What more can be said? Silicon Valley is full of bullshit and people with more idealism than good sense. I know that I won't win any awards for saying this, but I must confess to a certain satisfaction in knowing that my suspicions about HR and tech hiring practices were right all along. If it means an end to annoying and patronizing brain teaser questions that don't have anything to do with actually working in software development, that's a bonus.
the Chinese are starting to scream about environmental issues loud enough that even a totalitarian government can't ignore it.
Have you thought about what their response might be? Do you think it will involve listening to these people and actually making reforms or will they instead be rounded up and sent for reeducation through labor? I'm guessing it will be the later and not the former.
Meanwhile geeks, who do understand how computers work, instead of developing technologies supporting encryption and pricacy by default, have instead hopped into bed with big data and the NSA
Security is not something that you can simply buy as a product and then forget about. The tools are freely available, but they don't work well or even much at all unless you know how to use them. The Edward Snowden affair and his attempts to communicate securely with journalists via email serves to highlight the difficulties encountered by normal people attempting to install and use these tools. To some extent this is inevitable because good security requires knowledge of cryptographic procedures and strict observance of key handling protocols that most people outside of tech or intelligence circles would find to be esoteric at best and most probably incomprehensible.
There are more geeks helping the NSA builds a Stasi apperatus than there are geeks working on building a truely anonymous and untappable internet.
I'm not aware of any practical method of two-way communication that isn't subject to eavesdropping given enough resources. You can make yourself more difficult to follow, but as a practical matter if they want to listen in they will find a way to do so.
the more I see the NSA survellance apperatus collectively roaring with laughter at geekdom's heedless self-destruction of itself and the internet.
The people who work for the NSA have families and children too. Some of them might even be your neighbors. Surely your concerns aren't entirely separate from theirs on these matters? If they can listen to any of us then they can listen to all of us. Even Senators and Congressmen understand this much and it's no laughing matter.
Yeah, why bother getting two dozen routers for that price, when you can go buy just one!
How much is your time worth? How long would it take you to track down 24 routers for an average price of $2.08 apiece, never mind the logistics of getting them all ordered and shipped? Alternatively, how many would you have to buy from a single supplier to get the unit cost down to that price? Probably more than $50 worth in either case.
How about the market for crude oil? There you have a commodity that just about everyone wants and for which there are always willing buyers. You will notice that even the Iranians, who are supposed to be under economic sanction, are still able to find buyers for much of their oil, albeit at a somewhat reduced price and increased difficulty transporting it to markets. Does not oil flow almost to whomever will pay the most for it? Isn't that how markets are supposed to work, rationing based upon who will pay the most? How is this not a free market?
If you don't like that example then how about the market for drugs which governments classify as illegal. There you have a market that not only exists outside of government regulation or control but continues to exist in spite of active and ongoing attempts by governments to suppress it. Need I go on?
As for the rest of your post, I'm not really sure how to respond or even what the point would be. You're obviously pretty angry about something so what could it be? Are you mad because there are people in this world with more money than you? Are you mad because the government didn't give you a college education for free or now refuses to write off your student loan debt? Maybe you don't like how other people spend their time and money or think that the government ought to confiscate their wealth and put you in charge of redistributing it? Whatever the case may be, I don't see how continuing this conversation with you will lead to anything productive.
I do however, not enjoy hypocrisy of far right libertarians or tea partiers who want the government in my private life
It's not accurate, in my opinion, to characterize the Tea Party groups as libertarian. While it's true that some positions of the Tea Party platform lean libertarian, taxes for example, there are many other issues on which they are much closer to the neoconservatives. For example, I doubt that you would find much support within the Tea Party for ending the War on Drugs or allowing gay marriage.
It's worth it to note though, that the government had to step in precisely because the market was so fragmented that they were causing dangerous conditions with all the lines they were running without any unified standard and people generally refused to share line capabilities.
It's the classic example of natural monopoly, the regulated utility. Even most libertarian leaning people, with the possible exception of the anarcho-capitalists, would agree that government has a legitimate role to play in regulating natural monopolies.
If you do XP or Scrum it is more or less mandatory that you keep your code base without "technical depts".
If by "technical depts" you mean technical debt, forget about it. Most organizations have very large technical debts, but they're invisible because management doesn't care and bean counters refuse to recognize them as debts. Unless and until technical debt is listed in the liabilities column of the balance sheet, with the accounts and notes payable, as real debt with monetary value nobody gives a crap except maybe some of the developers and not even all of them.
