(My personal view is the same as Edison...Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration... they have a lot of work to do.)
All good, except for your last sentence.
The 99% perspiration was by other people, aimed in random directions – like monkeys at typewriters. The '1% inspiration' was Edison's disdain of academic research, from which he stole actual ideas with abandon.
Edison was an asshole, a shotgun researcher who had his R&D staff try everything imaginable. For example, to improve lightbulb filaments. He rewarded the one to have been randomly assigned a particular 'candidate filament material', and then rewarded them with a little extra money. . . and re-assignment to a project that would kill them (such as his 'x-ray R&D').
Gee, thanks boss!
Plus, he electrocuted an elephant in his AC/DC fight with Tesla. He 'invented' the "Electric Chair" as a form of capital punishment in a marketing attempt to defeat the superior AC electric technology. And, to repeat, he electrocuted a fucking elephant as a publicity stunt.
Each image in the article, except for the last one with a mock-up, is poorly done CG.
The tell-signs are so numerous that I have no interest in naming them. Those with even minimal knowledge of CG can tell. Please share your image-interpretations.
Oh, BTW, at the very end of the fluff Advertorial, you find the following (in the unreadable Arial Italics type-face):
"Disclosure: LeEco paid for the correspondent's flights and accommodation to attend its Beijing launch event."
When I want to message my colleagues, mostly ISIS members but also some Taliban, I use paper, pens, and send the missives to my minions via the United State Postal Service.
Encryption, pfeh! There is nothing that can feasibly beat OTPs (one-time pads). And the USPS is Constitutionally mandated by the US Government to exist.
Maybe the government should surveil itself!
PS — WARNING to NSA, FBI, and other idiots: Sarcasm is above.
universal healthcare works ok in every single western country except the USA, where the healthcare industry pays good money to block it. Also note that universal healthcare costs less per capita than private health care. The USA has the most expensive healthcare in the world, but not the best one (higher life expectancy elsewhere).
SMALL CORRECTION: "The US has the best healthcare in the world. . . but only if you're rich."
Whereas Capitalism fails only when human beings are no longer required to produce goods and services. i.e. real soon now.
Yep. Macroeconomics 101. The supply-demand curve.
If no one has money to buy your product (no purchasing-power == no demand), then prices will plummet. With no purchases, there is no tax base for government (maintaining roads, law-enforcement, utilities), so your country soon turns into Somalia.
To quote a mill supervisor, "I don't want the industrious guy who'll clean up the mess with a smile. I want the lazy bastard who'll figure out how to stop the mess from happening so he doesn't have to clean it up all the time.".
Great quote.
As I've always said, "Lazy Engineers are the best Engineers. They manage their factory line in a way that avoids middle-of-the-night phone calls about screw-ups they'll have to fix."
I bring home less than that, albeit by just a hair, working my ass off at a full-time IT job in the midwest USA. So I can get a mid-$40k/year income just by sitting on my ass in Greece? I'm a Republican and have always been against handouts, but you know what, fuck it. I'm done, sign me up to sit on my ass and smoke dope and play video games. What the fuck does it even matter anymore?
If you earn $40k per year, but choose to vote Republican, then you are the problem.
Sounds like a perfect cover, all missiles never work, everything fails. They will never be a threat. Thats a pretty good track record, 0 success, everything blows up after a perfect launch. Build up a working arsenal, while everyone thinks nothing works. Nobody expects the fool.
MOD UP!
I already commented in this thread, so can't mod.
You, Grasshopper, are clearly a student of Sun Tzu. And a good one at that.
The problem is that their game plan is to have 3 key technologies that ensure they can always retaliate if invaded or even nuked completely. Submarines, sub launched missiles, and nuclear weapons on those missiles. With that combination you can always have subs in the deep ocean (on rotation) and waiting to hit the USA in retaliation. Once they have that nobody can touch them without a very large risk of getting at least one nuke onto a major city because they can get very close into the west coast of the USA making it much harder to intercept a warhead before it hits it's target. So if that gang is not shut down soon they never will be,
In that case, the US response will be to kill a bunch of whales and dolphins.
