I don't know any conservatives (and I know quite a few) who think that the liberal media is engaging in a conspiracy, but this is a conflation of terms on the part of the liberal media. They know damn well what they are doing, and now thanks to talk radio and the internet, so does anyone else who is not slurping up their liberal pap. The MSM do not engage in cloak and dagger meetings or phone calls, AKA conspiracy. Anyone who says they do is a kook.
What they do is carry to varying degrees liberal bias in their soft and hard news. They also often take talking points verbatim from democratic strategists, democrat politicians etc. and report it as gospel with no investigation or factual context either about the topic or the source. OTOH, anything conservative is suspect, and even when all the facts support a conservative position, it is reported with something between vague skepticism and open hostility, often citing unnamed sources (which is often the reporter or producer and no one with any actual knowledge or expertise in the topic) to counter or cast doubt on the issue. This has been going on for decades, and we are sick of it.
I am not a big Trump fan, the guy is Joe six pack with a billion dollar check book who got elected president, but that said, he is not Hitler or the Antichrist (if you think he is, just stop reading, you are too far gone to even grasp the basics of this post). Just look at the coverage of Trump's presidency: - Almost 2 years of investigation and zero evidence of any wrong doing or collusion by the president with Russia, but 98% of reporting on Trump is still negative. - Never mind that ISIS in Syria is nearly wiped out, - The economy is going gangbusters, - Employment is up, - Abuse of H1B visas is being cracked down on, - illegal aliens who were stealing American jobs, benefits and driving down US wages are being deported and driven off in hoards, etc.
All great news for the average American, but if you listen to the MSM you would think that the third Reich has been reincarnated, meanwhile Trump is busy re-instating and protecting the 2nd amendment gun ownership, freedom of religion that was trampled by Barak Hussein Obama and as far as I know has yet to be bitch slapped by the supreme court for violating the constitution (BHO was bitch slapped a record number of times for exactly that, never mind he supposedly taught constitutional law).
The bottom line: is Trump perfect? not by a long shot. Has he done some good things for average Americans? Yes. Have those been fairly and consistently reported on? Absolutely not.
I have a PC gaming rig as well, and did a lot of PC gaming when I was younger, but honestly, at this point in my life between career and family, I don't have 2 hours to dick with installations, settings and drivers to get shit to work. When I have 30 minutes to do some gaming, I want to be able to turn on the TV and start gaming within 3 minutes, and the consoles do that for me. The reality is that the PS4 pro and Xbox One X output gaming quality that is virtually identical to a high end gaming PC because of their dedicated hardware and shortcuts that developers can take on that hardware. (Don't believe me? Check out The Last of Us on PS3. The game looks amazing on a console that is 9 years old.) Try getting that kind of performance out of a 9 year old PC/video card.
So yeah, PC master race/ bleeding edge/ upgrade your $600 video card every 18 months/ etc, but consoles "just work" and work very well for a very long time.
The same busybody politicians that said reading novels was a vice in the 1700s or watching too much TV was an addiction in the 60s have now moved on to video games (in the 1990s, it started in earnest with Mortal Kombat, thank you Midway) and more recently, social media. While your mother was right (whether it was 1965 or 2005) to say "Moderation in all things." video games are no more or less a problem than any other hobby. If you let any one thing consume your life, it can become bad for you and cause problems. If too many people do this it creates a problem for society.
From personal observation, I think that social media (Facebook, etc.) is much more likely to do this than video games, but there are certainly kids and adults who don't learn how to moderate and control their passion for gaming and it causes issues with other parts of their lives. There have been numerous studies that show that video games improve reflexes, problem solving skills and keep the brain flexible, teach kids to work out problems (and believe that every problem has a solution to find) and even help reduce the onset of dementia in the elderly. There are now numerous good quality video games that are effective teaching tools, teaching kids math, grammar, spelling etc. OTOH, social media is systematically radicalizing society, and being iteratively designed to be addictive for monetary gain with little to no value or return to the individual user or society, besides causing depression and feelings of increased isolation.
I am glad that the Switch works for you, but Nintendo hasn't been a contender for me since the Wii and even then it was clearly a child's toy, not a hardcore gaming system.
I have been gaming since Atari 2600 days, and have bought and played on most consoles, but the Wii U and Switch both felt way too gimmicky to buy, with poor performance and a weak lineup of games. The last real Nintendo console that was a contender in performance and lineup was the Gamecube and that was competing with the Xbox and PS2 (and Dreamcast)... The most recent Nintendo console I bought was a retro SNES. It is true that portable gaming has little appeal to me, but from what I have heard, the only game even worth playing on the Switch is the new Zelda game.
