It's the complexity that make it appealing. Vat grown meat will be analogous(sp?) to SPAM. Just a homogonized mishmash. No bad when you want a hotdog. Terrible when you want a steak.
though it is weird when you think about it, but continually inseminating in animal in order to continually retrieve a product (or in this case, a raw good..either way, though) from it is pretty messed up from my POV.
Granted, I'm a city boy, but you really don't know much about farming, do you? A cow only has to be inseminated once. You only ever inseminate the cow again if you want a calf. It will continue to give milk as long as you keep milking. The biological signal in all mammals is to turn off the milk when it stops being used.
Male egg chicks are at least disposed of quickly, but usually not disposed of, generally just discarded, i.e. in a dumpster or elsewhere.
I don't know where you're getting your rhetoric from, but the only dumpsters the male chicks will get dumped in is behind the Kentucky Fried. Why the hell would a farmer invest in hatching a chick, and then throw it away? Guess what male chicks turn into? CHICKENS!! You know, those things you can buy in the back of the grocery store, wrapped in plastic, and sort of looking like a bird without wings. People eat those at picnics, you know. And they're willing to pay good money to do it, too.
Well, I'm certainly glad they cleared that one up. I can't tell you the sleepless nights I've spent wondering if I existed in a spiral vs a barred spiral galaxy. With answers to such fundamental questions like these pouring forth, I'm sure our friends in Washington will continue to confiscate my property to fund their efforts.
Bankruptcy isn't a free way to get rid of debts and keep everything you have.
In theory you're correct. In reality, it is fairly easy to game the system. If you're a professional making a high 5-figure salary, bankruptcy hurts a lot. If you're a $30k/yr redneck, bankruptcy offers a way to run up a few tens of thousands of dollars of debt and then run away from it. And don't worry, some car lot will give you a loan a few months later. (Names are hidden to protect the guilty.)
If Richter can come up with 7million, he'll never touch it but have it assigned to a relative and ignore the judgement. People who think there is justice in the world are so unimaginative.
the poor with sub-poverty-level food assistance, if not simply left to starve.
What the hell are you talking about? The only people starving in America are the teenage girls who've been convinced that looking like a beanpole will make them 'liked' at school. Studies HAVE shown massive amounts of poor nutrition amoung the chronicly poor, but that is due to spending Food Stamps on junk food vs fruits and vegetables.
In the middle-class sections of US society, most pay private medical insurances.
Most people have insurance provided by their employer, or don't have it at all.
NO one in America starves, and NO one goes without shelter unless they are on the run or are too proud to live in the squalid cesspools that any nanny state creates as 'public aid'. So take your uninformed, poverty-pimping ass out into the real world and make an attempt to catch a clue.
No. This will mean less shelf space devoted to XBox accessories. Instead of 5 companies buying 5 shelves, there'll be one company buying 2 shelves.
Less shelf space devoted to XBox will diminish the coolness of owning an XBox. Why buy one if there is only 2 versions of memory cards vs 5 versions of memory cards.
Less coolness means fewer people buy XBox, which means fewer companies write games or take advantage of special features, which dimishes its coolness, which..
But you can look at pretty much anything in society and see this being used all the time. Look at how many people think things like Universal Health Care is bad,
No telling one member of society what he may charge for his services is bad. Another name for it is slavery. Unfortunately, that is a hidden prerequisite of nearly all the Universal Health Care packages.
Schools need local control,
This is because people in different locals have different values. Unfortunately, schools have extended far beyone simply teaching "reading, writing, and 'rithmtic'", and have crossed over more into indoctrination. Local control at least provides some means for various doctrines to be indoctrinated.
taxes are always bad,
This is just silly. Everyone knows that it is great for the tax collector.
paying off national debt isn't important,
Noboby says that. The argument is that it isn't worth wrecking the economy (or harpooning the next election cycle.)
the media is a left wing conspiracy,
Not nearly cohesive enough to be a conspiracy, just left wing.
nuclear power is bad,
Are you saying it isn't? The intelligent arguments hinge on whether the deadly wastes can be contained competently. At best, nuclear is simply considered better than the other alternatives.
republicans are good with money
Just got my paperwork from last years tax cycle to send in (I'm filing late). The Republicans seem to be doing a good job of handling a lot more of my money than I'd like.
tax cuts jump start the economy etc etc...