That is, total-coverage with the Navy's low-frequency sonar that bursts the eardrums (or equivalent) of cetaceans within miles, making them unable to navigate, converse, or to find food by echo-location.
Note that the US West Coast is along the seasonal-migration route for numerous species of cetaceans.
WHY do we keep sending "humanitarian" aid to a country devoting a huge portion of its GDP to building offensive weapons instead of food for its own people?
The US did this during the height of the Cold War, when Lysenko's advice to Stalin on crop-yield-optimization utterly failed in the worst way possible. Stalin's successors also reigned during famine-inducing periods. Famine was soon to ensue...
So the US, fearing a "cold and hungry Russia", sent shipload after shipload of grain to its proclaimed arch-enemy, the USSR.
It kind of makes sense. Governments of nations lose power in a matter of a week or two if everyone is starving. Then a demagogue, usually worse than the prior leader, rises to power. It's hard to imagine anyone worse than Stalin, but when people get desperate – like, "My baby is going to die in a few days"-type of desperate, things can go south very, very quickly.
And recall that the USSR had nuke-tipped ICBMs in abundance...
In closing, the US stance on N Korea has been, for decades, to send them food or fuel oil, usually when its leader throws a tantrum. That is what this current thing is about, nominally.
Ah, but The Little Fat One has gone a step further than his father or grandfather, and is openly bragging of, and showing off steps towards, the capability of hitting US cities (in addition to Japan, S Korea, etc.). In principle. He is upping the game from making "N-Korea-only" propaganda that he can strike the US – to actually demonstrating the NORK's progress toward this goal.
It is not saber-rattling for the folks at home. He is begging the world to assassinate him, which would, unfortunately, be likely to involve the death of tens of thousands of NORK civilians.
OK, so I am now disagreeing with myself. This is not fearing a "cold and hungry Russia", who had similar nuclear capabilities as the US at the time. This is "Little Kim" playing the same game his father and grandfather did, but in a catastrophically amplified and stupid way.
And the flagship product of Prime, the free shipping is sort of a scam, too. You'll see many sellers on Amazon selling the same product, and surprise, surprise, the ones that are Prime eligible happen to cost more, and the increase is pretty much exactly the price of shipping.
Oh, don't be so logical or the plebes will catch on!
Amazon Prime subscribers enjoy FREE SHIPPING (that is – the cost is incorporated into the price of the product, obscuring the difference in price from the rubes who think that it is a "Good Idea" to "Subscribe" (AKA, indenture one's self) to a particular retailer.
Oh, hey, it turns out that it has been 10 years since I swore off purchasing anything from Amazon or the Amazon Marketplace.
So, as it turns out, there are many others who have done the same. Otherwise, why would Amazon be adding this extra push to get people to "subscribe" to the privilege to pay essentially the same price for a book (or whatever) as they could pay elsewhere. (Note to hoarders: Amazon Prime provides FREE shipping!).
Oh, hey, that reminds me of the "old saying" that Best Buy, Circuit City, or your local retailer were the show-rooms for products available on Amazon. Sure, that was true enough back then.
Today, the Amazon website serves as a show-room for products that I might want to buy. Samples of text, astro-turfed product reviews, and most importantly – specs.
Once I've made my choice, I go off to another vendor. Sure, I might "pay a little more", as far as the list-price is concerned. But hey, the cost of shipping & tax are listed. I don't have to factor in the concept of: "Did I pay for a Prime membership – that gives me free delivery – or did that expire?"
Fuck Amazon. Sworn-off 10 years ago.
Also, fuck Best Buy and Circuit City, which I swore off 20 years ago. Oh, wait, they've gone out of business, haven't they?
There should be non field desk job roll that even some in wheel chair can do tech stuff for the FBI.
There probably are. There is law that lets people declared permanently disabled by the SSA –people on SSDI – "go to the front of the line". Effectively, from the bits I've read, anyone SSDI disabled, applying for a Federal Government job:
* Gets to skip the resume-culling steps that everyone else must pass through—They get to be considered in the last round.
