To download a torrent, click a single link on a website. On Vista it opens a dialog asking if you want to let it through your firewall, click yes (people are good at that, I hear).
Done.
While this might not be as convenient as Rapidshare for smaller files (100Mb), it is much better for larger files which are generally chopped up by Rapidshare uploaders. Downloading a 5 part, 700Mb movie via DD services is a pain in the ass, and takes about as long as getting it via torrent (especially if its well seeded).
Another problem with Rapidshare like services is you can never tell if the link is still alive, while with torrents you generally know what your getting before you even click the link.
You haven't been to a movie lately. The last couple movies I have been to have been absolute hell (excluding a showing of Moon at 11:00 on a Tuesday). I pretty much stopped going to movies because I can't stand the crowd, and the idiots constantly talking, or worse, yelling out blatantly obvious observations as if they were public service announcements ("look! Its Woody Harrilson!"). Of course then you have the people who decided that being glued to a cell phone at all times, discussing their rousing bout of grocery shopping, is socially acceptable.
And then the families with their damn broods, who somehow decided that little Billy should be allowed to scream whenever he wants, because discipline is a bad word. Generally this is the same family that constantly comments on the action to their children every five minutes, and are too enchanted by this to change their collicy babies damn diapers. This is obviously the same family that took their six year old daughter to an R rated horror movie, expecting it to be family friendly.
Movies are EXTREMELY social now. Which to me completely defeats the point of seeing them. If I wanted to be social, I could go to my local Irish pub for a quarter of the cost of movie tickets, and if I wanted to actually enjoy a movie I'd watch it in the comfort of my own living room, with my own snacks, and the possibility of drinking beer or wine while watching it.
So... its a graphical versioning system. Sure, there was nothing quite as good as it before (though I still mostly use iBackup), but it isn't a new or innovative idea. Its a backup... I've been doing that for around 20 years before Time Machine came around, I'll continue doing it years after OS X dies.
My respect for that one item is what made me go from a rabid Mac OSX hater to just not preferring it
Why the hell would you HATE an operating system? OS X is very nice, I even recommend it to all the non-nerds I know who are buying new PCs. Windows has been very nice, as well, since XP (barring the Vista launch, though Vista subsequently got better), hell even Linux has become mature, and very Usable with both KDE and Gnome becoming robust and intuitive. They all serve a purpose. OS X excels at general computing and ease of use, Windows is still the best gaming and compatability platform, and Linux is for nerds who want to play with their computer. They're all VERY good at what they're made for now. So I don't see the room for "hating" any of them.
Sure, we might prefer one or another of them, based on our experiences and computing styles, but none of the big three are really bad, either.
Actually hating OS X would be HARDER than hating any of the others.
Wait... I paid a decent chunk of cash going from 10.2 to 10.3 to 10.4... those are point releases, last I checked. And what did I get for it? Konfabulator, multiple desktops (been in Linux for years), and a versioning system (been in Linux for even more years). Wait, between 10.3 and 10.4 there was a minor graphics upgrade in the kernel, which didn't do much since you still need at least 2Gb to run OS X at any speed. And Snow Leopard is basically 10.4.5 (or is it 5.5?), which isn't even a point release. Yes, it is nice that I can upgrade my Tiger machine for $30, but it is hardly a big upgrade for Leopard. Not as big as XP to Win7, or even Vista to Win7.
And a crappy upgrade to Intel, which made all my software run slower on the same hardware specs.
I'm sorry, I like Apple's (outside of the insane "must upgrade" cycle), but don't over-glorify them. Just so people don't accuse me of "fan-boy-ism" I'm currently have a MacMini running Leopard, a gaming PC running Vista, and a laptop dual booting Win7 and Ubuntu 9.04. Going from Vista to Win7 is a pretty good improvement, going from Leopard to Snow Leopard isn't.
Win7 is the first Windows OS I've actually been excited by, ever. Sure, I commonly argue that Vista "isn't that bad", but Win7 is actually good, and probably worth upgrading XP over. Though the price is a bit insane (but isn't that why we have OEM copies at Fry's?).
Don't forget that you must, by law, have at least one body panel that is always primer gray. Its either painting that one panel above the left front tire electric lime green, or putting neon blue lights on the under carriage... What would make a car look less trashy? LIGHTS!