You do realize that the WRT54GL, the L being for "Linux", is still sold brand new by Cisco using the old style Linksys enclosure and branding, right? They do this because the WRT54G line was and still is popular with users who prefer alternative and open source Linux firmwares. So there's no need to go picking at yard sales for an old WRT54G when you can get a brand new one for less than $50 that both Tomato and DD-WRT will run on.
There'd be more stuff on things like unit testing, breaking dependencies, troubleshooting, and refactoring at least.
A big obstacle to more unit testing, breaking of dependencies and refactoring in industry is that all of these things take time and effort, time and effort that could be put into new code and features, and mostly for things which have little or no immediate business payoff. To invest in these things is to invest in the future of the code base and the productivity of future programmers who may come in years after the code was written or long after the original programmers have moved on. In an industry that often moves at "Internet speed" these practices are seen as luxuries to be indulged in by larger and more established companies, not startups that have to compete now or be gone in six months. So industry is just as much at fault, if not more so, for the lack of these things in practice. Indeed, it's often said that breaking dependencies, writing unit tests and refactoring are like eating vegetables; we all know that we should do it but few of us actually do. Finally, it doesn't help when you have large and established companies like Facebook saying, "move fast and break things" and sponsoring "hackathons" to crank out features and change code quickly, maintainability and testing be damned.
Why not listen to the fucking libertarians next time
Because the smart people who mentored them in Liberalism, their college professors perhaps, told them that Libertarians aren't worth listening to or ought to be ignored and these people, being intellectually lazy themselves, decided to follow that advice instead of thinking for themselves as Libertarians are fond of doing. The Liberals claim to be tolerant and open minded and yet in my experience that's only true if you agree with them.
This is why i have the urge to fucking bitchslap libertarians,
I think that your rage is misplaced. The telecom business, upon which the ISPs depend, is a natural monopoly which requires some regulation to properly align interests due to the physical impracticality of allowing competition to emerge organically in the marketplace. After all, there's only so many rights of way for digging trenches and laying fiber or setting up antennas on towers. However, a single counterexample, which amounts to a special case, does not invalidate the entire thesis of free market capitalism. Just because natural monopolies exist and must be regulated does not prove that the free market system is fundamentally flawed or broken.
How is that the fault of the free market? Even historically it has always been difficult for technology companies to break into the content business without either owning or partnering with studios and content delivery companies. The interests of a business of a company built upon copyright are not the same as those of company whose business is technology and even when the corporate ownership structure exists to compel cooperation between technology and content units, as in the case of Sony, the cooperation is often grudging and half hearted at best. The content companies aren't going to kiss Intel's ass just because they're Intel and they've got a cool technology to sell.
You have to realize that at the time Microsoft Windows had something like 95%+ market share in the home and small to medium sized business market. This has declined in more recent years due both to the rising popularity of Apple and Google and the shift towards smaller and more mobile computing devices, like tablets and smartphones, amongst consumers. However, at that time there were few viable alternatives to the Wintel monopoly for consumers and anything that could threaten sales of Windows or Microsoft Office was extremely unwelcome at Microsoft. So even though Microsoft made no money directly on Internet Explorer, they knew that if most people used what came with their PCs and that if what came with their PCs was Internet Explorer that they would be in a much stronger position to dictate, or at least strongly influence, the development of the web and the emerging Internet economy and looking back this is precisely what did happen. Microsoft was able to slow and moderate the disruptive influence of the Internet on their Windows monopoly by providing a built in browser that was just good enough for most people, but limited and buggy enough to frustrate attempts by others to use it as a platform from which to launch attacks on the core Windows and Office monopolies. So from a business perspective the relatively poor quality of Internet Explorer, especially version 6 which languished for years on millions of XP desktops, combined with OS integration was a brilliant delaying tactic by Microsoft. It couldn't hold back the tide of online competitors indefinitely, but it did retard their progress enough to give Microsoft some breathing room and relief from competitive pressures throughout the 1990s and even into the mid 2000s. It wasn't so much Netscape specifically, but the web in general, that Microsoft perceived as the competitive threat. Integrating the browser with the OS was a deliberate move by Microsoft to address that perceived threat. I doubt that they planned for Internet Explorer to suck as much as it did, but looking back it's one of the few cases where having a bad product was actually an advantage for a software company.
When you so blatantly target your marketing towards men, it sends the message that your product isn't for women.