* Is entitled to 'special considerations'. Not just wheelchair ramps, but flexible scheduling and similar accommodations.
* Is a 'diversity hire', scoring the hiring departments political points
The program is intended to have the same % of 'regular' people employed in proper jobs as the $ of SSDI people employed in proper jobs – jobs for which they must be qualified, BTW.
As is often the case, Terry Pratchett had some wise/comic insights which are relevant.
"How Vetinari himself ascended to the Patricianship is a story yet untold. Vetinari's suggestion to "tax the rat farms" provided an early demonstration of his shrewd political insight. "
Then we have the Nixon years were drug laws were actively pushed as a way to attack grass roots political campaigns and to oppose civil rights.
Mod this up!
This was the sole purpose of the War on Drugs.
Search google news for the recent revelation – made after the malfeasors who admitted in interviews that they created this monstrosity – are all safely in their graves.
Due to the krokodil epidemic, the Russian Government put very strict controls on the availability of codeine tablets. It's not over-the-counter any more, so obtaining the main ingredient to home-brew your own highly impure batch of krokodil has become very difficult. That is good.
The active component in krokodil is desomorphine – an opiate discovered about 90 years ago in a search for less addicting painkillers. As it turned out, desomorphine was w-a-a-a-ay more addictive. It is illegal in most countries, even as a hospital-administered pain-management drug. Morphine and dilaudid are what provide the most pain-relief per addictive potential. After surgery, you'll get a push-button morphine drip, but only for three days, to avoid addiction.
Rehabilitation is not easy, especially with such high unemployment. But basically, give them a two-day series of naloxone, plus benzos because accelerated withdrawal sucks. Then keep them on naltrexone for a couple of years. But such programs must include re-entry into society, leading to employment or something that feels meaningful—It was desperation tht drove the to krokodil in the first place.
DO NOT search YouTube for videos of flesh-rotting and live-limb-cutting (to avoid sepsis) un-anesthetized. Unless you have a strong stomach.
If you don't like taxes, from the list of things above, which one(s) should be cut or eliminated? Seriously, which ones would you do away with?
There's one easy way to cut out a couple: Work as a Contract Employee – 1099, instead of being a permanent employee – W-2.
Just don't get injured or become unemployed! Because you chose not to pay into that system, you are not entitled to Unemployment or Short-term Disability benefits. (This is a CA example, but UI & SDI are all state-level).
I missed mentioning that current US Law on 'cyber-security' would mean that most or all of these new companies would be based outside of the US, quite likely putting them beyond the reach of US Law (outside their contracts with the FBI), as long as they chose their country-of-incorporation and activity wisely.
The FBI wants to grow the market-sector of black-hat hacking? (Yes, I know, but language evolves, so I use the 'press-accepted' term here.)
In what reality could this conceivably be a good idea? Tons of new "exploit-mining" companies would spring up. Many would then have the FBI as perhaps one of their clients.
We already saw this with Symantec in the 1980's giving away $50 for each 'new' or even 'variant' of a virus that someone 'discovered'. They helpfully provided examples – you know, for training and reference purposes. We ended up with tons of variants on the first PC viruses, with someone changing a single line of a text string in an irrelevant way – such as changing the text displayed.
Back to the FBI hoping to contract this work out: WTF? That's worse than making this part of the revolving door between government service and private-sector employment.
Slashdot Mirror
(My personal view is the same as Edison...Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration... they have a lot of work to do.)
All good, except for your last sentence.
The 99% perspiration was by other people, aimed in random directions – like monkeys at typewriters. The '1% inspiration' was Edison's disdain of academic research, from which he stole actual ideas with abandon.
Edison was an asshole, a shotgun researcher who had his R&D staff try everything imaginable. For example, to improve lightbulb filaments. He rewarded the one to have been randomly assigned a particular 'candidate filament material', and then rewarded them with a little extra money. . . and re-assignment to a project that would kill them (such as his 'x-ray R&D').