If the econonmy is a consumer economy, how could it hurt?
Thanks for proving the point of the article, Mr. Madison.
The Concorde was forbidden to fly over the Continental US because Boeing bought off the boys in Washington. You see, the Concorde wasn't built by a US company, and would threaten the business model of Boeings trans-Atlantic fleet. The target market for the Concorde was Paris to LA, California flights. Paris to New York just barely made the time savings worthwhile.
Most mountainous regions are fairly remote. The property value of vertical land is almost non-existant as is.
Finally, hitting a wall of air, even at 10,000 ft at escape velocity would be like hitting a brick wall. Any concievable vehicle would simply explode. The real solution is to pump air in behind the vehicle. The vehicle would get an extra boost, and on exit from the tunnel, the vehicle will gradually transition into quickly thinning static air. The vehicle would only be going a few hundred mph on exit, so rockets would still be needed....but it would be past the hardest part of the lift off with a lot of stored energy already.
The distraction effort is nearly perfect because so few people really can bring themselves to believe that every single member of the state is a crooked asshole only out for himself.
Life would be much easier for you if you could bring yourself to believe that the description is not limited to members of the state.
I disagree here, I would say that MS is indeed improving things. That is what the blogging has convinced me of.
'Improving things'?...as in things that are taken for granted in every other sector of the industry? If someone built a dam just upstream from your house without following industry standards, would it make you feel any better that they were 'improving things' when you see them driving piles in an attempt to stop the cracks. Yes, UNIX variant have suffered from the same problems that Windows is experiencing. Why the hell didn't they learn about them? You want to give them kudos for doing buffer overrun checks? A gold star of implementing least privileges?
Dude, go back to my first post. A bunch of jacklegs come around calling themselves carpenters, though they know nothing about building houses. They are not to get credit for building the second half better, when the first half is a crumbling POS.
I used DR-DOS. I saw for myself the error messages that said Win3.1 might crash on a non-MSDOS system. I saw for myself how MSDOS was a POS trying to play catchup to DRDOS (only being able to undelete on file in a directory is my classic example). I read the contemporary reports of how MS strong armed PC sellers to choke off DRDOS.
I switched to OS/2 from Win3.1, because I got sick of the constant reboots when trying to program, and I saw for myself the consistency and smoothness of the interface. I saw for myself the logical consistency of the OS/2 programming API vs the confusing mishmash that composed the WinAPI. The single problem of the system was the single thread input system that would occassionaly lock up. A design that was insisted upon by MS during IBM collaboration with them. I watched OS/2 die as even IBM had to ship Windows on their computers to win market share, and MS withheld the betas until IBM agreed to choke off OS/2.
Now I use Linux. Every sensible report recommends that you hide your Windows boxes behind a Linux or hardware firewall. And you come around telling me that MS deserves some kind of award for taken !!BASIC!! security measures! The system that is supposed to be the premiere OS is just now taking steps to prevent buffer overflows and and implement least privileges. Just now. In 2005? Fifteen frackin' years after the start of the internet revolution? And you try to blow it of as unimportant because a few developers say, "We're really trying. Really we are."
I can't find any major faults other than current security issues, because I refuse to frackin' LOOK! "Heh, that car explodes every now and again. But other than that, it has no major fault...technology-wise." You have to put first things first. Protecting the data is way more important than putting a pretty interface on it, in the same way a solid second floor is immaterial if the foundation has crumbling mortar.