IANACN (I am not a comic nerd), but the parent was talking about post-WWII, not the 80's when comic publishing blew up into billions of niche imprints (or worse, the 90's when it blew up into trillions of "edgy" imprints). Back then comics WERE edgy, dark, and post-modern(ish), though I'd put DC as being the more edgy. Before WWII comics were mostly silly things for children, but after WWII they expanded their market towards a more "mature" teenage audience.
Yes, now Marvel is rather tame compared to some of the smaller imprints (some of which they own).
Compare this to Disney at the time, which was still catering to children, and was running with cute, and princess fantasies.
Though now this is all rather stupid. Disney owns Marvel, but Time-Warner owns DC. Disney also owns an obscene amount of media companies, some of which produce products aimed at a more adult audience (Touchstone, Miramax, and Hollywood, for example). Not all of Disney is just cartoons for children, and it hasn't been so for a very long time.
I really think the human race as a whole will not survive the 21st century using exponential growth as an example.
I'm not too worried about this, I'm not saying that there isn't a reason to worry, it just isn't that great a chance. First, I can't see many disasters (man made or not) that could completely eliminate the species. We've survived a lot of things already. If nothing else, humans are adaptable.
Also the exponential growth thing isn't completely accurate. Right now most of our population growth is from developing countries, while a lot of the developed ones are actually declining in population growth (birth rates are down), ignoring immigration. Most of the UN projections also say there will be some flattening of growth levels in the next decade or so, leaving an Earth with around 8-10 billion people.
Yes, this is a lot, but before we get all Malthusian, remember that technology is also increasing at an incredible rate as well. Right now we are above the carrying capacity the Earth had even 30 years ago.
The usual reason for this is when too many people running things get greedy. They make it hard on the people. The people then put someone in power that promises them everything that they want in life.
This annoys me too. Though I think it annoys almost everyone. But looking through history, this has been a universal from the time we decided to invent nation-states and government. I suppose I don't worry about it too much because I don't think there is a solution, and thus worrying about isn't productive. Not saying I don't get angry about it almost weekly. I think my neighbors think me saying "Why the f* are people so goddamn stupid?!" every morning on reading the paper is some strange religious ritual I have.
In the end, though, the big picture is mostly an academic, and abstract, thing. The only thing that really matters is our families, and immediate circle of friends, this has been the important thing since we decided to be more than mere critters, and this is all that will matters when modern society finally collapses under its own weight. Not saying we shouldn't do what we can to help others, and if we actually have the means to help others in the bigger world we should. If modern society completely died, I don't think it would be too big of a deal, people would survive, have children, fall in love, and make art. In some order.
You may be right, hell you probably are right, but my main point stands; Hugo Chavez is a Venezuelan problem, not a US problem. I don't like a lot of things about him, as I stated, I mainly agree with his current rhetoric. The main thing is that my opinion should have no bearing whatsoever on Venezuela, and thus doesn't matter one bit.
In my country most of the opposition to the Chavez isn't based based on any of the facts you listed, its purely ideological (as I admit most of my liking of him is), based off of a home (i.e. foreign) spun image of the guy as a tool towards conflicting ideologies. I'm more bashing them, than I am the actual people involved, or having to live under him.
More to the point, I was responding to the person who was saying that if you like someone, you must like all of their policies.
I will, though, read up on it more. Not that my opinion, revised or not, should play any role in anything of import outside of silly internet hand waving.
Oddly, I saw this in Oakland. Sure it wasn't a shotgun, but some huge security guard followed me around a Walgreens while menacingly slapping a billy club into the palm of his hand. Actually in post Katrina New Orleans you can see many armed guards wandering about, keeping people from basic services.
I personally like Chavez, and even if I didn't I don't think the US has ANY right whatsoever to complain about it. I find the silly "they don't live the American way! We can't make money off of exploiting their poor!" stuff a rather depressing statement about my own country (who I am a lot less proud off now that we know more about Cheney and his hired hit squads, and our love of torture). Who cares? Great, if the Venezuelans don't like Chavez, let them vote him out, or have a real, authentic, coup. Not our business. Same with Cuba, btw, same with every other country in the world. If they don't want to be like America, good for them, if it works. If the whole damn universe became socialist or communist, I don't think I'd lose a second of sleep.
That said, I don't agree with his banning violent video games. See what I did there? Just because you like someone, doesn't mean you have to love everything about them. I personally find Chavez to be a bit of a blow hard, and I dislike the cult of personality thing too, its a shallow way of leading. Wow... I still don't think the guy is an antichrist though.
I'm guessing the term "universal" here actually means that all employees get health care, as opposed to just some of them. What your confusing is "universal public healthcare", with emphasis on the public.