Gee, thanks boss!
Plus, he electrocuted an elephant in his AC/DC fight with Tesla. He 'invented' the "Electric Chair" as a form of capital punishment in a marketing attempt to defeat the superior AC electric technology. And, to repeat, he electrocuted a fucking elephant as a publicity stunt.
Each image in the article, except for the last one with a mock-up, is poorly done CG.
The tell-signs are so numerous that I have no interest in naming them. Those with even minimal knowledge of CG can tell. Please share your image-interpretations.
Oh, BTW, at the very end of the fluff Advertorial, you find the following (in the unreadable Arial Italics type-face):
"Disclosure: LeEco paid for the correspondent's flights and accommodation to attend its Beijing launch event."
FTA: "One day the car will be free. The Le See is a D-class car.
Déclassé?
That's truth in advertising.
This "war on encryption" is stupid to the core.
When I want to message my colleagues, mostly ISIS members but also some Taliban, I use paper, pens, and send the missives to my minions via the United State Postal Service.
Encryption, pfeh! There is nothing that can feasibly beat OTPs (one-time pads). And the USPS is Constitutionally mandated by the US Government to exist.
Maybe the government should surveil itself!
PS — WARNING to NSA, FBI, and other idiots: Sarcasm is above.
universal healthcare works ok in every single western country except the USA, where the healthcare industry pays good money to block it. Also note that universal healthcare costs less per capita than private health care. The USA has the most expensive healthcare in the world, but not the best one (higher life expectancy elsewhere).
SMALL CORRECTION: "The US has the best healthcare in the world. . . but only if you're rich."
Whereas Capitalism fails only when human beings are no longer required to produce goods and services. i.e. real soon now.
Yep. Macroeconomics 101. The supply-demand curve.
If no one has money to buy your product (no purchasing-power == no demand), then prices will plummet. With no purchases, there is no tax base for government (maintaining roads, law-enforcement, utilities), so your country soon turns into Somalia.
To quote a mill supervisor, "I don't want the industrious guy who'll clean up the mess with a smile. I want the lazy bastard who'll figure out how to stop the mess from happening so he doesn't have to clean it up all the time.".
Great quote.
As I've always said, "Lazy Engineers are the best Engineers. They manage their factory line in a way that avoids middle-of-the-night phone calls about screw-ups they'll have to fix."
Same for designs, R&D, etc.
I bring home less than that, albeit by just a hair, working my ass off at a full-time IT job in the midwest USA. So I can get a mid-$40k/year income just by sitting on my ass in Greece? I'm a Republican and have always been against handouts, but you know what, fuck it. I'm done, sign me up to sit on my ass and smoke dope and play video games. What the fuck does it even matter anymore?
If you earn $40k per year, but choose to vote Republican, then you are the problem.
Yes, with UBI I can find my potential!: http://imgur.com/XT3dfsp
Perhaps with UBI, you could learn how to embed a link?
Sounds like a perfect cover, all missiles never work, everything fails. They will never be a threat. Thats a pretty good track record, 0 success, everything blows up after a perfect launch. Build up a working arsenal, while everyone thinks nothing works. Nobody expects the fool.
MOD UP!
I already commented in this thread, so can't mod.
You, Grasshopper, are clearly a student of Sun Tzu. And a good one at that.
The problem is that their game plan is to have 3 key technologies that ensure they can always retaliate if invaded or even nuked completely. Submarines, sub launched missiles, and nuclear weapons on those missiles. With that combination you can always have subs in the deep ocean (on rotation) and waiting to hit the USA in retaliation. Once they have that nobody can touch them without a very large risk of getting at least one nuke onto a major city because they can get very close into the west coast of the USA making it much harder to intercept a warhead before it hits it's target. So if that gang is not shut down soon they never will be,
In that case, the US response will be to kill a bunch of whales and dolphins.
That is, total-coverage with the Navy's low-frequency sonar that bursts the eardrums (or equivalent) of cetaceans within miles, making them unable to navigate, converse, or to find food by echo-location.