Yes, but you don't see men complaining about how Liz Claiborne blatantly targets women with fragrances in such a way that it sends the message that the product isn't for men. Not every product that's marketed and sold has to be acceptable to both sexes.
Personal grooming products, cars, clothing, sports equipment etc.. all promoted by over idealized men.
This is especially prevalent in the advertising of luxury goods. The handsome 23 year old that you see in advertisement with the Armani suit and a $50,000 wrist watch standing next to an Audi R8 sports car doesn't actually own any of those things and likely couldn't afford them even if he wanted them. Contrast him with the men who actually buy these things who are typically in their mid 40s to late 50s or more, overweight and losing their hair and yet it typically doesn't bother them that they don't look like the model in the advertisement because they have too much money to care. For example, they can have just about any woman they want, provided that they aren't complete slobs, just by virtue of their enormous wealth and the luxury accessories serve to advertise and signal that wealth to those potential mates. At some level it's not all that different from a magnificent bird of paradise showing off his elaborate and multicolored plumage to entice a female into mating except that most women prefer the nice clothes, the fast car and the jewelry to feathers.
they want the women who look better than them to lose their jobs.
If true, that's pretty shallow of them. I don't care for Justin Bieber's singing, but the fact that he's a pretty boy and attracts the attention of hordes of teenage girls doesn't make me envious, even in the slightest. My sense of self worth is strong enough to endure the fact that men who are more attractive to women than I exist, so why do women allow something like that to get to them? It just doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things.
Don't fool yourself. Women aren't suddenly going to start buying more games because E3 stopped using booth babes.
Indeed, that would be like the AVN Expo in Las Vegas (aka the porn convention), removing the models from the booths because it offends the sensibilities of people who aren't their customers. It's just not going to happen. At some point the radical feminists must come to terms with the fact that in a free society there will always be those who enjoy looking at scantily clad members of the opposite (or even the same) sex and that just as surely there will be businesses that cater to these people and their proclivities. Why not just leave the gamers and the wankers alone to enjoy their conventions in peace? If you don't like them then you don't have to attend, but don't become like the religious nutty people who get their panties in a twist simply because they know that somebody somewhere is having a good time that involves sex, drugs or rock and roll.
There have been several attempts at human powered helicopters over the years, but from a practical standpoint the power to weight ratios required for effective rotary winged flight are so high that the human body, even in peak physical form, simply isn't capable of producing them for more than a few seconds and even then it's just barely enough to lift the person doing the work and an extremely light machine a few feet of the ground for a very short duration before gravity wins the contest.
I can't count the times I've spent hours on things that could have been resolved immediately if I had just had access to somebody who wasn't around at the moment.
So send them an email and wait for them to get back to you so that you don't waste your time working on something that either isn't needed or is being done wrong. Instead, work on something else that you can make progress on or complete in the meantime. This isn't a less efficient way of working overall and it can be more efficient than having the task blinders on and interrupting everyone else every half hour just so that you can complete your important task in a few hours on the same day. I really dislike it when people do this to me at work because it presumes that my time isn't worth very much to those who are interrupting my work to "pick my brain" or "ask a quick question".
How much money SHOULD there be in the world? How do you know? What if more people want to make more money, have 1st world wages? What if the money is flowing to them? Dont' we need more money then? How do you know?
The basic answer to your question is that there is roughly as much money as we collectively want there to be. The supply of credit in the marketplace and the demand for cash sets the price of money in the form of interest rates. I realize that this is a very rough and brief explanation, but without getting into a protracted discussion of fractional reserves, centralized banking and fiat currencies that will have to suffice. The important takeaway is that the market decides and we through our daily buying and selling decisions make that market.
You are right that it's unrealistic to expect privacy in certain situations, like the teacups at Disneyland. However, there is a difference between not having an expectation of privacy and having your every move recorded, indexed and stored for later searching and retrieval. The problem, as I see it, is that the government has not promised that the information they collect will not be used against US Citizens in a criminal or civil prosecution unconnected with national security. For example suppose the government used this information to gather a list of people who were likely cheating on their taxes, even if just to narrow down a list of targets for further investigation. This is tremendously problematic because if it's allowed to proceed it makes a complete mockery of the 4th Amendment, relegating it to the status of a quaint anachronism. It will be tremendously tempting for law enforcement to broaden the types of investigations that can be initiated through a search of the database. If we're not careful, all criminal investigations will begin with a search of these databases of stored communications and anything that comes from the them or any subsequent investigation informed by the results will be admissible in court as evidence against us. It's the slippery slope to a totalitarian police state and we've already taken the first steps down that road.