I'm glad that anti-health care trolls are just like the anti-Iraq trolls, trying to work it into any topic, no matter how little it actually relates.
"So the weather will be warm, with winds from the southwest" "See, public healthcare is COMMUNISM!"
Depends on what you mean by old, I was meaning "old and close to death", if I had to attach an actual age to that I would probably say somewhere in your later 60s, when age actually starts to effect your life, and becomes a constant reality.
How many old, bold and full of mold smart ones? He'll I was happy too when I was you and didn't really know shit. Now the more I learn the less that I really want to know. I have truly almost seen and done everything except jail time.
A couple, actually. Even if your going to die, YOUR STILL ALIVE. Depression is nothing but a mental illness, it isn't hyper-awareness, its focusing on the negative and ignoring the positive. Its like me claiming to be better than others because I have OCD, I must be smarter since I know the germs are out there.
My father, for example. While he's not very old (only in his mid-60s), he has several bad health conditions, and lately death has been catching up to his friends and family (as it does), but he is very happy. A bit mad that he's so sick, so can't do everything he wants, but still happy. He even denounced religion lately (which is rather odd for his age and condition). Sure, he has moments where he isn't completely blissful, which is natural, but on the whole I would say he's happy.
You WILL have to come to terms with it one way or another. Do you not care what the meaning of life is?
No, I don't care what the meaning of life is. I even find the term to be somewhat silly, since who is there to say life has ANY meaning? Sure, when I was younger I cared (I cared enough to go to college for philosophy and psychology), but through that education I realized that the question itself is probably meaningless. The real question is why life would have any meaning at all.
This is actually somewhat comforting, to me at least. For two reasons, the first being that I can stop beating my head against an imaginary wall. The second is more existential (in the literal sense), being that there is no meaning, I'm free.
But I might be odd, because even running through all this twisting logic and conclusions bring me great joy. Life is like a great surrealist painting, or a David Lynch movie, a grand puzzle with no real solution, but it doesn't matter since all the fun is in TRYING to solve it. Its a game with no real rules and no real conditions for winning. Beautiful.
I guess you can still be smart and have the ability to put blinders on. So, maybe I take that little bit back maybe not. I haven't decided yet.
Blinders to what? What is so dreadful out there? Does the dread outweigh the huge amounts of sublime beauty?
That makes sense... Depressed people have a depressed stimulus threshold. Its takes more stimulus to arouse even a minor reaction from them. Some people have very low thresholds, and get wildly happy or wildly upset over nothing (mania), some people are normal, people with depression are rocks. You can see the same thing in drug burn outs, actually, the flattening of affect and stimulus thresholds. Your brain isn't producing (or absorbing, I forgot which) enough serotonin, thus you need more of it floating about your synapses to elicit any affective response.
Have you tried cognitive therapy? Drugs are really only good for covering the symptoms long enough to get real therapy.
Saying that you can think yourself out of it is the same as trying to tell a diabetic that they just need to think positive (or stop sinning, or meditate, or open up their chi flow) in order to control their blood sugar levels.
That annoys the living crap out of me too. My mother has rather sever depression (not bipolar, thank God. People suffering depression can at least be happy that they never get manic), and people have told her the "boot strap" thing millions of times. She isn't happy, if she could pull herself out of it, one would think she would have by now. That said, there are activities, I've noticed, that a lot of people with actual depression do that exasperate the condition, and these the people CAN control. If they did so they might reach at least a slightly less funky depression.
These of course are complete isolation, complete lethargy, and drinking/substance abuse. Yes, being depressed, and thus having a much higher motivational threshold than most other people, abstaining from these behaviors are much harder than one might expect, but doing so is possible, and can only have positive effects.
You have SOME control over yourself, just like the rest of us.
True happiness requires emotional capabilities, independence, self-sufficiency and control over your own life.
That is nothing but the No True Scotsman fallacy. These might be the criteria you attach to happiness, but you'll find this is very far from universal. I do agree though that we lack these, we always have and we always will. We are a social animal, so really none of these things are in our nature. The last one is attainable, perhaps, but all the others are a myth.
I used to spend a great deal of time raging over this idea. The I moved somewhere beautiful where I could take nice long walks, sit under trees, and talk to wild rabbits while watching the sunset. I realized that none of it really matters, the only thing that really matters is milking every moment, experiencing it all. Most of the things that depress us, or that enrage us, are meaningless abstractions. We let them have power over us by focusing on them constantly. I realized a long time ago that all I need to be happy is a pen, a note book, and decent coffee, and to be able to go outside, into nature.