Why would I touch that crumbling POS that is MS anything when the foundation is in such disrepair? The excuse that their engineers are working on it (now that something better is on the horizon) doesn't mean squat.
unless of course the amateur is too busy making a living to work on the product.
I work full-time, attend all the kids school function, play basketball with them as long as I can last, have 'special' time with the wife. It is still coming together:
Slashdot may scoff at Microsofts security effort, but in all honesty it seems to be going fairly well form my perspective. Updates are quicker and more plentiful (also most vulnerabilities seem to be announced because the fix showed up on WindowsUpdate than because an exploit was found). Recompiling large part of the system with automatic buffer checks (where possible, this is C/C++ we are talking about) has helped the severity of a lot of exploits. The new low-rights IE seems to be a good approach to insulate any problems further (borrowed from UNIX daemons granted, but the OS-level security infrastructure is sound, and applying it in a useful way to desktop applications really is a new thing), check out the IE teams blog for information about that work by the way: IEBlog. They may not have had the best place to start from, but it does seem to be going the right way (I mean, hey, just getting a working software firewall in place was a huge leap forward), which I would think everyone can agree is a good thing.
I hired some guys to build my house. They couldn't read blueprints at first, but from my perspective things are getting better. The now cut the studs the same length, and they're starting to learn to put the wiring in BEFORE hanging the drywall. They may not have had the best place to start from, but it does seem to be going the right way (I mean, hey, digging the foundation after all the walls were assembled was a huge leap forward)
Look, MS wasn't working in a vacuum. There was technology and implementations all around them that did things correctly. You expect a professional to study their profession and do things correctly, and you expect a world leading technology company to sell products that lead the world in technology.
MS has been hawking bad implementations of decades old technology since before Digital Research realeased DR-DOS. What they did then, and what they are doing now shows only one thing. MS will only improve their products when competition starts eating into the profit margins. Until that time, they are completely content to foist garbage on the rest of us. They care not about a decent product, improving the state of the art, or improving lives through technology. And for that, they should be abhored.
Don't you think MS and everybody else would have liked to change the 8.3 filenames faster then what was happening.
Yeah, in the same way they would have liked to have replace the stinking heap that was MSDOS 4.0, sometime within the 5years before Digital Research started making inroads into their market.
Undelete didn't work right in MSDOS. You could only undelete one file in a directory, and then the rest of them were hosed. After MS forced them out of the market, there was no reason to fix it, and it was still broken when Win95 'ended' the DOS wars.
I swapped video cards two nights ago. An MGA400 for an ATI7000. I didn't do anything but switch the cards and boot back up. Kudzu asked if I wanted to remove the old configuration, then if I wanted to install the new. I then had to run one of the configuration programs as root to set the screen above 800x600.
I stayed at a summer camp for the gifted between my Junior and Senior years of high school. The head man in charge had an interesting viewpoint.
"You are all smart, and we know it. Anything we tell you that you can't do, you will find a way around it. So we're not going to do that. We're going to tell you what you can do. Everything else is forbidden."
The US government can't exactly follow this policy. All those bothersome things like inalienable rights, and such. But an operating system is NOT the US government. (cue UNIX and access controls)
No. If he were REALLY smart, he would learn how to make friends and quit whining on Slashdot. As it is, he's just another recalcitrant sociopath that has memorized a list of commands to operate a computer instead of doing his homework.
As long as the culture in the US continues to denigrate academic achievement and to glorify ignorance, this country will continue to fall behind the rest of the world in research and invention.
I've read this statement so many times in this article, I'm finding it pathetic.
Our culture doesn't denigrate academic achievement. It denigrates effort. Any effort. Anything that has to be worked for is considered an oddity. If it can't be bought in a store, then it is 'homemade' and 'redneck'.
Yardwork is to be done by the Mexicans, who are supposed to disappear when they're done, so we can enjoy our barbecues on our manicured lawns without being bothered with how they got that way. Just like the Desperate Housewives do on TV.
