Seriously - he's right. The Tobacco Industry saw it coming a long time ago. Because of the diversification, they are able to sell a pack of smokes at a loss (the vast majority of the $4.00 or so you pay for a pack of smokes goes to taxes, followed by retailer mark-up. Most convenience stores IIRC make a huge chunk of their income not on gasoline --which is a loss leader for them-- but by selling ciggies). Tangent aside, most cigarette brands are sold on razor-thin margins or at periodic loss for the manufacturer (this is due to a combination of price pressure brought on by draconian taxation at the retail side, and the amortization of billions in 'fines', brought on by Congress during their little lawsuit/grab in the mid-1990s). In spite of that, these same corps are still well-able to do things like sponsor NASCAR races. That dough doesn't come from tobacco (it used to), but from profits off the food side of their holdings.
The music industry does have one advantage that tobacco doesn't - the RIAA has a sizeable menagerie of pet congresscritters on both sides of the aisle (e.g. their lead lapdog, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah)).
Hate to break it to you, but if you want a gui, you should[n't] be involved in the firewall, period.
I take it you've never heard of Checkpoint?
GUI vs. CLI aside, I have no kick against a GUI... I have no personal use for it, but some folks do. A layout showing what rules take priority and showing parent-child relationships sounds kinda cool. Not quite sure how you'd visualize things like NAT, but it would be interesting to find out.
(BTW, I should've qualified my original post with ipf/FreeBSD, not pf/OpenBSD... IIRC they are close enough to be nearly identical in ruleset syntax, yes? )
/P
Re:Does anybody still filter based on ports?
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Linux Firewalls
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· Score: 1
Err... lots of services don't listen on ports 80 or 443, and some vendors (*cough*Microsoft*cough*) have had a historical nasty habit of letting their services listen on some obscure port by default without telling anyone (including the admin) about it until something nasty showed up (e.g. Slammer).
Placing a fireewall in the right spot allows you to have some network services remain locally open without having to filter at the service itself based on addys or a netmask (esp. since some can't).
Also, I'm assuming that you're talking ab't outbound traffic, not inbound. Put it this way: Someone trying to brute-force SSH on one of my servers by going after port 80 or 443 inbound really isn't going to have a whole lot of luck...;)
For the outbound stuff, yeah - it's simpler (if you need it) to deny all outbound traffic except through proxies, with exceptions (like, you know, the mail server) as put up in a ruleset.
Re:OpenBSD PF Firewalls
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Linux Firewalls
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· Score: 3, Insightful
I'd just like to chuck in a general agreement here. PF is hella flexible, and while "ipf -fa -F/etc/ipf.conf" is nowhere near as intuitive as "/etc/init.d/iptables reload", the ruleset syntax is IMHO superior by miles, and much easier for a newbie to grok. I lost count of how many times I was tempted to try to hunt down a pre-compiled binary for the thing in Linux.
(somebody had to have ported the thing by now... if not, damn that'd be an idea...)
Actually, a lot of sea life depends on the water staying within a given range of salinity to be found in ocean water. I do doubt that we'd be able to dump enough in to really affect that, especially if we extract sea salt in the first place. As long as you dump it where you got it, no real probs (BTW - does salt retain radioactivity? Can't remember offhand if it does or not).
Fortunately, we have lots of places to dump used terrestrial salt without hosing-up plant or animal life... like this place for instance.
It's not merely "biomedical". The proper term to describe such pumps is Peristaltic. It has its uses in a wide variety of industrial applications as well.
There's also the missing component of having the corresponding data in the airline's computer network/system that matches the barcode for that flight, at that time, on that date, at that gate, for that seat, etc etc... it only get more complex if you're dumb enough to try and check baggage as well.
You'd have to study more than just algorithms to get on a plane - all of the data the barcode represents would have to be in the airline's computer as well, else you won't ever get past the gate.
Unless there's some sort of secret code that gives free flights (could be, like for stewardesses returning home and such), it just ain't gonna happen that way.
Of course you could get real lucky, but it would have to be something on the scale of winning enough money via the Lottery to pay for the flight.
god i remember that - and sitting on a 2400 baud modem.. what a wonder the web was at that time..
Heh - I recall being stuck with a 2.4k modem once (my 'fast' 14.4 had busted for some odd reason and I was waiting for its replacement to ship to the local geek shack I'd bought it from).
I clocked this version of www.discovery.com loading in just under 42 minutes.