Sure, the world sucks, but does that really matter? The world has always sucked, and will continue to suck long after your gone. There is nothing you can do about it on a grand scale, so why worry about it? Do what you can to effect change locally, thats all we can ever do. Being depressed about some mythical "big picture" is rather futile. Even with all the crap in the world, there are aspects of sublime beauty lurking in all the murk and scum.
That is what depression is, the inability to focus on the good and beautiful bits. Its a mental illness, not some higher form of truth. Worse, its a mindless self-fulfilling prophecy, a self inflicted prison; you expect all things to be trash, so you only seek out the trash, and thus feel justified. You focus on the meaningless of it all... never realizing that this is also a meaningless thought. You established the fact that all is meaningless, and that is fine, now move on. There is no meaning, thus you are now open to forge your own meaning. (Trite, but its Sartre, who I will accept as an authority).
Either that or you realize how dreadfully amusing the whole thing is. I always pondered that at some point in time God took a vacation, and appointed Salvador Dalà as his replacement. This generally makes me laugh at the futility of it all. I don't see depression being the only possible conclusion for intellect.
Actually, how often do you REALLY think about death? I manage to almost never think of it, and not by some conscious act of will but just because it hardly ever enters my mind. Barring being old, ill, or having someone die close to them, most people NEVER think of it. It never comes up.
"Man these are some good peas, oh and by the way we're all going to die"
So to be happy, you have to think you have life after death figured out. Only the stupid can say that they have that problem solved or ever will IMO.
I have it figured out. You die, and then your gone. Simple. Sure, this might not work for you, but it works for me. To me it isn't a problem. Sure, it might be when I get closer to it, but so far it hasn't really been an issue.
You also pretty much claim that only stupid people are happy, which is bizarre. I've known a lot of very happy smart people, I'm sure you do to. I don't view myself as stupid, and I'm often very happy, and my baseline is generally being pretty content with life. But I suppose if I sat around repeating the "I'm going to die" mantra to myself I'd be pretty depressed to.
One-time pads. You can even falsify an alternate solution to the encrypted message.
But with one time pads doesn't the key need to be the same size as the data you want encrypted, which would make it somewhat useless for use on large amounts of data?
Perhaps I'm wrong, I've never been much of an encryption nerd.
(and really, how the hell did my original post get modded troll?)
China publicly harvests organs and people hardly notice. Israel is accused of harvesting organs, a total fabrication, and there's an outcry, demanding an investigation into these Zionist barbarians. What the hell?
When were these allegations against Israel? I've been paying pretty close attention to media driven hysteria for a couple years now, and I think I've completely missed this one. Where is the proof of the hysteria (from an American-centric POV), and where is the disproof that it actually happened? Are you sure you aren't thinking that minor outcry over things you pay attention to and care about are not being greatly conflated?
Actually if there was public, and proven, allegations of ANYONE harvesting organs against their will, I would be generally angry, and somewhat apathetic at the same time.
Bleh... Isn't there an internet law that basically says; "when correcting someones grammar, you will inevitably make a stupid mistake in your own grammar"?
Is there such a thing? Unfeasible encryption maybe, but all encryption, AFAIK, is breakable given substantial investments of time and money. Even if brute forcing it would take longer than the Earth will be around, there always is finding weak spots in the algorithms, which might, perhaps, bring the cracking time down to at least feasible time frames (albeit in mere geological time).
While you may not of gotten a warning while traveling within the EU,I'm very sure they also look through your computer which they have no real right to do at all.Unless the FBI or Interpol has you on a known terror list, or pervert list there is no reason they (the EU, or my governmentthe USA) has the right to know my private life.I fully agree with you, our policies are going to be be our undoing, it is sad really.I miss the Clinton era...
I was going to give a running tally of the errors, misspellings, and typos... But I gave up. Here is a free tip, in a fully text based medium, people judge you by your ability to type out a well formed thought/sentence. If you're too lazy to write it well, then your probably too lazy to bother with complex thoughts, or justified opinions.
Also, Clinton was also a wanker, and didn't do much for privacy rights, or rights in general.
Slashdot Mirror
To install uTorrent... click the damn .exe.
To download a torrent, click a single link on a website. On Vista it opens a dialog asking if you want to let it through your firewall, click yes (people are good at that, I hear).
Done.