How often in today's entertainment does the glory go to the 8hr a day factory worker? He/she is always the oppressed dullard. The glory is always to the multi-million deal maker in the polished suit who couldn't make a fire with two sticks if one were a match.
Americans don't denigrate academic achievement, they denigrate ANY effort, because obviously smart people don't have to work. Hell, haven't you watched TV. If you've got skillz, you can just do the cool stuff and leave the hard stuff to the worker bees. Sweaty people are just nasty, and don't have any class. So the game is to get the teacher to pass you (without doing any real work), so you can get the professor to pass you (without doing any real work), so you can buddy up to the CEO and get a manager's position (without doing any real work).
Why be a teacher when you can be a principle and sit around in meetings all day (without doing any real work).
I don't think that word means what you think it means.
DoS attack? Want to take out a neighborhood? Piece of rope tied to a car bumper and the little 2ft post on the side of the road. Or just knock the lock off with a cheap hammer, then reach in and pull out a handfull of wires.
Hit a big box with your car to cause real havoc.
How about listening to cell calls with a scanner? Ask Newt Gingrich about that one.
Monitoring a POTS line is still as simple as climbing a pole and attaching a couple of clips.
911? Don't you have a cell if the power fails? Does your neighbor? If the power is out for everyone, do you think the fire department really needs a phone call from you? What did people do before 911 was available? Can't they do it now?
Why do people scream about faults in new technology that were much worse in the old?
Slashdot Mirror
It's the complexity that make it appealing. Vat grown meat will be analogous(sp?) to SPAM. Just a homogonized mishmash. No bad when you want a hotdog. Terrible when you want a steak.
though it is weird when you think about it, but continually inseminating in animal in order to continually retrieve a product (or in this case, a raw good..either way, though) from it is pretty messed up from my POV.
Granted, I'm a city boy, but you really don't know much about farming, do you? A cow only has to be inseminated once. You only ever inseminate the cow again if you want a calf. It will continue to give milk as long as you keep milking. The biological signal in all mammals is to turn off the milk when it stops being used.
Male egg chicks are at least disposed of quickly, but usually not disposed of, generally just discarded, i.e. in a dumpster or elsewhere.
I don't know where you're getting your rhetoric from, but the only dumpsters the male chicks will get dumped in is behind the Kentucky Fried. Why the hell would a farmer invest in hatching a chick, and then throw it away? Guess what male chicks turn into? CHICKENS!! You know, those things you can buy in the back of the grocery store, wrapped in plastic, and sort of looking like a bird without wings. People eat those at picnics, you know. And they're willing to pay good money to do it, too.
Geesh!!
Well, I'm certainly glad they cleared that one up. I can't tell you the sleepless nights I've spent wondering if I existed in a spiral vs a barred spiral galaxy. With answers to such fundamental questions like these pouring forth, I'm sure our friends in Washington will continue to confiscate my property to fund their efforts.
Um...
Make sure you buy cars with manual transmissions
Park on a hill
Never worry
Bankruptcy isn't a free way to get rid of debts and keep everything you have.
In theory you're correct. In reality, it is fairly easy to game the system. If you're a professional making a high 5-figure salary, bankruptcy hurts a lot. If you're a $30k/yr redneck, bankruptcy offers a way to run up a few tens of thousands of dollars of debt and then run away from it. And don't worry, some car lot will give you a loan a few months later. (Names are hidden to protect the guilty.)
If Richter can come up with 7million, he'll never touch it but have it assigned to a relative and ignore the judgement. People who think there is justice in the world are so unimaginative.
the poor with sub-poverty-level food assistance, if not simply left to starve.
What the hell are you talking about? The only people starving in America are the teenage girls who've been convinced that looking like a beanpole will make them 'liked' at school. Studies HAVE shown massive amounts of poor nutrition amoung the chronicly poor, but that is due to spending Food Stamps on junk food vs fruits and vegetables.