The hippies chose the city of San Francisco here in California and now it's one of the most liberal cities in the United States. The hippies left the conservative communities around the country from which they originated, and where they weren't accepted and couldn't change things politically, to move to an area where they were accepted and could vote to change things. The Free Staters are just a better organized and more intentional effort to do the same.
They attempted to stack the select board with their members using unscrupulous means such as slander stuffing mailboxes without stamps in violation of federal rules.
The lefties here in California have done that and more in pursuit of getting what they want politically and now they run this state. So that's actually pretty tame by California standards.
There is some good as they oppose wind development which largely benefits out of state interests and decimates local ridgetops. As a group they seem like nice folks, kind of like right wing hippies ; )
One thing that you can count on with Libertarian types is that they won't be a drain on local social services. New Hampshire could do a lot worse than attracting a bunch of people who want to work hard and be self sufficient.
However they are subverting the will of the public by attempting to hijack local and state politics and a similar bunch has devastated the legislature at the state level and made many questionable laws in defiance of the majority of the electorate.
They are the public. They moved there, remember? Elections have consequences, as the left is fond of saying, and in this case their strategy of moving to an area to concentrate their votes appears to be working. You may not like the results, but coordinating your move with like minded people isn't illegal and it's the right of every American to live in wherever they choose to and are able to. The states cannot deny any American citizen the right to become a resident if they want to live there and freedom of association is protected in the First Amendment of our Constitution, right up there with speech.
Can't say I'm surprised given that their plan was always to coopt the NH state government.
And the left hasn't done the same sorts of things in other places, notably in California? Getting enough people who vote a certain way so as to consolidate political power in a particular area or state has long been a tactic employed or at least taken advantage of by the left, so why should we criticize these Americans for moving, as is their right, to a state of their choice in order to concentrate their voting power?
Slashdot Mirror
What more can be said? Silicon Valley is full of bullshit and people with more idealism than good sense. I know that I won't win any awards for saying this, but I must confess to a certain satisfaction in knowing that my suspicions about HR and tech hiring practices were right all along. If it means an end to annoying and patronizing brain teaser questions that don't have anything to do with actually working in software development, that's a bonus.
the Chinese are starting to scream about environmental issues loud enough that even a totalitarian government can't ignore it.
Have you thought about what their response might be? Do you think it will involve listening to these people and actually making reforms or will they instead be rounded up and sent for reeducation through labor? I'm guessing it will be the later and not the former.
Meanwhile geeks, who do understand how computers work, instead of developing technologies supporting encryption and pricacy by default, have instead hopped into bed with big data and the NSA
Security is not something that you can simply buy as a product and then forget about. The tools are freely available, but they don't work well or even much at all unless you know how to use them. The Edward Snowden affair and his attempts to communicate securely with journalists via email serves to highlight the difficulties encountered by normal people attempting to install and use these tools. To some extent this is inevitable because good security requires knowledge of cryptographic procedures and strict observance of key handling protocols that most people outside of tech or intelligence circles would find to be esoteric at best and most probably incomprehensible.
There are more geeks helping the NSA builds a Stasi apperatus than there are geeks working on building a truely anonymous and untappable internet.
I'm not aware of any practical method of two-way communication that isn't subject to eavesdropping given enough resources. You can make yourself more difficult to follow, but as a practical matter if they want to listen in they will find a way to do so.
the more I see the NSA survellance apperatus collectively roaring with laughter at geekdom's heedless self-destruction of itself and the internet.
The people who work for the NSA have families and children too. Some of them might even be your neighbors. Surely your concerns aren't entirely separate from theirs on these matters? If they can listen to any of us then they can listen to all of us. Even Senators and Congressmen understand this much and it's no laughing matter.
Really? What are their intelligence agencies doing, twiddling their thumbs? Epic Fail.
Yeah, why bother getting two dozen routers for that price, when you can go buy just one!
How much is your time worth? How long would it take you to track down 24 routers for an average price of $2.08 apiece, never mind the logistics of getting them all ordered and shipped? Alternatively, how many would you have to buy from a single supplier to get the unit cost down to that price? Probably more than $50 worth in either case.