While this might not be as convenient as Rapidshare for smaller files (100Mb), it is much better for larger files which are generally chopped up by Rapidshare uploaders. Downloading a 5 part, 700Mb movie via DD services is a pain in the ass, and takes about as long as getting it via torrent (especially if its well seeded).
Another problem with Rapidshare like services is you can never tell if the link is still alive, while with torrents you generally know what your getting before you even click the link.
You haven't been to a movie lately. The last couple movies I have been to have been absolute hell (excluding a showing of Moon at 11:00 on a Tuesday). I pretty much stopped going to movies because I can't stand the crowd, and the idiots constantly talking, or worse, yelling out blatantly obvious observations as if they were public service announcements ("look! Its Woody Harrilson!"). Of course then you have the people who decided that being glued to a cell phone at all times, discussing their rousing bout of grocery shopping, is socially acceptable.
And then the families with their damn broods, who somehow decided that little Billy should be allowed to scream whenever he wants, because discipline is a bad word. Generally this is the same family that constantly comments on the action to their children every five minutes, and are too enchanted by this to change their collicy babies damn diapers. This is obviously the same family that took their six year old daughter to an R rated horror movie, expecting it to be family friendly.
Movies are EXTREMELY social now. Which to me completely defeats the point of seeing them. If I wanted to be social, I could go to my local Irish pub for a quarter of the cost of movie tickets, and if I wanted to actually enjoy a movie I'd watch it in the comfort of my own living room, with my own snacks, and the possibility of drinking beer or wine while watching it.
Movies are very much a social activity now.
So... its a graphical versioning system. Sure, there was nothing quite as good as it before (though I still mostly use iBackup), but it isn't a new or innovative idea. Its a backup... I've been doing that for around 20 years before Time Machine came around, I'll continue doing it years after OS X dies.
My respect for that one item is what made me go from a rabid Mac OSX hater to just not preferring it
Why the hell would you HATE an operating system? OS X is very nice, I even recommend it to all the non-nerds I know who are buying new PCs. Windows has been very nice, as well, since XP (barring the Vista launch, though Vista subsequently got better), hell even Linux has become mature, and very Usable with both KDE and Gnome becoming robust and intuitive. They all serve a purpose. OS X excels at general computing and ease of use, Windows is still the best gaming and compatability platform, and Linux is for nerds who want to play with their computer. They're all VERY good at what they're made for now. So I don't see the room for "hating" any of them.
Sure, we might prefer one or another of them, based on our experiences and computing styles, but none of the big three are really bad, either.
Actually hating OS X would be HARDER than hating any of the others.
Wait... I paid a decent chunk of cash going from 10.2 to 10.3 to 10.4... those are point releases, last I checked. And what did I get for it? Konfabulator, multiple desktops (been in Linux for years), and a versioning system (been in Linux for even more years). Wait, between 10.3 and 10.4 there was a minor graphics upgrade in the kernel, which didn't do much since you still need at least 2Gb to run OS X at any speed. And Snow Leopard is basically 10.4.5 (or is it 5.5?), which isn't even a point release. Yes, it is nice that I can upgrade my Tiger machine for $30, but it is hardly a big upgrade for Leopard. Not as big as XP to Win7, or even Vista to Win7.
And a crappy upgrade to Intel, which made all my software run slower on the same hardware specs.
I'm sorry, I like Apple's (outside of the insane "must upgrade" cycle), but don't over-glorify them. Just so people don't accuse me of "fan-boy-ism" I'm currently have a MacMini running Leopard, a gaming PC running Vista, and a laptop dual booting Win7 and Ubuntu 9.04. Going from Vista to Win7 is a pretty good improvement, going from Leopard to Snow Leopard isn't.
Win7 is the first Windows OS I've actually been excited by, ever. Sure, I commonly argue that Vista "isn't that bad", but Win7 is actually good, and probably worth upgrading XP over. Though the price is a bit insane (but isn't that why we have OEM copies at Fry's?).
Don't forget that you must, by law, have at least one body panel that is always primer gray. Its either painting that one panel above the left front tire electric lime green, or putting neon blue lights on the under carriage... What would make a car look less trashy? LIGHTS!
IANACN (I am not a comic nerd), but the parent was talking about post-WWII, not the 80's when comic publishing blew up into billions of niche imprints (or worse, the 90's when it blew up into trillions of "edgy" imprints). Back then comics WERE edgy, dark, and post-modern(ish), though I'd put DC as being the more edgy. Before WWII comics were mostly silly things for children, but after WWII they expanded their market towards a more "mature" teenage audience.