The PS4 has been out for 4 years and it is still a far more powerful system than the Switch and yet you could buy one for $199 on Amazon this last black Friday, or an Xbone S for $189. Both the PS4 pro and Xbox One X are even more powerful offering 4k etc. while the the Switch limps along in performance and still costs $300 for the bare system.
"The Journal notes that Nintendo has already sold over 10 million Switch consoles, meaning developers could continue to flock to the platform, regardless"
Uh no. The PS4 has sold north of 60 million consoles and has by far the most titles, exclusives and indie ports. Developers are flocking to the PS4. The Xbone is north of 25 million units sold, making the switch the bastard step child of this console generation. With good reason. I used to buy every console of a generation to always be able to play the best exclusives on each console, but I never bought the WiiU and won't be buying the Switch either.
The switch is a bad joke of a console. It sacrifices what could be a low cost HD console for a half assed portable scheme that makes it a crappy, over priced console and a crappy portable... The Switch is the kind of crap you get with design by committee. When you have a visionary steering, they can keep the designers focused on a single mission, like Wii (make a cheap console for kids that is easy to program for that has built in motion controls and light gun functionality) or the PS4 (make a powerful next gen console that is good at playing games, reasonably priced with good indie support). The Xbone fell flat at launch because their vision involved raping consumers for every penny and blocking the resale of games (it is a sad fact; I was a huge 360 fan, but I waited a long time to buy an Xbone because of the crap they tried to pull before launch).
This is why we need legislation that treats internet access like the US used to treat the mail. Where mail service used to connect each citizen to the rest of the world and the fidelity of the service was vigorously protected, today we have the internet that does essentially the same thing for the modern world. As such internet access and protection of email should be enshrined into law as a basic right with the same protections of privacy as was the original US mail service.
Your example only reveals your ignorance. I do cash transactions all the time. If you are going to be selling something like a car, spend a few minutes and educate yourself. Nearly all private party sales of cars are cash, since money orders and checks are too easy to fake or use fraudulently. If you invest in a $5 cash pen and take the time to learn what to look for in legit cash, when you count the bills you spend a few extra minutes to verify the metal thread is present and of the right denomination, along with verifying the other water marks/anti fraud measures are present and correct. Can they still pull a weapon on you and steal your car? Sure, but again, there are ways to mitigate the risk. My favorite is doing the transaction in the parking lot of the local police station. If they won't show up there, they were never a legit buyer.
The reality is that however you are going to engage in monetary transactions, you must still do due dilligence, and cashless doesn't necessarily exempt you from this. In fact, there are myriad ways to defraud people using cashless transactions where the money can be moved overseas instantly and you will never see it again with no trail of recoverability.
Cashless is great, convenient etc. until it isn't. Wait until the next hurricane, earthquake or N Korea shoots an EMP attack and the power is out for days or weeks. Then the people with no cash will be stuck with no ways to buy food and water or other necessities... There is a reason that hard currency is still around even when credit cards have been around for decades.
The other problem with going cashless is the invasion of privacy that is routine by big businesses and the government. If you are fine with both knowing every intimate detail of your life, go for it, but if not, you may want to make some purchases with untraceable cash.
Hint for those not paying attention: China doesn't care about porn.
They will knock some of the porn sites offline because it gives them a PC cover to restrict political speech that they don't like or that might challenge the oligarchs in the communist party, which is communist in name only, they are just the new ruling class in China and everyone else in China are their surfs.
My smart phone that is always in my pocket does far more and is less likely to get damaged.
My dumb digital watch with an electrolumenescent back-light still does what I expect a watch to do, it does it for $35 dollars, it's permanently water proof for showers and pool swimming, it lasts 6 years on a single battery and I can't figure out why I would want to replace it.
The screen of a smart watch is too small to do jack on and other than maybe buying a fitness tracker, I can't fathom screwing around with watch apps when my nice big phone is right in my pocket. The smart watch is a hangover from the Dick Tracey days of the radio watch fantasy, the problem is we already have better tech than was imagined in the Star Trek communicators, so we kind of leap frogged the whole Dick Tracey watch thing both functionally and practically. Now smart watches are relegated to to the nerd toy aisle unless and until they can be more practical than a real watch with some actually valuable, unique functions.
"Given it's size and diversity, it is highly likely that aliens exist."
Given that there's been a grand total of zero evidence to back this up, the odds are much slimmer. And you don't need to "know everything about the universe" to project that. Feel free to toss out the Drake equation...it's truly meaningless since much of it is only based upon conjecture, speculation and unmeasured parameters.
