
Personally, I can have that on plenty of other platforms. I don't also need it here. But I have to accept that this is what Slashdot has become.
Taking a look at the blocked number list in my Fritz!Box 7490, there are a bit over 20 numbers in there since 2014. All of which I got on my unlisted land-line number. I also look up every individual number and know that they're supposedly from all over the planet.
All of the blocked numbers are scammers that told me I've won something, somewhere where I never participated and similar things. I could not tell whether they were robocalls or not, since I usually hang up long before.
It's difficult to say how often they'd call my number if I didn't block them manually. In a couple of instances, when I was not at home I received calls in intervals of one hour for 5 hours. The scammers are definitely there, however the occurrence of being called by a unique number is manageable.
Are we playing Myspace now?
Alright, I used to listen to Death Metal in the past, today not so much any more. But there are still songs I could listen to on occasions. I always found the concept of a favourite song a bit weird. At least for me these things are very temporary.
Listening to that kind of music certainly desensitized me a bit to electronic distortion and the whole Loudness War. While some of my friends hated the unnaturally introduced artifacts like occasional clipping and distorted guitars, I thought that it could be utilized for its very own aesthetics by widening the audio spectrum to its limits. Well, maybe becoming an electric engineer during that time also had something to do with that opinion.
Today I have more of an each to their own attitude and listen to mostly Electronica like Glitch on my Audeze LCD-2. It's quite ironic to listen to music that can be considered Lo-Fi on such expensive headphones, isn't it? Maybe. At least subjectively their good square wave response helps me to make the best out of that kind of music.
Slashdot Mirror
How about neither?
It's not a dichotomous choice of either frying a bunch of computers or shooting up a building of people. And it's also not like getting revenge in some destructive way was the only option in this case.
"Most crime is" vs "You are assuming all people".
Can you spot the difference here?
You're right, there were there.
I do not count them as musical numbers though. They're ambient stuff. Not something the protagonists are actively partaking in like in Disney cartoons or animations.
Imagine having Harrison Ford and Adam Driver sing and dance the part where Solo is killed. Or Daisy Ridley and Mark Hamil while training on that merchandise for children planet.
Musical numbers is something I'd expect Disney to come up with on their own; not that much from Lucas.
But yes, that would make it even more terrible in my opinion.
I am fairly certain that he could make it worse.
As a thought experiment, think of of Episode 7 and 8 with the addition of Jar Jar Binks and even more little children.
Never been there, but I've heard terrible things about Wisconsin.
Well, I suppose those settlers had good enough survival skills to not starve to death when they got lost.
I'd call it natural selection for the few that get lost because they can't verify directions by other means, like the apparent position of the sun or stars.
Of course there is evolution in pathogens. The common cold and influenza are good examples here. Luckily for us humans, both of these are benign in most cases where humans have a working immune system and take some time to rest.
The main difference between our immune system and these antimicrobials is that antimicrobials can not adapt.
These are basically inanimate poisons for the pathogens, which destroy their cell membranes and or otherwise inhibit their ability to reproduce.
Our immune system however is capable of 'learning', it can adapt to new circumstances.
The problematic pathogens we are talking about here are microorganisms that generally can exist outside of a host. Microorganisms whose metabolisms are pretty flexible and they can get their energy (food) from various sources.
Now these kinds of bugs, which can replicate as long as there's food (and water) and some places that weren't sterilized thoroughly enough, are always exposed to the same kind of antagonist.
And due to their short replication cycles the likelihood of developing a resistance against that particular antagonist is increased.
This makes the overuse of these antimicrobials concerning, while disinfecting hospital equipment or hospital space in general, when doctors prescribe unnecessary antibiotics for things like inflamed throats because colds or flus (which are caused by viruses), when livestock is unnecessarily fed antibiotics and so forth.
When it comes vaccines you can think of it this way: Pathogens will enter in the human body no matter what.
Strengthening the hosts natural immune responses does reduce the time frame in which they can mutate inside a host.
It also reduces the time frame during which the host may infect other hosts.
Hypothetically a super bug could emerge here as well, we should not deny this possibility. For example if a host was constantly exposed to a significant enough external supply of these pathogens, this may be a plausible scenario.
The big question would be if we're artificially speeding up that evolution with vaccination like with the overuse of antimicrobials or not.
Fortunately empirical evidence with cases like polio or small pox support the assumption that pathogens don't fare as well against a vaccinated adaptive immune system than against these 'static' antimicrobials.
Ah yes, the good old naturalist anti-science post.
I've got news for dumbasses like you. Vaccines are not like antibiotics or other antimicrobals.
If you grow a culture of bacteria or fungi in your petri dish and put an appropriate antimicrobal into it, like antibiotics or antifungals, they will kill the cultures.
If you grow a culture of bacteria or fungi or have viruses in your petri dish and you put an appropriate vaccine into there nothing of consequence happens.
Why? This is because vaccines work fundamentally different. For vaccines to work a functioning immune system is required in the first place. Only then a vaccine can work by given the immune system an example of a pathogen to prepare against for future encounters. That's the point of vaccines, they improve the immune system.
Thanks to the definition of "death" and rhetoric you can just say that the primary cause of death is life itself.