...and to think of all the FPS gamers today whining to the Heavens about, oh, ~40ms of lag... Heh.
He's upset because this isn't a high end desktop that can run mad and windows apps. He wants it to be a G5 but it isn't so it gets a low rating. If he rated cars only high-end sports cars would get a chance. Anything else would be under powered and without the luxuries he expects on every vehicle regardless of price.
Welcome to the entire raison d' etre of PC Magazine. Take a peek at their 'best' rated stuff sometime... none of it costs less than four figures, and often you can buy a dual-quad PowerMac for what some of these systems cost (yet strangely enough, I bet half the mag's fanboys would whine about Macs being too pricey...)
Having had the displeasure of reading a few of their issues recently, I can say right now that they aren't qualified to rate bupkis.
This is the same magazine that happily rates the 'best' laptops and desktops among those starting in the 4-figure price range, and apparently wouldn't dare dirty itself with cheaper gear. It cheerleads Windows to the hilt, with only occasional nods given to OSX - so as to drop hints as to what Redmond should be paying attention to for ideas.
Meh - PC Mag's audience are those who aren't geeks, but can afford to toss money around on stuff they barely understand. They're what most people think of when they think of a Mac Fanboy stereotype, but minus the Mac:
All glitz, no substance.
Trying to give them credibility is like trying to give the "Fast and Furious" wannabe ricer-car types credibility.... they suck down the industrial propaganda without understanding it, but will furiously defend it as some sort of lifestyle. It's all plastic and bubblegum, but for some odd reason there's no shortage of dumbasses out there who will happily devote themselves to it.
Like others have said... unlike the cheesy little Netgear rigs, Cisco gear can get damned noisy. I've got a Catalyst 6509 under my care that seems like it can out-noise any four servers put together.
...and the minute a PHB says "Vee -Oh -Eye -Pee" in a meeting, you'll end up with servers in there.
It's actually hard to find anything wrong with the results. Erdos is one of the greatest mathematicians of all time.
Fair enough in his specific case, though we both end up correct in a way... again, in his specific case.
The problems come when we start taking his case (as an arguable statistical outlier), and assume that we can apply it as a generic rule. Very few individuals have the maturity and willpower to lay off the stuff long enough to consistently do the vital things in life (pay the bills, go to work, feed the kids, etc), let alone do it on a bet. I only pointed out that it had gone from being an enhancement to becoming a crutch, as he himself had pretty much admitted to during the withdrawal period that he underwent on a bet.
You're right though - the results are hard to argue - he managed to be very productive about the whole thing. OTOH, would he have been even more productive had he never used it in the first place, or less?...and why? The operating assumption I gathered from it was that Speed was the factor which gave him the wisdom and insight; question is... can that be qualified as an actual fact, or just conjecture on his part brought on by coincidence?
I only pointed out the one thing that does ring true - that without Speed, he became incapacitated in a tangible measure, and by his own admission.
/P
*(modded "Troll"? sheyah... I just love mods who can't think past their knees).
Err... The Maya and Anasazi were both wiped out by a combination of severe drought and overpopulation (yes, even the "rainforest" Maya were whacked by drought). The Inca, Aztec, Maya, and Toltec all were very vicious warriors who frequently went to war with each other, long before the Conquistadors arrived. Most North American tribes happily went to war with each other over hunting territory, took and kept slaves,
Some scientists credibly attribute the extinction of the Woolly Mammoth, the North American Camel, and most other large ungulates of pre-historical North America - to over-hunting... by tribes who wouldn't have known who Spaniards (or Vikings) were, because this was waaaay before the likes of Ur, Babylon, and Egypt, let alone Rome, Spain, Danish warlords, etc.
Point is, as a species we excel at making things miserable for everyone else. That said, Global Warming existed long before there were dinosaurs, let alone humans.
Damn... please don't let yourself be so easily fooled by the likes of media and "non-profit political action" orgs... we as a species suck, and modern, current civilization is (until a better alternative arrives) IMHO the least sucky of the bunch, in spite of sucking pretty hard anyway.