That is like a bacterium saying that it is unlikely that birds exist because it has never seen one in the 1cc of dirt 3 feet down where it has spent it's entire existence. Lack of knowledge about the universe does not preclude the existence of something, and is in fact only evidence of our own lack of experience in the universe.
Murder is a moral definition that also happens to have a legal definition. The concept of murder far predates law (see Cain and Able), but the immorality of murder as a concept is fairly easy to grasp: the un-justified taking of another person's life. Killing someone because their life is inconvenient to you is clearly immoral, yet that is exactly what abortion on demand is. (We are not talking about the 0.1% of abortions that are performed to save the life of the mother, which most people don't have an issue with, because saving a life where two lives would be lost is justifiable morally, but the pro abortion crowd always trots out because that is literally all they have at this point, where babies are viable after about 22 weeks and science shows them to be a person at around 10 weeks.)
Your devolution into an obscene ad homonym tirade only underscores your weak position with no actual facts to support it. You may want to try going for a walk, getting some fresh air and maybe a little perspective, I wouldn't want you to die of a heat attack from all the stress that your irrational beliefs are clearly causing.
LOL the sock puppet mods are out in force today +5 for that alt left drivel is laughable. From the last few months, it is clear that most of the real abuse of women happens on the far left, not the far right (Harvey Weinstein and 50:1 of the rest of the woman molesters were far left guys, not "right wingers"). Hell, Bill Clinton straight up raped several women and you elected him president twice where he sexually harassed an intern in the oval office... It is surprising to me how often the left projects their own shortcomings onto the right. Conservatives are not perfect, but the facts are what they are.
Personal responsibility and morality have nothing to do with punishing women (or men for that matter) but are pre-requisites for a healthy society. All of this male hating alt left propaganda is going to backfire massively. Women in the US are on parity for men across the board socially (and in the work place once you control for hours worked, time off and job commitment). Compare that to the third world or the Muslim world and get yourself a reality check. The Judeo Christian philosophy, western civilization and chivalry have afforded modern women more freedom than any other force in history bar none and now you spit on it because you want the right to murder your children because it is inconvenient to have a baby. The fact that you hate the very institutions that have freed you and attribute repression of women to them is a sick joke.
Don't forget to add 9 more months of Social Security and Medicare.
The set of their arguments and actions are incoherent nonsense, unless you understand the core single truth: they know an unwanted child in an unsuitable family situation is intensely undesirable---the purpose is to punish women for sex. That one supposition explains nearly all the observations.
I honestly cannot see a single fact or piece of rational logic in this entire statement. I couldn't even figure out which side of the issue you were arguing for until the bit about punishing women for sex... Are you an idiot? Are you a space alien? Here on this planet we have a bunch of different contraceptives, including pills, condoms, morning after pills and the list goes on all of which do not stop a beating heart or terminate brain activity of distinct, unique human beings. I get that this debate is all emotion for many people, but the science is pretty clear if you are willing to look at it. Either way it has nothing to do with punishing women for sex, which can be safely had using contraceptives. It has to do with protecting an innocent human being who is currently in danger of being murdered because it's existence is inconvenient. There are thousands upon thousands of people waiting to adopt healthy babies, so the unwanted argument is not even legitimate. It is just inconvenient for the mother for about 7 months...
So you cite criminal behavior (child abuse in most states if the mother takes illicit drugs while pregnant) and think that is justification for an unborn baby not being a person?
As stated by others, there are many laws that make it illegal for pregnant women to abuse their unborn child by using drugs etc.
There is also plenty of judicial precedent for charging the mother with child abuse for such acts, but as with all crime, we punish the crime after it is committed, not before in our free society, which is why we don't have mandatory maternal monitoring...
There are also laws and judicial precedent for charging anyone who commits homicide on a pregnant woman with two counts of homicide. If the unborn child is not a person, how would this be justified?
How about you cite some actual, medical evidence for how a 20 week unborn baby is not a distinct person... "Put up or shut up?" Oh please, try and string together a few medical facts and some logic...
Censorship is rarely if ever the answer. The fact that a giant alt left company is doing it does not make it better. The solution to propaganda and disinformation is more accurate, factual information, and historical perspective.
The reason we are in this mess to begin with is the news media degenerated from it's original goal of reporting "Just the facts, mam." to actively shilling for the alt left and the Democrats, often using he said/she said with no underlying facts or background on the parties involved or deeper investigation into the truth.