Yes, now Marvel is rather tame compared to some of the smaller imprints (some of which they own).
Compare this to Disney at the time, which was still catering to children, and was running with cute, and princess fantasies.
Though now this is all rather stupid. Disney owns Marvel, but Time-Warner owns DC. Disney also owns an obscene amount of media companies, some of which produce products aimed at a more adult audience (Touchstone, Miramax, and Hollywood, for example). Not all of Disney is just cartoons for children, and it hasn't been so for a very long time.
I really think the human race as a whole will not survive the 21st century using exponential growth as an example.
I'm not too worried about this, I'm not saying that there isn't a reason to worry, it just isn't that great a chance. First, I can't see many disasters (man made or not) that could completely eliminate the species. We've survived a lot of things already. If nothing else, humans are adaptable.
Also the exponential growth thing isn't completely accurate. Right now most of our population growth is from developing countries, while a lot of the developed ones are actually declining in population growth (birth rates are down), ignoring immigration. Most of the UN projections also say there will be some flattening of growth levels in the next decade or so, leaving an Earth with around 8-10 billion people.
Yes, this is a lot, but before we get all Malthusian, remember that technology is also increasing at an incredible rate as well. Right now we are above the carrying capacity the Earth had even 30 years ago.
The usual reason for this is when too many people running things get greedy. They make it hard on the people. The people then put someone in power that promises them everything that they want in life.
This annoys me too. Though I think it annoys almost everyone. But looking through history, this has been a universal from the time we decided to invent nation-states and government. I suppose I don't worry about it too much because I don't think there is a solution, and thus worrying about isn't productive. Not saying I don't get angry about it almost weekly. I think my neighbors think me saying "Why the f* are people so goddamn stupid?!" every morning on reading the paper is some strange religious ritual I have.
In the end, though, the big picture is mostly an academic, and abstract, thing. The only thing that really matters is our families, and immediate circle of friends, this has been the important thing since we decided to be more than mere critters, and this is all that will matters when modern society finally collapses under its own weight. Not saying we shouldn't do what we can to help others, and if we actually have the means to help others in the bigger world we should. If modern society completely died, I don't think it would be too big of a deal, people would survive, have children, fall in love, and make art. In some order.
You may be right, hell you probably are right, but my main point stands; Hugo Chavez is a Venezuelan problem, not a US problem. I don't like a lot of things about him, as I stated, I mainly agree with his current rhetoric. The main thing is that my opinion should have no bearing whatsoever on Venezuela, and thus doesn't matter one bit.
In my country most of the opposition to the Chavez isn't based based on any of the facts you listed, its purely ideological (as I admit most of my liking of him is), based off of a home (i.e. foreign) spun image of the guy as a tool towards conflicting ideologies. I'm more bashing them, than I am the actual people involved, or having to live under him.
More to the point, I was responding to the person who was saying that if you like someone, you must like all of their policies.
I will, though, read up on it more. Not that my opinion, revised or not, should play any role in anything of import outside of silly internet hand waving.
Oddly, I saw this in Oakland. Sure it wasn't a shotgun, but some huge security guard followed me around a Walgreens while menacingly slapping a billy club into the palm of his hand. Actually in post Katrina New Orleans you can see many armed guards wandering about, keeping people from basic services.
I personally like Chavez, and even if I didn't I don't think the US has ANY right whatsoever to complain about it. I find the silly "they don't live the American way! We can't make money off of exploiting their poor!" stuff a rather depressing statement about my own country (who I am a lot less proud off now that we know more about Cheney and his hired hit squads, and our love of torture). Who cares? Great, if the Venezuelans don't like Chavez, let them vote him out, or have a real, authentic, coup. Not our business. Same with Cuba, btw, same with every other country in the world. If they don't want to be like America, good for them, if it works. If the whole damn universe became socialist or communist, I don't think I'd lose a second of sleep.
That said, I don't agree with his banning violent video games. See what I did there? Just because you like someone, doesn't mean you have to love everything about them. I personally find Chavez to be a bit of a blow hard, and I dislike the cult of personality thing too, its a shallow way of leading. Wow... I still don't think the guy is an antichrist though.
You forgot Poland.
Feeding trolls:
I'm guessing the term "universal" here actually means that all employees get health care, as opposed to just some of them. What your confusing is "universal public healthcare", with emphasis on the public.
I'm glad that anti-health care trolls are just like the anti-Iraq trolls, trying to work it into any topic, no matter how little it actually relates.