And yet, there is no organized competition among academics that I'm aware of, at least not of the scale and culture-soaking reach that FISA, NFL, NBA, MLB, PGA, and the like have. Not too many post-grads can negotiate 7-figure (let alone 8-figure) contracts with any sort of talent scout, let alone the right one. Even on the prize level - a Nobel Laureate for Physics or Philosophy, vs. a Super Bowl Quarterback, or the MVP? Geddafuggouttahere...:)
Dude - you're talking tenured positions here as the Big Goal... barely a six figure salary if you're lucky and find a first-rate university (a salary that would barely match the back-bench last-string position of almost any national-league sports team).
I won't say there is no competition at all, but really... nobody chooses Philosophy (or Physics, or Engineering(mine), or Music, or...) as a major because of the money or fame. That's what the kids who take Law, Business, CS*, or Medicine do. We pick the weird subjects simply because we like doing it.
That said, shit... I'd rather do it honestly, than live in constant (justified or not) fear of having my brain go 'splat' smack in the middle of my career...
/P
* yeah, I know... gonna catch hell for that one. Then again, I taught CS for six years at a state-level college... I can count less than ~20% of the kids in my experience who got into it because they were no-shit geeks who loved tinkering with code, silicon, or wires. Most did it for the "money" (even in the dot-bust... go figure).
There's a hell of a lot more to it than presenting a "lily white" or "wholesome" package when it comes to the ban on sports doping (couldya pack in the word "conservative a few more times? I didn't see it enough in there). There was a recent (and still ongoing) debate on the use of sports enhancers in friggin' golf FFS. (Having been stuck w/ frequently visting a hospital that doesn't have WiFi over the past month or so, I get to read the newspapers a lot). Okay... golf. We're not talking the Tiger Woods type of golfers incidentally; we're talking about old men who takes drugs to keep their knees and hips from coming apart - drugs which have a neat side effect of adding a measureable number of yards to their swing... yet for some odd reason, the entire golf industry is going apeshit over whether or not these old men, playing the various Senior tours, should be allowed to use these medicines and keep playing. The whole point had frig-all to do with image, or what the kids might think (I mean, c'mon - how many teenaged kids watch Senior Tour Golf)? No - the whole point was that golf, like any other sport*, is a measurement of how good at it a human being can get without any help of the chemical variety - they're measuring the man, not the chemicals he used to get the win.
Point is, there are tons of people so obsessed and engrossed with sports (kids, adults, what-have-you), that it's all about the stats. It's all about the drive to eliminate 'cheating' of any kind.
A good geek parallel would be a pro gamer being caught with a custom aimbot. Would you be so quick to dismiss that as a drive by the sponsors to present a "lily white", "conservative" image? Hell, no! You'd want the bum tossed. Similarly, you get shades of grey there, too - wallhacks, "custom" binds that enhance gameplay, things like that... all the sudden it's no longer a contest of skill, but a contest to see who can build the best hack, and the game is no longer the game.
Sure, PR plays a pretty big role in the whole sports/drugs affair, no doubt about it, but don't fool yourself into thinking it's the primary goal of the whole anti-doping brouhaha.
Academia is a whole other dimension - mostly because the question is... "what competition"? Sure, there is a level of competitiveness, but not in any organized sense of the concept.
While the goal is certainly noble (more knowledge), there are a lot of side-effects that nobody understands. A researcher sucking down "mind-enhancing" pills may or may not come up with some new way to get a widget to do something neat, or they might manage to build an anti-gravity machine... but how many of these folks understand that they're facing a coctail of potential troubles down the road? The thought of accelerated Alzheimers' disease or chemically-induced mental illness down the road seems to be a hellishly high price to pay for something that may or may not come true.
Pretty much the same deal with the whole "i'm afraid of my body" semi-taunt you posted... it isn't fear of the body (or mind), it's what happens much later on, when the demand/desire is over, and you're stuck trying to pick up the pieces with what you have left - mind, body, finances, social circle, etc. Some drugs (e.g. marijuana) can be taken over years without too much worry over long-term effects - provided that the one consuming it is at least halfway mature, does so in moderation, and exercises enough willpower to not let it affect (let alone dominate) all other aspects of his or her life. That said, most folks don't have these qualities, and tend to make a royal mess of things, even with the relatively harmless stuff (let alone the real dangerous shit like, say, methamphetamines). Same with alcohol, incidentally. (now the whole idea of legality and such is beyond the purview of discussion... personally, I believe the "war on drugs" is idiotic; there are far better ways to handle it - by actually profiting off of human stupidity (e.g. tax the shit) and at the same time
But the goodies? The US of A? Hitler went to the east for lebensraum, the americans trekked to the west and killed the people already living there. What is the difference between a sign that says "Geine Juden" and "No Blacks"?