Show me ONE functional free market system
How about the market for crude oil? There you have a commodity that just about everyone wants and for which there are always willing buyers. You will notice that even the Iranians, who are supposed to be under economic sanction, are still able to find buyers for much of their oil, albeit at a somewhat reduced price and increased difficulty transporting it to markets. Does not oil flow almost to whomever will pay the most for it? Isn't that how markets are supposed to work, rationing based upon who will pay the most? How is this not a free market?
If you don't like that example then how about the market for drugs which governments classify as illegal. There you have a market that not only exists outside of government regulation or control but continues to exist in spite of active and ongoing attempts by governments to suppress it. Need I go on?
As for the rest of your post, I'm not really sure how to respond or even what the point would be. You're obviously pretty angry about something so what could it be? Are you mad because there are people in this world with more money than you? Are you mad because the government didn't give you a college education for free or now refuses to write off your student loan debt? Maybe you don't like how other people spend their time and money or think that the government ought to confiscate their wealth and put you in charge of redistributing it? Whatever the case may be, I don't see how continuing this conversation with you will lead to anything productive.
I do however, not enjoy hypocrisy of far right libertarians or tea partiers who want the government in my private life
It's not accurate, in my opinion, to characterize the Tea Party groups as libertarian. While it's true that some positions of the Tea Party platform lean libertarian, taxes for example, there are many other issues on which they are much closer to the neoconservatives. For example, I doubt that you would find much support within the Tea Party for ending the War on Drugs or allowing gay marriage.
It's worth it to note though, that the government had to step in precisely because the market was so fragmented that they were causing dangerous conditions with all the lines they were running without any unified standard and people generally refused to share line capabilities.
It's the classic example of natural monopoly, the regulated utility. Even most libertarian leaning people, with the possible exception of the anarcho-capitalists, would agree that government has a legitimate role to play in regulating natural monopolies.
If you do XP or Scrum it is more or less mandatory that you keep your code base without "technical depts".
If by "technical depts" you mean technical debt, forget about it. Most organizations have very large technical debts, but they're invisible because management doesn't care and bean counters refuse to recognize them as debts. Unless and until technical debt is listed in the liabilities column of the balance sheet, with the accounts and notes payable, as real debt with monetary value nobody gives a crap except maybe some of the developers and not even all of them.
You do realize that the WRT54GL, the L being for "Linux", is still sold brand new by Cisco using the old style Linksys enclosure and branding, right? They do this because the WRT54G line was and still is popular with users who prefer alternative and open source Linux firmwares. So there's no need to go picking at yard sales for an old WRT54G when you can get a brand new one for less than $50 that both Tomato and DD-WRT will run on.
There'd be more stuff on things like unit testing, breaking dependencies, troubleshooting, and refactoring at least.
A big obstacle to more unit testing, breaking of dependencies and refactoring in industry is that all of these things take time and effort, time and effort that could be put into new code and features, and mostly for things which have little or no immediate business payoff. To invest in these things is to invest in the future of the code base and the productivity of future programmers who may come in years after the code was written or long after the original programmers have moved on. In an industry that often moves at "Internet speed" these practices are seen as luxuries to be indulged in by larger and more established companies, not startups that have to compete now or be gone in six months. So industry is just as much at fault, if not more so, for the lack of these things in practice. Indeed, it's often said that breaking dependencies, writing unit tests and refactoring are like eating vegetables; we all know that we should do it but few of us actually do. Finally, it doesn't help when you have large and established companies like Facebook saying, "move fast and break things" and sponsoring "hackathons" to crank out features and change code quickly, maintainability and testing be damned.
Why not listen to the fucking libertarians next time
Because the smart people who mentored them in Liberalism, their college professors perhaps, told them that Libertarians aren't worth listening to or ought to be ignored and these people, being intellectually lazy themselves, decided to follow that advice instead of thinking for themselves as Libertarians are fond of doing. The Liberals claim to be tolerant and open minded and yet in my experience that's only true if you agree with them.
This is why i have the urge to fucking bitchslap libertarians,
I think that your rage is misplaced. The telecom business, upon which the ISPs depend, is a natural monopoly which requires some regulation to properly align interests due to the physical impracticality of allowing competition to emerge organically in the marketplace. After all, there's only so many rights of way for digging trenches and laying fiber or setting up antennas on towers. However, a single counterexample, which amounts to a special case, does not invalidate the entire thesis of free market capitalism. Just because natural monopolies exist and must be regulated does not prove that the free market system is fundamentally flawed or broken.