Thus, about 65% of the country (the 35% alt left don't even notice the echo chamber) have lost confidence in the MSM to give them the truth on any kind of contentious situation or topic. This was a long slide for the MSM, from the rise of talk radio in the 90s through to the foundation of online only outlets like Breitebart and The Drudge Report. At this point, the majority of people in the US spend more hours online than watching TV and it is just a natural extension that they would rather get their news online than listen to the alt left propaganda coming out of the MSM.
Russia is just the latest foreign power to recognize this trend and utilize it to spread their propaganda. People who get their "news" from Facebook or Google are at the same level as those who get it around the water cooler, as it is essentially gossip and not much more. Facebook and Google want it to be more, but until they start to honestly and impartially vet sources across the ideological spectrum, they are nothing more than another alt left gossip rag.
Only a fool thinks they know everything about the universe. Given it's size and diversity, it is highly likely that aliens exist. If they are capable of interstellar travel, it is highly likely that they are vastly superior technologically to us.
So one of two things is going on. The US is/was spending resources investigating possible UFOs which is just rational and prudent. They either have not found anything concrete, or there is a full on MIB situation, in which case, they sure as hell won't tell the world as there would be a massive shitstorm of craziness as people freaked out.
The arrival of the white man was the end of the Native American way of life, but we are still here. All of us smart ones integrated, intermarried and are productive members of society. A few holdouts, mostly stubborn idiots, fought the white man and lost and the ones that are still stubborn idiots live on reservations. In each generation, the smart ones move out and integrate into society.
When someone shows up and demonstrably proves that your way of life and beliefs are backwards and wrong, the wise man accepts reality and adapts. I am not saying that the arrival of Europeans was good for Native Americans of the time, but I am glad to not be living that life today. I greatly enjoy modern civilization.
Seriously, Bitcoin is nothing but a string of unique numbers at it's core. There is no tangible value, not even a government fiat supporting it. The only thing propping up the value is it's meteoric increase in value. If any of the major holders of Bitcoin decide to divest, the value will go down and all the speculators that are leveraged to the hilt will try to sell and the value will drop to nothing overnight. If it were a stock, I would short the hell out of it.
Trusting Microsoft was your first mistake. I don't trust those idiots to do anything. I wait years between upgrading Windows OS (no choice but to use MS due to critical software). I was on XP for years, finally upgraded to 7. I have no intention of going to Windows 10 until security updates for Windows 7 expire. I worry that with the update treadmill of Windows 10, it may turn out to be a perpetual bug cluster F*** since they can always just push out a new patch to fix what they broke in the last one.
The most secure way to store your passwords is on a piece of paper next to your computer. For added security, abbreviate the parts of the password with a reminder rather than the actual part, so that only you can decode the reminder and create the actual password. The odds of someone breaking into your house, being interested in your password list and further figuring out you password hints to reconstruct your actual password are so minuscule as to be essentially zero. The odds of some organization that you use being hacked and compromising your information or login and password are far more likely.
Until we start taking hacking more seriously: criminal charges for negligent security at corporations (i.e. not using best practices) and heavy corporate fines on a per victim level, and life sentences with no parole, etc. for hackers and black bagging non-extradition offenders (or just blocking/blacklisting non-extradition/bad actor countries), the hacking epidemic will continue to grow.
And yet a fetus is a baby, just still in the womb. If you remove the baby from the womb, it is still a baby, thus all fetus are babies, but according to the pro baby killers, fetus are not babies and that distinction in language has made the murder of millions of babies easier to get away with by calling them fetus, parasites and blobs of tissue instead of what they are, babies.
100 years from now abortion will be viewed as we today view slavery, with horror and disbelief that a civilized society could condone and legalize the murder of their own children for the sake of convenience. Savages and the ancient world did this, but our society is no better. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Babies in the womb are genetically distinct, living humans, who while being dependent on their mothers for nutrients and protection, meet every criteria of a living organism and while a blastocist 20 days after fertilization is clearly not a baby, at 10 weeks (prior to 99% plus of all abortions, excepting the morning after pill, which has the same effect of preventing implantation as most birth control pills and clearly does not kill a baby) the baby is clearly identifiable as such by any 6 year old. https://www.babycenter.com/ims... Regardless of how anyone feels emotionally about this issue, unless you can refute the above, abortion is demonstrably the murder of a baby. Unless you start defining personhood by location, intelligence, ability, method of feeding, or some other arbitrary factor, the personhood of the unborn baby is undeniable.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know any conservatives (and I know quite a few) who think that the liberal media is engaging in a conspiracy, but this is a conflation of terms on the part of the liberal media. They know damn well what they are doing, and now thanks to talk radio and the internet, so does anyone else who is not slurping up their liberal pap. The MSM do not engage in cloak and dagger meetings or phone calls, AKA conspiracy. Anyone who says they do is a kook.