In the middle-class sections of US society, most pay private medical insurances.
Most people have insurance provided by their employer, or don't have it at all.
NO one in America starves, and NO one goes without shelter unless they are on the run or are too proud to live in the squalid cesspools that any nanny state creates as 'public aid'. So take your uninformed, poverty-pimping ass out into the real world and make an attempt to catch a clue.
No. This will mean less shelf space devoted to XBox accessories. Instead of 5 companies buying 5 shelves, there'll be one company buying 2 shelves.
Less shelf space devoted to XBox will diminish the coolness of owning an XBox. Why buy one if there is only 2 versions of memory cards vs 5 versions of memory cards.
Less coolness means fewer people buy XBox, which means fewer companies write games or take advantage of special features, which dimishes its coolness, which..
For more information, see: Micro-channel.
All that needs to be said is:
Micro-channel
But you can look at pretty much anything in society and see this being used all the time. Look at how many people think things like Universal Health Care is bad,
No telling one member of society what he may charge for his services is bad. Another name for it is slavery. Unfortunately, that is a hidden prerequisite of nearly all the Universal Health Care packages.
Schools need local control,
This is because people in different locals have different values. Unfortunately, schools have extended far beyone simply teaching "reading, writing, and 'rithmtic'", and have crossed over more into indoctrination. Local control at least provides some means for various doctrines to be indoctrinated.
taxes are always bad,
This is just silly. Everyone knows that it is great for the tax collector.
paying off national debt isn't important,
Noboby says that. The argument is that it isn't worth wrecking the economy (or harpooning the next election cycle.)
the media is a left wing conspiracy,
Not nearly cohesive enough to be a conspiracy, just left wing.
nuclear power is bad,
Are you saying it isn't? The intelligent arguments hinge on whether the deadly wastes can be contained competently. At best, nuclear is simply considered better than the other alternatives.
republicans are good with money
Just got my paperwork from last years tax cycle to send in (I'm filing late). The Republicans seem to be doing a good job of handling a lot more of my money than I'd like.
tax cuts jump start the economy etc etc...
If the econonmy is a consumer economy, how could it hurt?
Thanks for proving the point of the article, Mr. Madison.
The Concorde was forbidden to fly over the Continental US because Boeing bought off the boys in Washington. You see, the Concorde wasn't built by a US company, and would threaten the business model of Boeings trans-Atlantic fleet. The target market for the Concorde was Paris to LA, California flights. Paris to New York just barely made the time savings worthwhile.
Most mountainous regions are fairly remote. The property value of vertical land is almost non-existant as is.
Finally, hitting a wall of air, even at 10,000 ft at escape velocity would be like hitting a brick wall. Any concievable vehicle would simply explode. The real solution is to pump air in behind the vehicle. The vehicle would get an extra boost, and on exit from the tunnel, the vehicle will gradually transition into quickly thinning static air. The vehicle would only be going a few hundred mph on exit, so rockets would still be needed....but it would be past the hardest part of the lift off with a lot of stored energy already.
Never been in the military have you?
Nobody there gives a damn about being liked. The do get a little concerned about being alive, though.
The distraction effort is nearly perfect because so few people really can bring themselves to believe that every single member of the state is a crooked asshole only out for himself.
Life would be much easier for you if you could bring yourself to believe that the description is not limited to members of the state.
My God died, wrested control of the keys to Hell, and rose again to become more powerful than you could ever imagine. Any questions?
Sweetcheeks? Toots?
Damn, man! Did you see how UGGLY that bitch is?
Ewhhhh....NASTY!!
I disagree here, I would say that MS is indeed improving things. That is what the blogging has convinced me of.