Or like some of my more cynical cohorts like to say and being the title of an eastern European drama: "Life as a Fatal Sexually Transmitted Disease".
They way you phrased it here it's akin to saying that our sun will eventually turn into a red giant and kill all life on our planet. So do whatever here on Earth, I guess.
To most of us time frames still matter.
For example based on my current enjoyment of life and the prospect of staying mentally healthy, I'd much rather live to see my 80th birthday and die by the cause of "time", than to kick it at 50 because of some cardiopulmonary disease or diabetes.
The perplexing part to me was that I could see plenty of Romanian people buying a that overpriced stuff in large quantities. Shopping carts stuffed with junk food like Chio Chips (German brand) and soft drinks like Fanta (German origin) and Coca Cola. This was in one of the Kauflands in Sibiu or like we Transylvanian Saxons are calling it - Hermannstadt.
I know that at least some of them work in Germany for a couple of months and then head back home to spend money there, while others certainly have to manage to get by on Romanian wages, which can be about as low as 300€ per month. And they still spend money on those products.
This opened my eyes to two things: It looks like we've successfully turned them into crafty consumers of our western products. And if they fully embrace the western lifestyle it's actually more affordable for them to just stay in Germany. Although I already helped a couple of families to integrate into German society over the course of the last decade, I never dared to ask for reasons to choose permanent residence here.
Wouldn't that be socialism? And isn't that what people are already complaining about so much?
Sarcasm aside, I've actually been in Romania last year, visiting my place of birth and some relatives that moved back to their homestead/farm, because they like the climate there more than in Germany.
When shopping in one of the bigger cities I noticed that German supermarket chains have sprouted all over the place there.
There They have a lot of products that are originally from western European states like Germany or France or the UK. At least some of these products appear to be produced locally to be sold for the local market. There are also some differences in the properties of the products.
For example I brought some body wash with me from Germany and saw the same product there in the shelves. Because I was interested I bought a bottle. When I looked at the prices I was already baffled. Things don't only cost more in terms of the purchasing power of Romanian people, things cost even more than the same brand at the same quantities costs in Germany for example.
Then when I was back at the farm I compared both. While the bottles looked nearly identical, besides of the printed labels (they used Romanian of course), after I opened the bottle I already noticed the different smell. Applied to my skin the gels even felt a bit different. I can't say much about the quality because of low sample size and little objective ways of comparison, although I do not expect the Romanian product to be superior here or at least proportionally better to justify the higher price.
Platforms like Netflix have to struggle with different issues like licensing the series, which can work differently for each country. If there are TV channels that already are a licence holder in that specific country this becomes even more complicated.
The EU would first have to unify the licensing market in some way, or the member states would have to reach some consensus through other means, before this can happen.
That is unlikely to begin with.
The main problem of cloud based gaming is having issues with latencies and especially inconsistent lattencies (jitter).
We don't have any technology that can effectively compensate for these phenomenon, which would be a requirement to enable remote gameplay with the responsiveness of a local gaming PC or gaming console.
A lot of the games kids play these days are fast paced. And while many of them are multiplayers that work over the internet, these games still have to use a predictive 'netcode' to deliver the smooth and responsive gamplay on the client machines that people have come to expect.
The tricky thing about these predictive networking solutions is that they have to be implemented on the client side as well as on the server side (if applicable, because it may just as well be a P2P network). And for them to work properly, the client side predictions also have to be done on the client side, which again requires hardware powerful enough to do this on the client side.
My educated guess here is that unless we revolutionize the way the internet works or find communication methods that are multiple times as fast as what we have now over tethered copper or fibre optics, there will always be some place for gaming PCs and consoles. Although we might see this place shrinking down over time.
Atheism is as much a religion as turning off the TV is a TV channel.
The official religion of Communism, which has pretty much all the qualities of a religion, is Communism itself.
This is pretty evident by the fact that virtually all of the great communist leaders have had themselves elevated to a godlike status as the fathers of the nation. They created huge personality cults around themselves, which celebrated them in various ways not unlike some kind of religious guru figure.
This is probably also the main reason why communist leaders persecuted other religion, because they wanted citizens to have no other gods besides of themselves.
I usually avoid these topics. But allow me a bit of whataboutery here (well not exactly that).
These are the post 9/11 reactionary measures that governments are pushing all around the world after being empowered by such tragedies. A most disgusting method if you ask me.
And in the face of such events, where fear is still at its peak, it is also the best situation for political parties and or governments to propose and push through the erosion of our liberties. People are likely to cheer for them and shut up critical discourse with platitudes.
Although some contextual translation into "besiegt" (defeated/beaten) or "erwischt" (busted/caught) or "vernichtet" (destroyed/annihilated) are possible here and there, there is no thought concept of "pwned" in the German language that can be associated with a specific word.
Hence someone belonging to the younger generations in Germany would just say "pwned", if it isn't use within the context of a sentence that allows for a different expression to be used. Even then they may still say "pwned" because it's convenient.
Although as of yet it has not been officially adopted into the German language through the Duden, it's certainly on the track to become a loanword.