What they do is carry to varying degrees liberal bias in their soft and hard news. They also often take talking points verbatim from democratic strategists, democrat politicians etc. and report it as gospel with no investigation or factual context either about the topic or the source. OTOH, anything conservative is suspect, and even when all the facts support a conservative position, it is reported with something between vague skepticism and open hostility, often citing unnamed sources (which is often the reporter or producer and no one with any actual knowledge or expertise in the topic) to counter or cast doubt on the issue. This has been going on for decades, and we are sick of it.
I am not a big Trump fan, the guy is Joe six pack with a billion dollar check book who got elected president, but that said, he is not Hitler or the Antichrist (if you think he is, just stop reading, you are too far gone to even grasp the basics of this post). Just look at the coverage of Trump's presidency:
- Almost 2 years of investigation and zero evidence of any wrong doing or collusion by the president with Russia, but 98% of reporting on Trump is still negative.
- Never mind that ISIS in Syria is nearly wiped out,
- The economy is going gangbusters,
- Employment is up,
- Abuse of H1B visas is being cracked down on,
- illegal aliens who were stealing American jobs, benefits and driving down US wages are being deported and driven off in hoards, etc.
All great news for the average American, but if you listen to the MSM you would think that the third Reich has been reincarnated, meanwhile Trump is busy re-instating and protecting the 2nd amendment gun ownership, freedom of religion that was trampled by Barak Hussein Obama and as far as I know has yet to be bitch slapped by the supreme court for violating the constitution (BHO was bitch slapped a record number of times for exactly that, never mind he supposedly taught constitutional law).
The bottom line: is Trump perfect? not by a long shot. Has he done some good things for average Americans? Yes. Have those been fairly and consistently reported on? Absolutely not.
I have a PC gaming rig as well, and did a lot of PC gaming when I was younger, but honestly, at this point in my life between career and family, I don't have 2 hours to dick with installations, settings and drivers to get shit to work. When I have 30 minutes to do some gaming, I want to be able to turn on the TV and start gaming within 3 minutes, and the consoles do that for me. The reality is that the PS4 pro and Xbox One X output gaming quality that is virtually identical to a high end gaming PC because of their dedicated hardware and shortcuts that developers can take on that hardware. (Don't believe me? Check out The Last of Us on PS3. The game looks amazing on a console that is 9 years old.) Try getting that kind of performance out of a 9 year old PC/video card.
So yeah, PC master race/ bleeding edge/ upgrade your $600 video card every 18 months/ etc, but consoles "just work" and work very well for a very long time.
The same busybody politicians that said reading novels was a vice in the 1700s or watching too much TV was an addiction in the 60s have now moved on to video games (in the 1990s, it started in earnest with Mortal Kombat, thank you Midway) and more recently, social media. While your mother was right (whether it was 1965 or 2005) to say "Moderation in all things." video games are no more or less a problem than any other hobby. If you let any one thing consume your life, it can become bad for you and cause problems. If too many people do this it creates a problem for society.
From personal observation, I think that social media (Facebook, etc.) is much more likely to do this than video games, but there are certainly kids and adults who don't learn how to moderate and control their passion for gaming and it causes issues with other parts of their lives. There have been numerous studies that show that video games improve reflexes, problem solving skills and keep the brain flexible, teach kids to work out problems (and believe that every problem has a solution to find) and even help reduce the onset of dementia in the elderly. There are now numerous good quality video games that are effective teaching tools, teaching kids math, grammar, spelling etc. OTOH, social media is systematically radicalizing society, and being iteratively designed to be addictive for monetary gain with little to no value or return to the individual user or society, besides causing depression and feelings of increased isolation.
I am glad that the Switch works for you, but Nintendo hasn't been a contender for me since the Wii and even then it was clearly a child's toy, not a hardcore gaming system.
I have been gaming since Atari 2600 days, and have bought and played on most consoles, but the Wii U and Switch both felt way too gimmicky to buy, with poor performance and a weak lineup of games. The last real Nintendo console that was a contender in performance and lineup was the Gamecube and that was competing with the Xbox and PS2 (and Dreamcast)... The most recent Nintendo console I bought was a retro SNES. It is true that portable gaming has little appeal to me, but from what I have heard, the only game even worth playing on the Switch is the new Zelda game.
The PS4 has been out for 4 years and it is still a far more powerful system than the Switch and yet you could buy one for $199 on Amazon this last black Friday, or an Xbone S for $189. Both the PS4 pro and Xbox One X are even more powerful offering 4k etc. while the the Switch limps along in performance and still costs $300 for the bare system.