'Improving things'?...as in things that are taken for granted in every other sector of the industry? If someone built a dam just upstream from your house without following industry standards, would it make you feel any better that they were 'improving things' when you see them driving piles in an attempt to stop the cracks. Yes, UNIX variant have suffered from the same problems that Windows is experiencing. Why the hell didn't they learn about them? You want to give them kudos for doing buffer overrun checks? A gold star of implementing least privileges?
Dude, go back to my first post. A bunch of jacklegs come around calling themselves carpenters, though they know nothing about building houses. They are not to get credit for building the second half better, when the first half is a crumbling POS.
I used DR-DOS. I saw for myself the error messages that said Win3.1 might crash on a non-MSDOS system. I saw for myself how MSDOS was a POS trying to play catchup to DRDOS (only being able to undelete on file in a directory is my classic example). I read the contemporary reports of how MS strong armed PC sellers to choke off DRDOS.
I switched to OS/2 from Win3.1, because I got sick of the constant reboots when trying to program, and I saw for myself the consistency and smoothness of the interface. I saw for myself the logical consistency of the OS/2 programming API vs the confusing mishmash that composed the WinAPI. The single problem of the system was the single thread input system that would occassionaly lock up. A design that was insisted upon by MS during IBM collaboration with them. I watched OS/2 die as even IBM had to ship Windows on their computers to win market share, and MS withheld the betas until IBM agreed to choke off OS/2.
Now I use Linux. Every sensible report recommends that you hide your Windows boxes behind a Linux or hardware firewall. And you come around telling me that MS deserves some kind of award for taken !!BASIC!! security measures! The system that is supposed to be the premiere OS is just now taking steps to prevent buffer overflows and and implement least privileges. Just now. In 2005? Fifteen frackin' years after the start of the internet revolution? And you try to blow it of as unimportant because a few developers say, "We're really trying. Really we are."
I can't find any major faults other than current security issues, because I refuse to frackin' LOOK! "Heh, that car explodes every now and again. But other than that, it has no major fault...technology-wise." You have to put first things first. Protecting the data is way more important than putting a pretty interface on it, in the same way a solid second floor is immaterial if the foundation has crumbling mortar.
Why would I touch that crumbling POS that is MS anything when the foundation is in such disrepair? The excuse that their engineers are working on it (now that something better is on the horizon) doesn't mean squat.
unless of course the amateur is too busy making a living to work on the product.
I work full-time, attend all the kids school function, play basketball with them as long as I can last, have 'special' time with the wife. It is still coming together:
http://ernest.isa-geek.org/
(The pictures and narrative aren't uptodate, but I've been choosing to build vs. writing web pages.)
Slashdot may scoff at Microsofts security effort, but in all honesty it seems to be going fairly well form my perspective. Updates are quicker and more plentiful (also most vulnerabilities seem to be announced because the fix showed up on WindowsUpdate than because an exploit was found). Recompiling large part of the system with automatic buffer checks (where possible, this is C/C++ we are talking about) has helped the severity of a lot of exploits. The new low-rights IE seems to be a good approach to insulate any problems further (borrowed from UNIX daemons granted, but the OS-level security infrastructure is sound, and applying it in a useful way to desktop applications really is a new thing), check out the IE teams blog for information about that work by the way: IEBlog. They may not have had the best place to start from, but it does seem to be going the right way (I mean, hey, just getting a working software firewall in place was a huge leap forward), which I would think everyone can agree is a good thing.
I hired some guys to build my house. They couldn't read blueprints at first, but from my perspective things are getting better. The now cut the studs the same length, and they're starting to learn to put the wiring in BEFORE hanging the drywall. They may not have had the best place to start from, but it does seem to be going the right way (I mean, hey, digging the foundation after all the walls were assembled was a huge leap forward)
Look, MS wasn't working in a vacuum. There was technology and implementations all around them that did things correctly. You expect a professional to study their profession and do things correctly, and you expect a world leading technology company to sell products that lead the world in technology.