Err...
Black folk weren't native to the North American continent. I think you were trying to refer to another group of folk entirely when comparing 'lebensraum' and 'Manifest Destiny'.
Black (and Native American) folk weren't systematically exterminated by the millions in Konzentrationslagern. There are vast differences between casualties of greed and outright genocide. Please learn them.
There's at least a half-century of space between the various Indian Wars and WW2. We were supposed to all know better by 1936.
Tension and violence-as-policy between black and white in the US were ended through peaceful means (that is, the court and legislature were put to use). It took a global war to end Nazi Germany's efforts.
That's the problem with moral relativism... Comparing a toy R/C car/duct-taped camera rig with one of the Mars Rovers won't get you very far, either. Sure, they have a few basic similarities, but the differences are large enough to be bloody obvious to all but the idiots or the agenda-ladened.
England? Talk about a country bend on taking over the world, it made an empire out of astraucities.
Nevermind the distance of time and subsequent cultural evolution, huh? 'Gee - somebody call NASA and tell 'em I can do their Mars exploration thingy for only a fraction of their budget! Guess I'd better go call the hobby shop now...'
You might have noticed that in the recent WW2 tv series Band of Brothers absolutly no mentions is made of the US army policies regarding blacks or those with ancestors from Japan?
You might have noticed that the drama you were talking about centered on the wartime experiences of a group of men who had no contact with or knowledge of these things? Or is cultural self-flagellation the only requirement for good television these days?
Part of the final solution was to deport jews to remote areas where they could be controlled/wiped out. Explain to me the motivations between Indian reservations and the rather diminsied population figures of native americans?
Part of the point of launching remote vehicles with sensors to Mars was to see things remotely without actually going there in person. Explain to me the differences and motivations between that and strapping your Dad's camcorder to the top of an R/C toy car?
That's the problem with your comparisons... you assume equivalence in effort, and equal motivation... neither of which are true. One had to deal with basic and decentralized greed for land, while the other was a systematic desire to eliminate an entire culture and 'race' of people completely off the face of the Earth.
Steve Jobs is a figure in IT, there are many others, but he can be very closely linked to Bill Gates, an obvious baddy (although once seen as a hero freeing us from the evil IBM, a company that is now often seen as a goodie).
NOW we're getting somewhere... but, err, it doesn't quite compare. You spent all this time talking about global historical movements just to make comparison with two friggin' CEO's? WTF?
Lookit - I'll solve your little question here and now. It ain't the people. Bill Gates I'm sure is one hell of a nice guy to drink beer and talk shop with. Steve Jobs is prolly the same.
The philosophical diffs begin when it comes to how both of these guys' corporation operate. Apple was once pretty much just like Microsoft, until they were nearly crushed in the 1990s, and learned the hard way that hubris will get you unemployed. Apple has had to pay penance in the marketplace. OSX' kernel is literally open source (Darwin). They go out of their wa
OK, it may be a hoax... but wasn't it perfectly believable that Apple would act this way?
It is plausible for some corporations, but that's what makes trolls so successful to the uninitiated - that kernel of possible plausibility.
OTOH, Apple has never (to my knowledge) done any sort of astroturfing efforts - ever. No free blogger laptops, no fake 'bloggers' or 'commenters', no fake websites purporting to be 3rd-party fansites... none of that. That makes the whole thing implausible and unbelievable.
Lyons failed hard, which made it easy to spot for what it was... first off, astroturfing is handled by PR and marketing departments, not Legal. If a blogger says "no", then no amount of public assertion on Lyons' part would get any lawyers involved - Legal and PR would just say publicly that he's full of shit (in so many nice words) and that would be that. Even Microsoft was smart enough to keep their Acer Laptop fiasco confined to just the PR flack who got caught. Next up, astroturfing efforts would be kept more on the down-low, not splattered all over the place on recordable email.
Sorry, man... we all get trolled at one time or another. This was apparently your turn.:)
I really wish Apple fans would wake up and hold Apple to a higher standard. They get away with this kind of arrogant crap because they're not held accountable.
I wish folks would quit giving that attention-whore Lyons any attention... especially when he's lying his ass off;)
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The music industry does have one advantage that tobacco doesn't - the RIAA has a sizeable menagerie of pet congresscritters on both sides of the aisle (e.g. their lead lapdog, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah)).
