The only people more square than that are the ones who actually unironically believe that Facebook and all other so-called 'social media' is somehow not a malignant cancer on our civilization.
1. Why shouldn't we just throw your worthless ass in jail forever and forget you exist?
2. Why shouldn't we shut down Facebook for good and burn every last scrap of it to the ground?
..and I'm far from being convinced that I'm wrong. The first two (Money and Power) really do seem to be a proxy for the third (Sex), and it all amounts to CONTROL. Humans want to CONTROL everything, and the more CONTROL they have, the more CONTROL they want; they want ALL of the CONTROL, and they don't care what the consequences are. The irony is even if they managed to CONTROL ALL THE THINGS, they wouldn't know what the fuck to do with it -- and subsequently they'd screw it all up. So it seems to be going with the Internet. They'll all fight for CONTROL of it, and it'll get shredded into little bitty useless pieces in the process, ruining it for everyone, everywhere.
By my reckoning, more and more governments are deciding to do things regarding the Internet that will eventually break it into nation-sized 'walled gardens' like China has done. Add to that the possible actions by ISPs here in the U.S. now that Net Neutrality has been (only for the moment, hopefully) repealed, and the Internet as a whole will become quite broken. Really, it's not looking too good for the planet so far as Internet goes. Apparently we, as a species, are not evolved enough yet to get past all this childish bullshit so we can have something like the Internet without completely fucking it up.
Wow, you mean mucking about in our DNA with an editor when we don't really know how everything works might give us a fatal disease? Shocking, I tell you, shocking!
Does Trump have any idea of the mess he's creating in the name of money?
I'll assume that's a rhetorical question because the answer is an obvious and resounding 'NO'. You can't run a country 'like a business', the goals and concepts are incompatible, and in the specific case of one Donald J. Trump, it's irrelevant whether you could run a country that way or not because he's actually a pretty shitty businessman as well as completely out of his depth as POTUS, and as the months of his administration drag on that becomes more and more evident. It'll take decades to repair all the damage he's done thusfar let alone if he survives the entire 4 years or (shudder! The horror!) manages somehow to get re-elected (in which case there may not be much of a country left).
If the repeal of Net Neutrality sticks and things go as poorly as they potentially could, people may be spending more time doing anything but using the Internet -- if they even bother paying for it anymore. If ISPs start mucking up the works enough people might just get frustrated enough to throw up their hands and just walk away from it.
More information is bad, less information is good, just fly by the seat of your pants!
That's essentially what you're saying. The fact that you've been modded up just means that the Trump supporters and/or trolls that infest Slashdot as much as they do anywhere else on the Internets just happen to have mod points to spend today.
You've likely seen primaries in your own State by now, so then you're seeing the beginnings of the 'political power' flipping already; our government, in it's current state, is incredibly and horribly out of balance. A correction is forthcoming, and as stated above you're likely already seeing that correction happen. The political needle is currently slammed all the way over to the right and is bending against it's stop; starting with this year, it will start to slowly move back towards the center, which is where it belongs. We are not a one-party nation, and our government, which is ostensibly by the people and for the people, is supposed to represent the interests of all it's citizens, not less than half of them. Democrats will likely take back the House of Representatives, which will go a long way towards restoring the balance. In 2020, Trump will not be re-elected, and unless we somehow end up with someone worse (hard to imagine) the country will breathe a collective sigh of relief, as some sanity is restored. Meanwhile the Mueller investigation is rooting out the corruption, and I wouldn't at all be surprised if some Trump appointees (Pai, Pruitt, Sessions, I'm looking at you) get forced out.
..and now, having spoken my mind, I will no doubt be insulted to within an inch of my life by the pro-Trump people, LOL.
Reddit would end up being shut down for, again, concerns over liability. This place (slashdot) would be shut down for similar reasons, I'd imagine. You'd even have a hard time starting your own website that only contains things you created yourself, because there are companies that would claim copyright of them anyway (there is documented precedent for this happening, especially to musicians/singer/songwriters). We live in a day and age where, if someone's name, that they were given at birth, happens to clash with some companies' trademarked or copyrighted name, and that person tries to start a business that uses their name? They get sued for it, and they lose, and aren't allowed to use their own name. Ridiculous, right?
I of course know that what one country (or coalition of countries) decides to do with the internet doens't affect everyone else directly, but what I'm more concerned about is everyone else deciding to follow suit and implement this nonsense regardless, mainly because of pressure from corporations (which have too much political influence currently). They'll go for whatever seems to make their bottom line more attractive regardless of the consequences to everyone else.