I am not sure about mass production, but many of these things are already available. Things like (possible multiuse) bamboo plates and cutlery as well as disposable straws, bowls, and cups are easily available all the time here in Germany through Amazon and some times through supermarkets/discounters as well.
I suppose the main problem people have with these is their price. Most bamboo products are more expensive than single use plastic equivalents.
Business as usual, we'll bring it to the Bundesverfassungsgericht.
After all it's their job to clean up the mess our politicians do on a regular basis.
If that part of the separation of powers doen't work any more maybe it's time for pitchforks, torches, and nooses again.
What you mean is called enabling devices.
They are used in fiction to enable certain plot developments in a story.
Here mainstream SciFi TV series have a very bad reputation for throwing these around carelessly, basically using them like magic while burying that magic under a myriad of technobabble.
From a story telling perspective I also have to disagree on the time travel vs. FTL thing. While both may be impossible for all we know, time travel is usually the far more lazy choice for a story writer as an enabling device. Why?
Nobody really understands how time travel into the past would work. It's not something that we can study using physics. So all of our ideas about it rely on works of fiction. Would it work like Back to the Future, where all your actions in the past would somehow affect your future self in the past? Would it work like in the Butterfly Effect, where you can't meet your past self because you are your past self. And where actions in the past affect your future (which may be in alternative timelines), but only when you 'travel back to the future'? Would it work by creating alternative time lines that run in parallel, where you practically remain untouched but only the world around you changes? All while things in other timelines remain to be like they were? This last one also takes care of things many time travel paradoxes.
The bottom line is, who knows? And that is the problem, as a writer can justify pretty much whatever with time travel by inventing their own time travel mechanics/dynamics.
FTL is a different beast. I dare to wager that most people understand the concept for travelling in the 3 dimensions. You want to reach a distant target? It'll take you some time to get there. Divide the distance travelled by the time it took and you get your average velocity. Easy enough.
What FTL does here first and foremost is to reduce travel times by increasing velocities (beyond what we know is possible without losing information in the process).
It's analogous to technological advancements like horse drawn carriages, ships, trains, cars, and eventually aeroplanes. All these advancements helped to reduce travel times, to get humans to distant places in a more timely fashion. This may also be one of the reasons why so many SciFi writers see FTL as a given in the future.
People roughly know what to expect from FTL exactly because of those real world analogies to methods of travelling. It's implied that it requires some kind of engine, which requires certain conditions to work and may not work under other conditions. An engine that can fail or break like any piece of technology. Here a writer can't be as sloppy and or lazy without a higher risk of breaking suspension of disbelief and possibly alienating their audience.
Of course you don't have to use either one of those enabling devices if you're a writer work the money. But I think it's easy to see why FTL is the preferred method for most space sciences fiction.
It would be sooo much more effective if google and facebook did this. Even if it only was for a single day. After all, these will be the companies who are affected by the new laws the most.
Unfortunately they don't seem to value fighting copyright reforms as highly as the profit generated by a single day of regular usage.
Maybe if you enjoy seeing how people who like to think they're among the smart types devolve into hard tribalism, repeating some the lowest of the political rhetoric that you can find.
If it only was about political discourse on a more rational basis. But no, we can't have that. There must always be some who generalize with flame bates like "stupid Americans", "stupid EUians", "stupid Russians", "stupid Nazis (Germans)", and so forth. Other trolls mod them up. Other people feel offended by the statement and come up with equally stupid rebuttals, offending other parties by generalizing and "stupid". Then we enter a shit storm loop with no other exit condition than ad nauseam.
Personally, I can have that on plenty of other platforms. I don't also need it here. But I have to accept that this is what Slashdot has become.
Taking a look at the blocked number list in my Fritz!Box 7490, there are a bit over 20 numbers in there since 2014. All of which I got on my unlisted land-line number. I also look up every individual number and know that they're supposedly from all over the planet.
All of the blocked numbers are scammers that told me I've won something, somewhere where I never participated and similar things. I could not tell whether they were robocalls or not, since I usually hang up long before.
It's difficult to say how often they'd call my number if I didn't block them manually. In a couple of instances, when I was not at home I received calls in intervals of one hour for 5 hours. The scammers are definitely there, however the occurrence of being called by a unique number is manageable.
On my mobile phone I block all unknown numbers.
Are we playing Myspace now?
Alright, I used to listen to Death Metal in the past, today not so much any more. But there are still songs I could listen to on occasions. I always found the concept of a favourite song a bit weird. At least for me these things are very temporary.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... - Opeth
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... - Meshuggah
Listening to that kind of music certainly desensitized me a bit to electronic distortion and the whole Loudness War. While some of my friends hated the unnaturally introduced artifacts like occasional clipping and distorted guitars, I thought that it could be utilized for its very own aesthetics by widening the audio spectrum to its limits. Well, maybe becoming an electric engineer during that time also had something to do with that opinion.
Today I have more of an each to their own attitude and listen to mostly Electronica like Glitch on my Audeze LCD-2.
It's quite ironic to listen to music that can be considered Lo-Fi on such expensive headphones, isn't it? Maybe. At least subjectively their good square wave response helps me to make the best out of that kind of music.