"The Journal notes that Nintendo has already sold over 10 million Switch consoles, meaning developers could continue to flock to the platform, regardless"
Uh no. The PS4 has sold north of 60 million consoles and has by far the most titles, exclusives and indie ports. Developers are flocking to the PS4. The Xbone is north of 25 million units sold, making the switch the bastard step child of this console generation. With good reason. I used to buy every console of a generation to always be able to play the best exclusives on each console, but I never bought the WiiU and won't be buying the Switch either.
The switch is a bad joke of a console. It sacrifices what could be a low cost HD console for a half assed portable scheme that makes it a crappy, over priced console and a crappy portable... The Switch is the kind of crap you get with design by committee. When you have a visionary steering, they can keep the designers focused on a single mission, like Wii (make a cheap console for kids that is easy to program for that has built in motion controls and light gun functionality) or the PS4 (make a powerful next gen console that is good at playing games, reasonably priced with good indie support). The Xbone fell flat at launch because their vision involved raping consumers for every penny and blocking the resale of games (it is a sad fact; I was a huge 360 fan, but I waited a long time to buy an Xbone because of the crap they tried to pull before launch).
This is why we need legislation that treats internet access like the US used to treat the mail. Where mail service used to connect each citizen to the rest of the world and the fidelity of the service was vigorously protected, today we have the internet that does essentially the same thing for the modern world. As such internet access and protection of email should be enshrined into law as a basic right with the same protections of privacy as was the original US mail service.
Your example only reveals your ignorance. I do cash transactions all the time. If you are going to be selling something like a car, spend a few minutes and educate yourself. Nearly all private party sales of cars are cash, since money orders and checks are too easy to fake or use fraudulently. If you invest in a $5 cash pen and take the time to learn what to look for in legit cash, when you count the bills you spend a few extra minutes to verify the metal thread is present and of the right denomination, along with verifying the other water marks/anti fraud measures are present and correct. Can they still pull a weapon on you and steal your car? Sure, but again, there are ways to mitigate the risk. My favorite is doing the transaction in the parking lot of the local police station. If they won't show up there, they were never a legit buyer.
The reality is that however you are going to engage in monetary transactions, you must still do due dilligence, and cashless doesn't necessarily exempt you from this. In fact, there are myriad ways to defraud people using cashless transactions where the money can be moved overseas instantly and you will never see it again with no trail of recoverability.
Cashless is great, convenient etc. until it isn't. Wait until the next hurricane, earthquake or N Korea shoots an EMP attack and the power is out for days or weeks. Then the people with no cash will be stuck with no ways to buy food and water or other necessities... There is a reason that hard currency is still around even when credit cards have been around for decades.
The other problem with going cashless is the invasion of privacy that is routine by big businesses and the government. If you are fine with both knowing every intimate detail of your life, go for it, but if not, you may want to make some purchases with untraceable cash.
Hint for those not paying attention: China doesn't care about porn.
They will knock some of the porn sites offline because it gives them a PC cover to restrict political speech that they don't like or that might challenge the oligarchs in the communist party, which is communist in name only, they are just the new ruling class in China and everyone else in China are their surfs.
Two fundamental problems with smart watches:
My smart phone that is always in my pocket does far more and is less likely to get damaged.
My dumb digital watch with an electrolumenescent back-light still does what I expect a watch to do, it does it for $35 dollars, it's permanently water proof for showers and pool swimming, it lasts 6 years on a single battery and I can't figure out why I would want to replace it.
The screen of a smart watch is too small to do jack on and other than maybe buying a fitness tracker, I can't fathom screwing around with watch apps when my nice big phone is right in my pocket. The smart watch is a hangover from the Dick Tracey days of the radio watch fantasy, the problem is we already have better tech than was imagined in the Star Trek communicators, so we kind of leap frogged the whole Dick Tracey watch thing both functionally and practically. Now smart watches are relegated to to the nerd toy aisle unless and until they can be more practical than a real watch with some actually valuable, unique functions.
"Given it's size and diversity, it is highly likely that aliens exist."
Given that there's been a grand total of zero evidence to back this up, the odds are much slimmer. And you don't need to "know everything about the universe" to project that. Feel free to toss out the Drake equation...it's truly meaningless since much of it is only based upon conjecture, speculation and unmeasured parameters.
https://www.realclearscience.c...
That is like a bacterium saying that it is unlikely that birds exist because it has never seen one in the 1cc of dirt 3 feet down where it has spent it's entire existence. Lack of knowledge about the universe does not preclude the existence of something, and is in fact only evidence of our own lack of experience in the universe.