MS has been hawking bad implementations of decades old technology since before Digital Research realeased DR-DOS. What they did then, and what they are doing now shows only one thing. MS will only improve their products when competition starts eating into the profit margins. Until that time, they are completely content to foist garbage on the rest of us. They care not about a decent product, improving the state of the art, or improving lives through technology. And for that, they should be abhored.
Don't you think MS and everybody else would have liked to change the 8.3 filenames faster then what was happening.
Yeah, in the same way they would have liked to have replace the stinking heap that was MSDOS 4.0, sometime within the 5years before Digital Research started making inroads into their market.
Undelete didn't work right in MSDOS. You could only undelete one file in a directory, and then the rest of them were hosed. After MS forced them out of the market, there was no reason to fix it, and it was still broken when Win95 'ended' the DOS wars.
Amateurs 'can' always outperform Professionals.
The Amateur only has to make a product.
The Professional also has to make a living.
I swapped video cards two nights ago. An MGA400 for an ATI7000. I didn't do anything but switch the cards and boot back up. Kudzu asked if I wanted to remove the old configuration, then if I wanted to install the new. I then had to run one of the configuration programs as root to set the screen above 800x600.
Done.
Fedora Core 3.
I stayed at a summer camp for the gifted between my Junior and Senior years of high school. The head man in charge had an interesting viewpoint.
"You are all smart, and we know it. Anything we tell you that you can't do, you will find a way around it. So we're not going to do that. We're going to tell you what you can do. Everything else is forbidden."
The US government can't exactly follow this policy. All those bothersome things like inalienable rights, and such. But an operating system is NOT the US government. (cue UNIX and access controls)
No. If he were REALLY smart, he would learn how to make friends and quit whining on Slashdot. As it is, he's just another recalcitrant sociopath that has memorized a list of commands to operate a computer instead of doing his homework.
Well, that would explain why John Kerry wasn't elected President of the US.
As long as the culture in the US continues to denigrate academic achievement and to glorify ignorance, this country will continue to fall behind the rest of the world in research and invention.
I've read this statement so many times in this article, I'm finding it pathetic.
Our culture doesn't denigrate academic achievement. It denigrates effort. Any effort. Anything that has to be worked for is considered an oddity. If it can't be bought in a store, then it is 'homemade' and 'redneck'.
Yardwork is to be done by the Mexicans, who are supposed to disappear when they're done, so we can enjoy our barbecues on our manicured lawns without being bothered with how they got that way. Just like the Desperate Housewives do on TV.
How often in today's entertainment does the glory go to the 8hr a day factory worker? He/she is always the oppressed dullard. The glory is always to the multi-million deal maker in the polished suit who couldn't make a fire with two sticks if one were a match.
Americans don't denigrate academic achievement, they denigrate ANY effort, because obviously smart people don't have to work. Hell, haven't you watched TV. If you've got skillz, you can just do the cool stuff and leave the hard stuff to the worker bees. Sweaty people are just nasty, and don't have any class. So the game is to get the teacher to pass you (without doing any real work), so you can get the professor to pass you (without doing any real work), so you can buddy up to the CEO and get a manager's position (without doing any real work).
Why be a teacher when you can be a principle and sit around in meetings all day (without doing any real work).
Bulletproof?!
I don't think that word means what you think it means.
DoS attack? Want to take out a neighborhood? Piece of rope tied to a car bumper and the little 2ft post on the side of the road. Or just knock the lock off with a cheap hammer, then reach in and pull out a handfull of wires.
Hit a big box with your car to cause real havoc.
How about listening to cell calls with a scanner? Ask Newt Gingrich about that one.
Monitoring a POTS line is still as simple as climbing a pole and attaching a couple of clips.
911? Don't you have a cell if the power fails? Does your neighbor? If the power is out for everyone, do you think the fire department really needs a phone call from you? What did people do before 911 was available? Can't they do it now?
Why do people scream about faults in new technology that were much worse in the old?