I take it you've never heard of Checkpoint?
GUI vs. CLI aside, I have no kick against a GUI... I have no personal use for it, but some folks do. A layout showing what rules take priority and showing parent-child relationships sounds kinda cool. Not quite sure how you'd visualize things like NAT, but it would be interesting to find out.
(BTW, I should've qualified my original post with ipf/FreeBSD, not pf/OpenBSD... IIRC they are close enough to be nearly identical in ruleset syntax, yes? )
Placing a fireewall in the right spot allows you to have some network services remain locally open without having to filter at the service itself based on addys or a netmask (esp. since some can't).
Also, I'm assuming that you're talking ab't outbound traffic, not inbound. Put it this way: Someone trying to brute-force SSH on one of my servers by going after port 80 or 443 inbound really isn't going to have a whole lot of luck... ;)
For the outbound stuff, yeah - it's simpler (if you need it) to deny all outbound traffic except through proxies, with exceptions (like, you know, the mail server) as put up in a ruleset.
(somebody had to have ported the thing by now... if not, damn that'd be an idea...)
Fortunately, we have lots of places to dump used terrestrial salt without hosing-up plant or animal life... like this place for instance.
Cheers,
You'd have to study more than just algorithms to get on a plane - all of the data the barcode represents would have to be in the airline's computer as well, else you won't ever get past the gate.
Unless there's some sort of secret code that gives free flights (could be, like for stewardesses returning home and such), it just ain't gonna happen that way.
Of course you could get real lucky, but it would have to be something on the scale of winning enough money via the Lottery to pay for the flight.
Give it 10 years, then tell that crop of users something about, oh, what it was like to have to install a driver.
You'll understand, eventually. :)
(trust me - compared to Mosaic, "Nutscrape" was [i]the shit[/i]...)
Heh - I recall being stuck with a 2.4k modem once (my 'fast' 14.4 had busted for some odd reason and I was waiting for its replacement to ship to the local geek shack I'd bought it from).
I clocked this version of www.discovery.com loading in just under 42 minutes.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20071007-new-blu-ray-discs-with-bd-drm-failing-to-play-on-some-devices.html
I asked the question for a very legit reason.
I honestly don't care for or against either format... yet. Both are still relatively expensive, and I have no equipment that utilizes either one.
(well, it's not Sony, so prolly not near as much, but still, that's something that seems to be missing from all this).
Welcome to the entire raison d' etre of PC Magazine. Take a peek at their 'best' rated stuff sometime... none of it costs less than four figures, and often you can buy a dual-quad PowerMac for what some of these systems cost (yet strangely enough, I bet half the mag's fanboys would whine about Macs being too pricey...)
This is the same magazine that happily rates the 'best' laptops and desktops among those starting in the 4-figure price range, and apparently wouldn't dare dirty itself with cheaper gear. It cheerleads Windows to the hilt, with only occasional nods given to OSX - so as to drop hints as to what Redmond should be paying attention to for ideas.
Meh - PC Mag's audience are those who aren't geeks, but can afford to toss money around on stuff they barely understand. They're what most people think of when they think of a Mac Fanboy stereotype, but minus the Mac:
All glitz, no substance.
Trying to give them credibility is like trying to give the "Fast and Furious" wannabe ricer-car types credibility.... they suck down the industrial propaganda without understanding it, but will furiously defend it as some sort of lifestyle. It's all plastic and bubblegum, but for some odd reason there's no shortage of dumbasses out there who will happily devote themselves to it.
It's actually hard to find anything wrong with the results. Erdos is one of the greatest mathematicians of all time.
Fair enough in his specific case, though we both end up correct in a way... again, in his specific case.
The problems come when we start taking his case (as an arguable statistical outlier), and assume that we can apply it as a generic rule. Very few individuals have the maturity and willpower to lay off the stuff long enough to consistently do the vital things in life (pay the bills, go to work, feed the kids, etc), let alone do it on a bet. I only pointed out that it had gone from being an enhancement to becoming a crutch, as he himself had pretty much admitted to during the withdrawal period that he underwent on a bet.
You're right though - the results are hard to argue - he managed to be very productive about the whole thing. OTOH, would he have been even more productive had he never used it in the first place, or less? ...and why? The operating assumption I gathered from it was that Speed was the factor which gave him the wisdom and insight; question is... can that be qualified as an actual fact, or just conjecture on his part brought on by coincidence?