Watch out DNS, I suspect that meglon is running some sock puppets to dish out his "social justice". Sad but apparently true.
No.
Murder is a moral definition that also happens to have a legal definition. The concept of murder far predates law (see Cain and Able), but the immorality of murder as a concept is fairly easy to grasp: the un-justified taking of another person's life. Killing someone because their life is inconvenient to you is clearly immoral, yet that is exactly what abortion on demand is. (We are not talking about the 0.1% of abortions that are performed to save the life of the mother, which most people don't have an issue with, because saving a life where two lives would be lost is justifiable morally, but the pro abortion crowd always trots out because that is literally all they have at this point, where babies are viable after about 22 weeks and science shows them to be a person at around 10 weeks.)
Your devolution into an obscene ad homonym tirade only underscores your weak position with no actual facts to support it. You may want to try going for a walk, getting some fresh air and maybe a little perspective, I wouldn't want you to die of a heat attack from all the stress that your irrational beliefs are clearly causing.
LOL the sock puppet mods are out in force today +5 for that alt left drivel is laughable. From the last few months, it is clear that most of the real abuse of women happens on the far left, not the far right (Harvey Weinstein and 50:1 of the rest of the woman molesters were far left guys, not "right wingers"). Hell, Bill Clinton straight up raped several women and you elected him president twice where he sexually harassed an intern in the oval office... It is surprising to me how often the left projects their own shortcomings onto the right. Conservatives are not perfect, but the facts are what they are.
Personal responsibility and morality have nothing to do with punishing women (or men for that matter) but are pre-requisites for a healthy society. All of this male hating alt left propaganda is going to backfire massively. Women in the US are on parity for men across the board socially (and in the work place once you control for hours worked, time off and job commitment). Compare that to the third world or the Muslim world and get yourself a reality check. The Judeo Christian philosophy, western civilization and chivalry have afforded modern women more freedom than any other force in history bar none and now you spit on it because you want the right to murder your children because it is inconvenient to have a baby. The fact that you hate the very institutions that have freed you and attribute repression of women to them is a sick joke.
> Either put up or shut up.
Don't forget to add 9 more months of Social Security and Medicare.
The set of their arguments and actions are incoherent nonsense, unless you understand the core single truth: they know an unwanted child in an unsuitable family situation is intensely undesirable---the purpose is to punish women for sex. That one supposition explains nearly all the observations.
I honestly cannot see a single fact or piece of rational logic in this entire statement. I couldn't even figure out which side of the issue you were arguing for until the bit about punishing women for sex... Are you an idiot? Are you a space alien? Here on this planet we have a bunch of different contraceptives, including pills, condoms, morning after pills and the list goes on all of which do not stop a beating heart or terminate brain activity of distinct, unique human beings. I get that this debate is all emotion for many people, but the science is pretty clear if you are willing to look at it. Either way it has nothing to do with punishing women for sex, which can be safely had using contraceptives. It has to do with protecting an innocent human being who is currently in danger of being murdered because it's existence is inconvenient. There are thousands upon thousands of people waiting to adopt healthy babies, so the unwanted argument is not even legitimate. It is just inconvenient for the mother for about 7 months...
So you cite criminal behavior (child abuse in most states if the mother takes illicit drugs while pregnant) and think that is justification for an unborn baby not being a person?
As stated by others, there are many laws that make it illegal for pregnant women to abuse their unborn child by using drugs etc.
There is also plenty of judicial precedent for charging the mother with child abuse for such acts, but as with all crime, we punish the crime after it is committed, not before in our free society, which is why we don't have mandatory maternal monitoring...
There are also laws and judicial precedent for charging anyone who commits homicide on a pregnant woman with two counts of homicide. If the unborn child is not a person, how would this be justified?
How about you cite some actual, medical evidence for how a 20 week unborn baby is not a distinct person... "Put up or shut up?" Oh please, try and string together a few medical facts and some logic...
Quoting AC who said it well:
"Argues that it's not a medical definition. Goes to a dictionary instead of a proper human embryology reference......."
"That said, I'd like to hope we're at least of greater interest than just for an alien betting pool on when and how we blow ourselves up."
Never underestimate the alien value of a medieval vacation destination. They are probably already here. I suspect "Florida man"...
Censorship is rarely if ever the answer. The fact that a giant alt left company is doing it does not make it better. The solution to propaganda and disinformation is more accurate, factual information, and historical perspective.
The reason we are in this mess to begin with is the news media degenerated from it's original goal of reporting "Just the facts, mam." to actively shilling for the alt left and the Democrats, often using he said/she said with no underlying facts or background on the parties involved or deeper investigation into the truth.