But, see, that will kill it. Did you read my entire paragraph? The Internet would essentially become read-only, like Cable TV. The only difference between the two would be you'd (ostensibly) be able to email (maybe -- they'd probably sift through that, too, to make sure you're not 'sharing' anything copyrighted) and access government sites, and buy things from retailers. The real value of the Internet would be gone. There would be no room for creativity or freedom of speech. It wouldn't be worth paying for anymore, and even if it was free it would be boring and pointless.
Get Gibbs and his team on the case, track down them wily Chinese operatives pronto!
Really, is anyone even surprised at any of this shit anymore? Everything is hackable now, nothing is safe. Remember that at least half of us has had ALL of their financial data stolen from them in the Equifax breach, and by now there's probably a million copies of all of that floating around the world. Meanwhile dickheads in the EU and corporate assholes here in the States are more concerned about 'losing profits to piracy' and will completely ruin the Internet, turn it into a read-only 'service' (like Cable TV, just stupider) in order to accomplish that, and why the ever-loving fuck should they care that there are criminal and military assholes out there that will hack the shit out of our infrastructure (electricity generation, water, natural gas, water service, nuclear reactors, and so on), rob our banks blind, and steal every military and state secret we've got? Doesn't make them money to give a shit about any of that now does it?
I don't think this has anything to do with better gameplay or cheaper hardware or anything like that, I think it has more to do with them having more control over every aspect of the games. If none of it lives on anything local to you, then you have no control over it. Also: games as a service, instead of as a product. More renting things, less (or abolition of) actually owning a copy of a game. Or worse: you 'buy' a 'copy' of it, but it's 100% digital, and they can revoke it anytime they feel like it, and you have no say in the matter. You know, like e-books and digital music and digital-only copies of movies and TV shows?
Really, though, it sounds to me like another case of technologically clueless politicians catering to the demands of corporations with no regard whatsoever to the technical feasibility of the 'legislation' they're proposing. In this case it would literally KILL the Internet, turning it into not much better than Cable TV, read-only.
Freedom of Speech would only be one of the casualties of legislation like this; it would, for the most part, make the Internet read-only. Few if any websites would allow anyone to upload anything whatsoever, because of the cost and the exposure to liability under the law. You wouldn't even be able to upload photographs you took with your own camera or device. In a possible future Internet under legislation like this, it would be more like having a Cable TV subscription than it would anything you've come to associate with the Internet of today. The only difference would be email and access to government services. Who would be willing to pay for that? Speaking only for myself, I wouldn't be willing to pay much, if anything, for that level of 'service', for the same reasons I stopped paying for Cable TV: not enough value for the money. If they really want to kill the Internet completely, then draconian legislation like this is the way to do it.
You know.. my initial internal reaction to reading what you wrote (half-life: about, say, 3 minutes) was to think to myself "That's a nutty idea, 3-phase industrial motors are a mature technology, very simple comparatively speaking, have a long lifespan, why should they change them for something more complicated?", but thereafter I thought to myself "..but while they are in fact a 'mature technology', that also implies they're a very old technology, and while elegantly simple in design, they were so because anything more complicated just didn't exist -- and big industry tends to be conservative about such things, so why should it change?"
In fact we've got high-horsepower brushless DC motors, which, yes, require relatively complex (compared to a 3-phase AC motor) electronics, also capable of handling high currents (which is, I think, the major reason they weren't used before; power MOSFETs are relatively new compared to 3-phase AC motors), and it would have been prohibitively expensive and high maintenance compared to a simple motor. As a proof-of-concept, you could probably take the motor and controller straight out of an electric car and adapt it to an industrial application, and it'd do just fine, have an at least comparable lifespan, etc.
You know, everyone seems to be such gods-be-damned fanboys about GMO crops, so how about we get these companies to develop a plant whose sole purpose is two-fold: (1) Grow and spread like weeds, and (2) Suck up and sequester CO2, and return us nice clean O2?
The world has not only gotten quite a bit shittier in the last 20 years or so, but we've got the Internet now, which means you have orders of magnitude more sources and volume of information available at the click of a mouse button to show you how shitty the world is, so it's no big surprise that more people would fail their morale check and decide to check out early on life.
Slashdot Mirror
Monopolies are like candy to a culture of protectionism.
The only people more square than that are the ones who actually unironically believe that Facebook and all other so-called 'social media' is somehow not a malignant cancer on our civilization.