"So the weather will be warm, with winds from the southwest"
"See, public healthcare is COMMUNISM!"
Depends on what you mean by old, I was meaning "old and close to death", if I had to attach an actual age to that I would probably say somewhere in your later 60s, when age actually starts to effect your life, and becomes a constant reality.
How many old, bold and full of mold smart ones? He'll I was happy too when I was you and didn't really know shit. Now the more I learn the less that I really want to know. I have truly almost seen and done everything except jail time.
A couple, actually. Even if your going to die, YOUR STILL ALIVE. Depression is nothing but a mental illness, it isn't hyper-awareness, its focusing on the negative and ignoring the positive. Its like me claiming to be better than others because I have OCD, I must be smarter since I know the germs are out there.
My father, for example. While he's not very old (only in his mid-60s), he has several bad health conditions, and lately death has been catching up to his friends and family (as it does), but he is very happy. A bit mad that he's so sick, so can't do everything he wants, but still happy. He even denounced religion lately (which is rather odd for his age and condition). Sure, he has moments where he isn't completely blissful, which is natural, but on the whole I would say he's happy.
You WILL have to come to terms with it one way or another. Do you not care what the meaning of life is?
No, I don't care what the meaning of life is. I even find the term to be somewhat silly, since who is there to say life has ANY meaning? Sure, when I was younger I cared (I cared enough to go to college for philosophy and psychology), but through that education I realized that the question itself is probably meaningless. The real question is why life would have any meaning at all.
This is actually somewhat comforting, to me at least. For two reasons, the first being that I can stop beating my head against an imaginary wall. The second is more existential (in the literal sense), being that there is no meaning, I'm free.
But I might be odd, because even running through all this twisting logic and conclusions bring me great joy. Life is like a great surrealist painting, or a David Lynch movie, a grand puzzle with no real solution, but it doesn't matter since all the fun is in TRYING to solve it. Its a game with no real rules and no real conditions for winning. Beautiful.
I guess you can still be smart and have the ability to put blinders on. So, maybe I take that little bit back maybe not. I haven't decided yet.
Blinders to what? What is so dreadful out there? Does the dread outweigh the huge amounts of sublime beauty?
That makes sense... Depressed people have a depressed stimulus threshold. Its takes more stimulus to arouse even a minor reaction from them. Some people have very low thresholds, and get wildly happy or wildly upset over nothing (mania), some people are normal, people with depression are rocks. You can see the same thing in drug burn outs, actually, the flattening of affect and stimulus thresholds. Your brain isn't producing (or absorbing, I forgot which) enough serotonin, thus you need more of it floating about your synapses to elicit any affective response.
Have you tried cognitive therapy? Drugs are really only good for covering the symptoms long enough to get real therapy.
Saying that you can think yourself out of it is the same as trying to tell a diabetic that they just need to think positive (or stop sinning, or meditate, or open up their chi flow) in order to control their blood sugar levels.
That annoys the living crap out of me too. My mother has rather sever depression (not bipolar, thank God. People suffering depression can at least be happy that they never get manic), and people have told her the "boot strap" thing millions of times. She isn't happy, if she could pull herself out of it, one would think she would have by now. That said, there are activities, I've noticed, that a lot of people with actual depression do that exasperate the condition, and these the people CAN control. If they did so they might reach at least a slightly less funky depression.
These of course are complete isolation, complete lethargy, and drinking/substance abuse. Yes, being depressed, and thus having a much higher motivational threshold than most other people, abstaining from these behaviors are much harder than one might expect, but doing so is possible, and can only have positive effects.
You have SOME control over yourself, just like the rest of us.
True happiness requires emotional capabilities, independence, self-sufficiency and control over your own life.
That is nothing but the No True Scotsman fallacy. These might be the criteria you attach to happiness, but you'll find this is very far from universal. I do agree though that we lack these, we always have and we always will. We are a social animal, so really none of these things are in our nature. The last one is attainable, perhaps, but all the others are a myth.
I used to spend a great deal of time raging over this idea. The I moved somewhere beautiful where I could take nice long walks, sit under trees, and talk to wild rabbits while watching the sunset. I realized that none of it really matters, the only thing that really matters is milking every moment, experiencing it all. Most of the things that depress us, or that enrage us, are meaningless abstractions. We let them have power over us by focusing on them constantly. I realized a long time ago that all I need to be happy is a pen, a note book, and decent coffee, and to be able to go outside, into nature.