Thus, about 65% of the country (the 35% alt left don't even notice the echo chamber) have lost confidence in the MSM to give them the truth on any kind of contentious situation or topic. This was a long slide for the MSM, from the rise of talk radio in the 90s through to the foundation of online only outlets like Breitebart and The Drudge Report. At this point, the majority of people in the US spend more hours online than watching TV and it is just a natural extension that they would rather get their news online than listen to the alt left propaganda coming out of the MSM.
Russia is just the latest foreign power to recognize this trend and utilize it to spread their propaganda. People who get their "news" from Facebook or Google are at the same level as those who get it around the water cooler, as it is essentially gossip and not much more. Facebook and Google want it to be more, but until they start to honestly and impartially vet sources across the ideological spectrum, they are nothing more than another alt left gossip rag.
Your daddy's skynet this AI is not. Even Arnold had better lines than this AI written mess.
Only a fool thinks they know everything about the universe. Given it's size and diversity, it is highly likely that aliens exist. If they are capable of interstellar travel, it is highly likely that they are vastly superior technologically to us.
So one of two things is going on. The US is/was spending resources investigating possible UFOs which is just rational and prudent. They either have not found anything concrete, or there is a full on MIB situation, in which case, they sure as hell won't tell the world as there would be a massive shitstorm of craziness as people freaked out.
The arrival of the white man was the end of the Native American way of life, but we are still here. All of us smart ones integrated, intermarried and are productive members of society. A few holdouts, mostly stubborn idiots, fought the white man and lost and the ones that are still stubborn idiots live on reservations. In each generation, the smart ones move out and integrate into society.
When someone shows up and demonstrably proves that your way of life and beliefs are backwards and wrong, the wise man accepts reality and adapts. I am not saying that the arrival of Europeans was good for Native Americans of the time, but I am glad to not be living that life today. I greatly enjoy modern civilization.
Say it all with me "Bubble"...
Seriously, Bitcoin is nothing but a string of unique numbers at it's core. There is no tangible value, not even a government fiat supporting it. The only thing propping up the value is it's meteoric increase in value. If any of the major holders of Bitcoin decide to divest, the value will go down and all the speculators that are leveraged to the hilt will try to sell and the value will drop to nothing overnight. If it were a stock, I would short the hell out of it.
Trusting Microsoft was your first mistake. I don't trust those idiots to do anything. I wait years between upgrading Windows OS (no choice but to use MS due to critical software). I was on XP for years, finally upgraded to 7. I have no intention of going to Windows 10 until security updates for Windows 7 expire. I worry that with the update treadmill of Windows 10, it may turn out to be a perpetual bug cluster F*** since they can always just push out a new patch to fix what they broke in the last one.
The most secure way to store your passwords is on a piece of paper next to your computer. For added security, abbreviate the parts of the password with a reminder rather than the actual part, so that only you can decode the reminder and create the actual password. The odds of someone breaking into your house, being interested in your password list and further figuring out you password hints to reconstruct your actual password are so minuscule as to be essentially zero. The odds of some organization that you use being hacked and compromising your information or login and password are far more likely.
Until we start taking hacking more seriously: criminal charges for negligent security at corporations (i.e. not using best practices) and heavy corporate fines on a per victim level, and life sentences with no parole, etc. for hackers and black bagging non-extradition offenders (or just blocking/blacklisting non-extradition/bad actor countries), the hacking epidemic will continue to grow.
And yet a fetus is a baby, just still in the womb. If you remove the baby from the womb, it is still a baby, thus all fetus are babies, but according to the pro baby killers, fetus are not babies and that distinction in language has made the murder of millions of babies easier to get away with by calling them fetus, parasites and blobs of tissue instead of what they are, babies.
100 years from now abortion will be viewed as we today view slavery, with horror and disbelief that a civilized society could condone and legalize the murder of their own children for the sake of convenience. Savages and the ancient world did this, but our society is no better. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Babies in the womb are genetically distinct, living humans, who while being dependent on their mothers for nutrients and protection, meet every criteria of a living organism and while a blastocist 20 days after fertilization is clearly not a baby, at 10 weeks (prior to 99% plus of all abortions, excepting the morning after pill, which has the same effect of preventing implantation as most birth control pills and clearly does not kill a baby) the baby is clearly identifiable as such by any 6 year old. https://www.babycenter.com/ims... Regardless of how anyone feels emotionally about this issue, unless you can refute the above, abortion is demonstrably the murder of a baby. Unless you start defining personhood by location, intelligence, ability, method of feeding, or some other arbitrary factor, the personhood of the unborn baby is undeniable.