I'd say it's more like (Money == Power == Control) -> Sex
Yeah, you're right, really. Damn I'm tired and fatigued today, I know better than that. :-/
1. Why shouldn't we just throw your worthless ass in jail forever and forget you exist?
2. Why shouldn't we shut down Facebook for good and burn every last scrap of it to the ground?
(Money == Power == Sex) == CONTROL
..and I'm far from being convinced that I'm wrong. The first two (Money and Power) really do seem to be a proxy for the third (Sex), and it all amounts to CONTROL. Humans want to CONTROL everything, and the more CONTROL they have, the more CONTROL they want; they want ALL of the CONTROL, and they don't care what the consequences are. The irony is even if they managed to CONTROL ALL THE THINGS, they wouldn't know what the fuck to do with it -- and subsequently they'd screw it all up. So it seems to be going with the Internet. They'll all fight for CONTROL of it, and it'll get shredded into little bitty useless pieces in the process, ruining it for everyone, everywhere.
By my reckoning, more and more governments are deciding to do things regarding the Internet that will eventually break it into nation-sized 'walled gardens' like China has done. Add to that the possible actions by ISPs here in the U.S. now that Net Neutrality has been (only for the moment, hopefully) repealed, and the Internet as a whole will become quite broken. Really, it's not looking too good for the planet so far as Internet goes. Apparently we, as a species, are not evolved enough yet to get past all this childish bullshit so we can have something like the Internet without completely fucking it up.
Wow, you mean mucking about in our DNA with an editor when we don't really know how everything works might give us a fatal disease? Shocking, I tell you, shocking!
Does Trump have any idea of the mess he's creating in the name of money?
I'll assume that's a rhetorical question because the answer is an obvious and resounding 'NO'. You can't run a country 'like a business', the goals and concepts are incompatible, and in the specific case of one Donald J. Trump, it's irrelevant whether you could run a country that way or not because he's actually a pretty shitty businessman as well as completely out of his depth as POTUS, and as the months of his administration drag on that becomes more and more evident. It'll take decades to repair all the damage he's done thusfar let alone if he survives the entire 4 years or (shudder! The horror!) manages somehow to get re-elected (in which case there may not be much of a country left).
If the repeal of Net Neutrality sticks and things go as poorly as they potentially could, people may be spending more time doing anything but using the Internet -- if they even bother paying for it anymore. If ISPs start mucking up the works enough people might just get frustrated enough to throw up their hands and just walk away from it.
Enough said.
More information is bad, less information is good, just fly by the seat of your pants!
That's essentially what you're saying. The fact that you've been modded up just means that the Trump supporters and/or trolls that infest Slashdot as much as they do anywhere else on the Internets just happen to have mod points to spend today.
You've likely seen primaries in your own State by now, so then you're seeing the beginnings of the 'political power' flipping already; our government, in it's current state, is incredibly and horribly out of balance. A correction is forthcoming, and as stated above you're likely already seeing that correction happen. The political needle is currently slammed all the way over to the right and is bending against it's stop; starting with this year, it will start to slowly move back towards the center, which is where it belongs. We are not a one-party nation, and our government, which is ostensibly by the people and for the people, is supposed to represent the interests of all it's citizens, not less than half of them. Democrats will likely take back the House of Representatives, which will go a long way towards restoring the balance. In 2020, Trump will not be re-elected, and unless we somehow end up with someone worse (hard to imagine) the country will breathe a collective sigh of relief, as some sanity is restored. Meanwhile the Mueller investigation is rooting out the corruption, and I wouldn't at all be surprised if some Trump appointees (Pai, Pruitt, Sessions, I'm looking at you) get forced out.
..and now, having spoken my mind, I will no doubt be insulted to within an inch of my life by the pro-Trump people, LOL.
Reddit would end up being shut down for, again, concerns over liability. This place (slashdot) would be shut down for similar reasons, I'd imagine. You'd even have a hard time starting your own website that only contains things you created yourself, because there are companies that would claim copyright of them anyway (there is documented precedent for this happening, especially to musicians/singer/songwriters). We live in a day and age where, if someone's name, that they were given at birth, happens to clash with some companies' trademarked or copyrighted name, and that person tries to start a business that uses their name? They get sued for it, and they lose, and aren't allowed to use their own name. Ridiculous, right?
I of course know that what one country (or coalition of countries) decides to do with the internet doens't affect everyone else directly, but what I'm more concerned about is everyone else deciding to follow suit and implement this nonsense regardless, mainly because of pressure from corporations (which have too much political influence currently). They'll go for whatever seems to make their bottom line more attractive regardless of the consequences to everyone else.