How is that the fault of the free market? Even historically it has always been difficult for technology companies to break into the content business without either owning or partnering with studios and content delivery companies. The interests of a business of a company built upon copyright are not the same as those of company whose business is technology and even when the corporate ownership structure exists to compel cooperation between technology and content units, as in the case of Sony, the cooperation is often grudging and half hearted at best. The content companies aren't going to kiss Intel's ass just because they're Intel and they've got a cool technology to sell.
You have to realize that at the time Microsoft Windows had something like 95%+ market share in the home and small to medium sized business market. This has declined in more recent years due both to the rising popularity of Apple and Google and the shift towards smaller and more mobile computing devices, like tablets and smartphones, amongst consumers. However, at that time there were few viable alternatives to the Wintel monopoly for consumers and anything that could threaten sales of Windows or Microsoft Office was extremely unwelcome at Microsoft. So even though Microsoft made no money directly on Internet Explorer, they knew that if most people used what came with their PCs and that if what came with their PCs was Internet Explorer that they would be in a much stronger position to dictate, or at least strongly influence, the development of the web and the emerging Internet economy and looking back this is precisely what did happen. Microsoft was able to slow and moderate the disruptive influence of the Internet on their Windows monopoly by providing a built in browser that was just good enough for most people, but limited and buggy enough to frustrate attempts by others to use it as a platform from which to launch attacks on the core Windows and Office monopolies. So from a business perspective the relatively poor quality of Internet Explorer, especially version 6 which languished for years on millions of XP desktops, combined with OS integration was a brilliant delaying tactic by Microsoft. It couldn't hold back the tide of online competitors indefinitely, but it did retard their progress enough to give Microsoft some breathing room and relief from competitive pressures throughout the 1990s and even into the mid 2000s. It wasn't so much Netscape specifically, but the web in general, that Microsoft perceived as the competitive threat. Integrating the browser with the OS was a deliberate move by Microsoft to address that perceived threat. I doubt that they planned for Internet Explorer to suck as much as it did, but looking back it's one of the few cases where having a bad product was actually an advantage for a software company.
When you so blatantly target your marketing towards men, it sends the message that your product isn't for women.
Yes, but you don't see men complaining about how Liz Claiborne blatantly targets women with fragrances in such a way that it sends the message that the product isn't for men. Not every product that's marketed and sold has to be acceptable to both sexes.
Personal grooming products, cars, clothing, sports equipment etc.. all promoted by over idealized men.
This is especially prevalent in the advertising of luxury goods. The handsome 23 year old that you see in advertisement with the Armani suit and a $50,000 wrist watch standing next to an Audi R8 sports car doesn't actually own any of those things and likely couldn't afford them even if he wanted them. Contrast him with the men who actually buy these things who are typically in their mid 40s to late 50s or more, overweight and losing their hair and yet it typically doesn't bother them that they don't look like the model in the advertisement because they have too much money to care. For example, they can have just about any woman they want, provided that they aren't complete slobs, just by virtue of their enormous wealth and the luxury accessories serve to advertise and signal that wealth to those potential mates. At some level it's not all that different from a magnificent bird of paradise showing off his elaborate and multicolored plumage to entice a female into mating except that most women prefer the nice clothes, the fast car and the jewelry to feathers.
they want the women who look better than them to lose their jobs.
If true, that's pretty shallow of them. I don't care for Justin Bieber's singing, but the fact that he's a pretty boy and attracts the attention of hordes of teenage girls doesn't make me envious, even in the slightest. My sense of self worth is strong enough to endure the fact that men who are more attractive to women than I exist, so why do women allow something like that to get to them? It just doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things.
Don't fool yourself. Women aren't suddenly going to start buying more games because E3 stopped using booth babes.
Indeed, that would be like the AVN Expo in Las Vegas (aka the porn convention), removing the models from the booths because it offends the sensibilities of people who aren't their customers. It's just not going to happen. At some point the radical feminists must come to terms with the fact that in a free society there will always be those who enjoy looking at scantily clad members of the opposite (or even the same) sex and that just as surely there will be businesses that cater to these people and their proclivities. Why not just leave the gamers and the wankers alone to enjoy their conventions in peace? If you don't like them then you don't have to attend, but don't become like the religious nutty people who get their panties in a twist simply because they know that somebody somewhere is having a good time that involves sex, drugs or rock and roll.