I only pointed out the one thing that does ring true - that without Speed, he became incapacitated in a tangible measure, and by his own admission.
*(modded "Troll"? sheyah... I just love mods who can't think past their knees).
Some scientists credibly attribute the extinction of the Woolly Mammoth, the North American Camel, and most other large ungulates of pre-historical North America - to over-hunting... by tribes who wouldn't have known who Spaniards (or Vikings) were, because this was waaaay before the likes of Ur, Babylon, and Egypt, let alone Rome, Spain, Danish warlords, etc.
Point is, as a species we excel at making things miserable for everyone else. That said, Global Warming existed long before there were dinosaurs, let alone humans.
Damn... please don't let yourself be so easily fooled by the likes of media and "non-profit political action" orgs... we as a species suck, and modern, current civilization is (until a better alternative arrives) IMHO the least sucky of the bunch, in spite of sucking pretty hard anyway.
Dude - you're talking tenured positions here as the Big Goal... barely a six figure salary if you're lucky and find a first-rate university (a salary that would barely match the back-bench last-string position of almost any national-league sports team).
I won't say there is no competition at all, but really... nobody chooses Philosophy (or Physics, or Engineering(mine), or Music, or...) as a major because of the money or fame. That's what the kids who take Law, Business, CS*, or Medicine do. We pick the weird subjects simply because we like doing it.
That said, shit... I'd rather do it honestly, than live in constant (justified or not) fear of having my brain go 'splat' smack in the middle of my career...
* yeah, I know... gonna catch hell for that one. Then again, I taught CS for six years at a state-level college... I can count less than ~20% of the kids in my experience who got into it because they were no-shit geeks who loved tinkering with code, silicon, or wires. Most did it for the "money" (even in the dot-bust... go figure).
There's a hell of a lot more to it than presenting a "lily white" or "wholesome" package when it comes to the ban on sports doping (couldya pack in the word "conservative a few more times? I didn't see it enough in there). There was a recent (and still ongoing) debate on the use of sports enhancers in friggin' golf FFS. (Having been stuck w/ frequently visting a hospital that doesn't have WiFi over the past month or so, I get to read the newspapers a lot). Okay... golf. We're not talking the Tiger Woods type of golfers incidentally; we're talking about old men who takes drugs to keep their knees and hips from coming apart - drugs which have a neat side effect of adding a measureable number of yards to their swing... yet for some odd reason, the entire golf industry is going apeshit over whether or not these old men, playing the various Senior tours, should be allowed to use these medicines and keep playing. The whole point had frig-all to do with image, or what the kids might think (I mean, c'mon - how many teenaged kids watch Senior Tour Golf)? No - the whole point was that golf, like any other sport*, is a measurement of how good at it a human being can get without any help of the chemical variety - they're measuring the man, not the chemicals he used to get the win.
Point is, there are tons of people so obsessed and engrossed with sports (kids, adults, what-have-you), that it's all about the stats. It's all about the drive to eliminate 'cheating' of any kind.
A good geek parallel would be a pro gamer being caught with a custom aimbot. Would you be so quick to dismiss that as a drive by the sponsors to present a "lily white", "conservative" image? Hell, no! You'd want the bum tossed. Similarly, you get shades of grey there, too - wallhacks, "custom" binds that enhance gameplay, things like that... all the sudden it's no longer a contest of skill, but a contest to see who can build the best hack, and the game is no longer the game.
Sure, PR plays a pretty big role in the whole sports/drugs affair, no doubt about it, but don't fool yourself into thinking it's the primary goal of the whole anti-doping brouhaha.
Academia is a whole other dimension - mostly because the question is... "what competition"? Sure, there is a level of competitiveness, but not in any organized sense of the concept.
While the goal is certainly noble (more knowledge), there are a lot of side-effects that nobody understands. A researcher sucking down "mind-enhancing" pills may or may not come up with some new way to get a widget to do something neat, or they might manage to build an anti-gravity machine... but how many of these folks understand that they're facing a coctail of potential troubles down the road? The thought of accelerated Alzheimers' disease or chemically-induced mental illness down the road seems to be a hellishly high price to pay for something that may or may not come true.