But, see, that will kill it. Did you read my entire paragraph? The Internet would essentially become read-only, like Cable TV. The only difference between the two would be you'd (ostensibly) be able to email (maybe -- they'd probably sift through that, too, to make sure you're not 'sharing' anything copyrighted) and access government sites, and buy things from retailers. The real value of the Internet would be gone. There would be no room for creativity or freedom of speech. It wouldn't be worth paying for anymore, and even if it was free it would be boring and pointless.
Get Gibbs and his team on the case, track down them wily Chinese operatives pronto!
Really, is anyone even surprised at any of this shit anymore? Everything is hackable now, nothing is safe. Remember that at least half of us has had ALL of their financial data stolen from them in the Equifax breach, and by now there's probably a million copies of all of that floating around the world. Meanwhile dickheads in the EU and corporate assholes here in the States are more concerned about 'losing profits to piracy' and will completely ruin the Internet, turn it into a read-only 'service' (like Cable TV, just stupider) in order to accomplish that, and why the ever-loving fuck should they care that there are criminal and military assholes out there that will hack the shit out of our infrastructure (electricity generation, water, natural gas, water service, nuclear reactors, and so on), rob our banks blind, and steal every military and state secret we've got? Doesn't make them money to give a shit about any of that now does it?
Things have got to change.
I don't think this has anything to do with better gameplay or cheaper hardware or anything like that, I think it has more to do with them having more control over every aspect of the games. If none of it lives on anything local to you, then you have no control over it. Also: games as a service, instead of as a product. More renting things, less (or abolition of) actually owning a copy of a game. Or worse: you 'buy' a 'copy' of it, but it's 100% digital, and they can revoke it anytime they feel like it, and you have no say in the matter. You know, like e-books and digital music and digital-only copies of movies and TV shows?
Seriously, fuck 'the cloud'.
Really, though, it sounds to me like another case of technologically clueless politicians catering to the demands of corporations with no regard whatsoever to the technical feasibility of the 'legislation' they're proposing. In this case it would literally KILL the Internet, turning it into not much better than Cable TV, read-only.
Freedom of Speech would only be one of the casualties of legislation like this; it would, for the most part, make the Internet read-only. Few if any websites would allow anyone to upload anything whatsoever, because of the cost and the exposure to liability under the law. You wouldn't even be able to upload photographs you took with your own camera or device. In a possible future Internet under legislation like this, it would be more like having a Cable TV subscription than it would anything you've come to associate with the Internet of today. The only difference would be email and access to government services. Who would be willing to pay for that? Speaking only for myself, I wouldn't be willing to pay much, if anything, for that level of 'service', for the same reasons I stopped paying for Cable TV: not enough value for the money. If they really want to kill the Internet completely, then draconian legislation like this is the way to do it.
...riiight, as I said: take into account the total population differences, it matters. Population pressure changes things.
You know.. my initial internal reaction to reading what you wrote (half-life: about, say, 3 minutes) was to think to myself "That's a nutty idea, 3-phase industrial motors are a mature technology, very simple comparatively speaking, have a long lifespan, why should they change them for something more complicated?", but thereafter I thought to myself "..but while they are in fact a 'mature technology', that also implies they're a very old technology, and while elegantly simple in design, they were so because anything more complicated just didn't exist -- and big industry tends to be conservative about such things, so why should it change?"
In fact we've got high-horsepower brushless DC motors, which, yes, require relatively complex (compared to a 3-phase AC motor) electronics, also capable of handling high currents (which is, I think, the major reason they weren't used before; power MOSFETs are relatively new compared to 3-phase AC motors), and it would have been prohibitively expensive and high maintenance compared to a simple motor. As a proof-of-concept, you could probably take the motor and controller straight out of an electric car and adapt it to an industrial application, and it'd do just fine, have an at least comparable lifespan, etc.
You know, everyone seems to be such gods-be-damned fanboys about GMO crops, so how about we get these companies to develop a plant whose sole purpose is two-fold: (1) Grow and spread like weeds, and (2) Suck up and sequester CO2, and return us nice clean O2?
Wasn't this a violation of that reporters 1st Amendment rights?
The world has not only gotten quite a bit shittier in the last 20 years or so, but we've got the Internet now, which means you have orders of magnitude more sources and volume of information available at the click of a mouse button to show you how shitty the world is, so it's no big surprise that more people would fail their morale check and decide to check out early on life.
Are you taking into account the difference in the population of the planet in those different time periods?