Sure, the world sucks, but does that really matter? The world has always sucked, and will continue to suck long after your gone. There is nothing you can do about it on a grand scale, so why worry about it? Do what you can to effect change locally, thats all we can ever do. Being depressed about some mythical "big picture" is rather futile. Even with all the crap in the world, there are aspects of sublime beauty lurking in all the murk and scum.
That is what depression is, the inability to focus on the good and beautiful bits. Its a mental illness, not some higher form of truth. Worse, its a mindless self-fulfilling prophecy, a self inflicted prison; you expect all things to be trash, so you only seek out the trash, and thus feel justified. You focus on the meaningless of it all... never realizing that this is also a meaningless thought. You established the fact that all is meaningless, and that is fine, now move on. There is no meaning, thus you are now open to forge your own meaning. (Trite, but its Sartre, who I will accept as an authority).
I'm rambling a bit, I apologize.
Either that or you realize how dreadfully amusing the whole thing is. I always pondered that at some point in time God took a vacation, and appointed Salvador Dalà as his replacement. This generally makes me laugh at the futility of it all. I don't see depression being the only possible conclusion for intellect.
Actually, how often do you REALLY think about death? I manage to almost never think of it, and not by some conscious act of will but just because it hardly ever enters my mind. Barring being old, ill, or having someone die close to them, most people NEVER think of it. It never comes up.
"Man these are some good peas, oh and by the way we're all going to die"
So to be happy, you have to think you have life after death figured out. Only the stupid can say that they have that problem solved or ever will IMO.
I have it figured out. You die, and then your gone. Simple. Sure, this might not work for you, but it works for me. To me it isn't a problem. Sure, it might be when I get closer to it, but so far it hasn't really been an issue.
You also pretty much claim that only stupid people are happy, which is bizarre. I've known a lot of very happy smart people, I'm sure you do to. I don't view myself as stupid, and I'm often very happy, and my baseline is generally being pretty content with life. But I suppose if I sat around repeating the "I'm going to die" mantra to myself I'd be pretty depressed to.
One-time pads. You can even falsify an alternate solution to the encrypted message.
But with one time pads doesn't the key need to be the same size as the data you want encrypted, which would make it somewhat useless for use on large amounts of data?
Perhaps I'm wrong, I've never been much of an encryption nerd.
(and really, how the hell did my original post get modded troll?)
Meta: Troll? How so?
I'm being a pedant, as should be immediately obvious by stating anything about "geologic time" being "feasible"... Damn cryptonerds.
Its sarcasm. I doubt very much that 99% of people have anything serious to hide, and the other 1% is smart enough to hide it.
China publicly harvests organs and people hardly notice. Israel is accused of harvesting organs, a total fabrication, and there's an outcry, demanding an investigation into these Zionist barbarians. What the hell?
When were these allegations against Israel? I've been paying pretty close attention to media driven hysteria for a couple years now, and I think I've completely missed this one. Where is the proof of the hysteria (from an American-centric POV), and where is the disproof that it actually happened? Are you sure you aren't thinking that minor outcry over things you pay attention to and care about are not being greatly conflated?
Actually if there was public, and proven, allegations of ANYONE harvesting organs against their will, I would be generally angry, and somewhat apathetic at the same time.
"One Time Pads" are unbreakable, I suppose, but also somewhat infeasible when it comes to huge amounts of data. Again, I might be mistaken.
Bleh... Isn't there an internet law that basically says; "when correcting someones grammar, you will inevitably make a stupid mistake in your own grammar"?
If not, there should be.
offers completely unbreakable encryption.
Is there such a thing? Unfeasible encryption maybe, but all encryption, AFAIK, is breakable given substantial investments of time and money. Even if brute forcing it would take longer than the Earth will be around, there always is finding weak spots in the algorithms, which might, perhaps, bring the cracking time down to at least feasible time frames (albeit in mere geological time).
While you may not of gotten a warning while traveling within the EU, I'm very sure they also look through your computer which they have no real right to do at all. Unless the FBI or Interpol has you on a known terror list, or pervert list there is no reason they (the EU, or my government the USA) has the right to know my private life. I fully agree with you, our policies are going to be be our undoing, it is sad really. I miss the Clinton era...
I was going to give a running tally of the errors, misspellings, and typos... But I gave up. Here is a free tip, in a fully text based medium, people judge you by your ability to type out a well formed thought/sentence. If you're too lazy to write it well, then your probably too lazy to bother with complex thoughts, or justified opinions.
Also, Clinton was also a wanker, and didn't do much for privacy rights, or rights in general.