There have been several attempts at human powered helicopters over the years, but from a practical standpoint the power to weight ratios required for effective rotary winged flight are so high that the human body, even in peak physical form, simply isn't capable of producing them for more than a few seconds and even then it's just barely enough to lift the person doing the work and an extremely light machine a few feet of the ground for a very short duration before gravity wins the contest.
I can't count the times I've spent hours on things that could have been resolved immediately if I had just had access to somebody who wasn't around at the moment.
So send them an email and wait for them to get back to you so that you don't waste your time working on something that either isn't needed or is being done wrong. Instead, work on something else that you can make progress on or complete in the meantime. This isn't a less efficient way of working overall and it can be more efficient than having the task blinders on and interrupting everyone else every half hour just so that you can complete your important task in a few hours on the same day. I really dislike it when people do this to me at work because it presumes that my time isn't worth very much to those who are interrupting my work to "pick my brain" or "ask a quick question".
How much money SHOULD there be in the world? How do you know? What if more people want to make more money, have 1st world wages? What if the money is flowing to them? Dont' we need more money then? How do you know?
The basic answer to your question is that there is roughly as much money as we collectively want there to be. The supply of credit in the marketplace and the demand for cash sets the price of money in the form of interest rates. I realize that this is a very rough and brief explanation, but without getting into a protracted discussion of fractional reserves, centralized banking and fiat currencies that will have to suffice. The important takeaway is that the market decides and we through our daily buying and selling decisions make that market.
Hopefully you smiled at the various cameras in-store and in the parking lot that recorded you driving up and buying the phone. ;-)
He was wearing a latex mask and makeup disguise kit and he took the bus or rode his bicycle :P
You are right that it's unrealistic to expect privacy in certain situations, like the teacups at Disneyland. However, there is a difference between not having an expectation of privacy and having your every move recorded, indexed and stored for later searching and retrieval. The problem, as I see it, is that the government has not promised that the information they collect will not be used against US Citizens in a criminal or civil prosecution unconnected with national security. For example suppose the government used this information to gather a list of people who were likely cheating on their taxes, even if just to narrow down a list of targets for further investigation. This is tremendously problematic because if it's allowed to proceed it makes a complete mockery of the 4th Amendment, relegating it to the status of a quaint anachronism. It will be tremendously tempting for law enforcement to broaden the types of investigations that can be initiated through a search of the database. If we're not careful, all criminal investigations will begin with a search of these databases of stored communications and anything that comes from the them or any subsequent investigation informed by the results will be admissible in court as evidence against us. It's the slippery slope to a totalitarian police state and we've already taken the first steps down that road.
They chose my home town as the test bed.
The hippies chose the city of San Francisco here in California and now it's one of the most liberal cities in the United States. The hippies left the conservative communities around the country from which they originated, and where they weren't accepted and couldn't change things politically, to move to an area where they were accepted and could vote to change things. The Free Staters are just a better organized and more intentional effort to do the same.
They attempted to stack the select board with their members using unscrupulous means such as slander stuffing mailboxes without stamps in violation of federal rules.
The lefties here in California have done that and more in pursuit of getting what they want politically and now they run this state. So that's actually pretty tame by California standards.
There is some good as they oppose wind development which largely benefits out of state interests and decimates local ridgetops. As a group they seem like nice folks, kind of like right wing hippies ; )
One thing that you can count on with Libertarian types is that they won't be a drain on local social services. New Hampshire could do a lot worse than attracting a bunch of people who want to work hard and be self sufficient.
However they are subverting the will of the public by attempting to hijack local and state politics and a similar bunch has devastated the legislature at the state level and made many questionable laws in defiance of the majority of the electorate.
They are the public. They moved there, remember? Elections have consequences, as the left is fond of saying, and in this case their strategy of moving to an area to concentrate their votes appears to be working. You may not like the results, but coordinating your move with like minded people isn't illegal and it's the right of every American to live in wherever they choose to and are able to. The states cannot deny any American citizen the right to become a resident if they want to live there and freedom of association is protected in the First Amendment of our Constitution, right up there with speech.
Can't say I'm surprised given that their plan was always to coopt the NH state government.
And the left hasn't done the same sorts of things in other places, notably in California? Getting enough people who vote a certain way so as to consolidate political power in a particular area or state has long been a tactic employed or at least taken advantage of by the left, so why should we criticize these Americans for moving, as is their right, to a state of their choice in order to concentrate their voting power?