Pretty much the same deal with the whole "i'm afraid of my body" semi-taunt you posted... it isn't fear of the body (or mind), it's what happens much later on, when the demand/desire is over, and you're stuck trying to pick up the pieces with what you have left - mind, body, finances, social circle, etc. Some drugs (e.g. marijuana) can be taken over years without too much worry over long-term effects - provided that the one consuming it is at least halfway mature, does so in moderation, and exercises enough willpower to not let it affect (let alone dominate) all other aspects of his or her life. That said, most folks don't have these qualities, and tend to make a royal mess of things, even with the relatively harmless stuff (let alone the real dangerous shit like, say, methamphetamines). Same with alcohol, incidentally. (now the whole idea of legality and such is beyond the purview of discussion... personally, I believe the "war on drugs" is idiotic; there are far better ways to handle it - by actually profiting off of human stupidity (e.g. tax the shit) and at the same time
But the goodies? The US of A? Hitler went to the east for lebensraum, the americans trekked to the west and killed the people already living there. What is the difference between a sign that says "Geine Juden" and "No Blacks"?
Err...
That's the problem with moral relativism... Comparing a toy R/C car/duct-taped camera rig with one of the Mars Rovers won't get you very far, either. Sure, they have a few basic similarities, but the differences are large enough to be bloody obvious to all but the idiots or the agenda-ladened.
England? Talk about a country bend on taking over the world, it made an empire out of astraucities.
Nevermind the distance of time and subsequent cultural evolution, huh? 'Gee - somebody call NASA and tell 'em I can do their Mars exploration thingy for only a fraction of their budget! Guess I'd better go call the hobby shop now...'
You might have noticed that in the recent WW2 tv series Band of Brothers absolutly no mentions is made of the US army policies regarding blacks or those with ancestors from Japan?
You might have noticed that the drama you were talking about centered on the wartime experiences of a group of men who had no contact with or knowledge of these things? Or is cultural self-flagellation the only requirement for good television these days?
Part of the final solution was to deport jews to remote areas where they could be controlled/wiped out. Explain to me the motivations between Indian reservations and the rather diminsied population figures of native americans?
Part of the point of launching remote vehicles with sensors to Mars was to see things remotely without actually going there in person. Explain to me the differences and motivations between that and strapping your Dad's camcorder to the top of an R/C toy car?
That's the problem with your comparisons... you assume equivalence in effort, and equal motivation... neither of which are true. One had to deal with basic and decentralized greed for land, while the other was a systematic desire to eliminate an entire culture and 'race' of people completely off the face of the Earth.
Steve Jobs is a figure in IT, there are many others, but he can be very closely linked to Bill Gates, an obvious baddy (although once seen as a hero freeing us from the evil IBM, a company that is now often seen as a goodie).
NOW we're getting somewhere... but, err, it doesn't quite compare. You spent all this time talking about global historical movements just to make comparison with two friggin' CEO's? WTF?
Lookit - I'll solve your little question here and now. It ain't the people. Bill Gates I'm sure is one hell of a nice guy to drink beer and talk shop with. Steve Jobs is prolly the same.
The philosophical diffs begin when it comes to how both of these guys' corporation operate. Apple was once pretty much just like Microsoft, until they were nearly crushed in the 1990s, and learned the hard way that hubris will get you unemployed. Apple has had to pay penance in the marketplace. OSX' kernel is literally open source (Darwin). They go out of their wa
OK, it may be a hoax... but wasn't it perfectly believable that Apple would act this way?
It is plausible for some corporations, but that's what makes trolls so successful to the uninitiated - that kernel of possible plausibility.
OTOH, Apple has never (to my knowledge) done any sort of astroturfing efforts - ever. No free blogger laptops, no fake 'bloggers' or 'commenters', no fake websites purporting to be 3rd-party fansites... none of that. That makes the whole thing implausible and unbelievable.
Lyons failed hard, which made it easy to spot for what it was... first off, astroturfing is handled by PR and marketing departments, not Legal. If a blogger says "no", then no amount of public assertion on Lyons' part would get any lawyers involved - Legal and PR would just say publicly that he's full of shit (in so many nice words) and that would be that. Even Microsoft was smart enough to keep their Acer Laptop fiasco confined to just the PR flack who got caught. Next up, astroturfing efforts would be kept more on the down-low, not splattered all over the place on recordable email.
Sorry, man... we all get trolled at one time or another. This was apparently your turn. :)
I wish folks would quit giving that attention-whore Lyons any attention... especially when he's lying his ass off ;)
(yes, it was a poor hoax on Lyon's part).