Note that the US West Coast is along the seasonal-migration route for numerous species of cetaceans.
and how long will there troops last? Be for they give up just to get some food?
"An army marches on its stomach" — N. Bonaparte
WHY do we keep sending "humanitarian" aid to a country devoting a huge portion of its GDP to building offensive weapons instead of food for its own people?
The US did this during the height of the Cold War, when Lysenko's advice to Stalin on crop-yield-optimization utterly failed in the worst way possible. Stalin's successors also reigned during famine-inducing periods. Famine was soon to ensue...
So the US, fearing a "cold and hungry Russia", sent shipload after shipload of grain to its proclaimed arch-enemy, the USSR.
It kind of makes sense. Governments of nations lose power in a matter of a week or two if everyone is starving. Then a demagogue, usually worse than the prior leader, rises to power. It's hard to imagine anyone worse than Stalin, but when people get desperate – like, "My baby is going to die in a few days"-type of desperate, things can go south very, very quickly.
And recall that the USSR had nuke-tipped ICBMs in abundance...
In closing, the US stance on N Korea has been, for decades, to send them food or fuel oil, usually when its leader throws a tantrum. That is what this current thing is about, nominally.
Ah, but The Little Fat One has gone a step further than his father or grandfather, and is openly bragging of, and showing off steps towards, the capability of hitting US cities (in addition to Japan, S Korea, etc.). In principle. He is upping the game from making "N-Korea-only" propaganda that he can strike the US – to actually demonstrating the NORK's progress toward this goal.
It is not saber-rattling for the folks at home. He is begging the world to assassinate him, which would, unfortunately, be likely to involve the death of tens of thousands of NORK civilians.
OK, so I am now disagreeing with myself. This is not fearing a "cold and hungry Russia", who had similar nuclear capabilities as the US at the time. This is "Little Kim" playing the same game his father and grandfather did, but in a catastrophically amplified and stupid way.
I think as soon as you start "hacking" for law enforcement the color of your hat changes. Isn't that the entire definition?
To what?
"Blue-hat" hacker?
Shall we coin a term right here, right now? (I do not advocate this idea.)
"Cartel"? Is that the word for it?
It's called "collusion".
It's the kind of thing that the RICO Act was designed to extinguish.
And the flagship product of Prime, the free shipping is sort of a scam, too. You'll see many sellers on Amazon selling the same product, and surprise, surprise, the ones that are Prime eligible happen to cost more, and the increase is pretty much exactly the price of shipping.
Oh, don't be so logical or the plebes will catch on!
Amazon Prime subscribers enjoy FREE SHIPPING (that is – the cost is incorporated into the price of the product, obscuring the difference in price from the rubes who think that it is a "Good Idea" to "Subscribe" (AKA, indenture one's self) to a particular retailer.
Oh, hey, it turns out that it has been 10 years since I swore off purchasing anything from Amazon or the Amazon Marketplace.
So, as it turns out, there are many others who have done the same. Otherwise, why would Amazon be adding this extra push to get people to "subscribe" to the privilege to pay essentially the same price for a book (or whatever) as they could pay elsewhere. (Note to hoarders: Amazon Prime provides FREE shipping!).
Oh, hey, that reminds me of the "old saying" that Best Buy, Circuit City, or your local retailer were the show-rooms for products available on Amazon. Sure, that was true enough back then.
Today, the Amazon website serves as a show-room for products that I might want to buy. Samples of text, astro-turfed product reviews, and most importantly – specs.
Once I've made my choice, I go off to another vendor. Sure, I might "pay a little more", as far as the list-price is concerned. But hey, the cost of shipping & tax are listed. I don't have to factor in the concept of: "Did I pay for a Prime membership – that gives me free delivery – or did that expire?"
Fuck Amazon. Sworn-off 10 years ago.
Also, fuck Best Buy and Circuit City, which I swore off 20 years ago. Oh, wait, they've gone out of business, haven't they?
I look forward to ten years-from-now.
There should be non field desk job roll that even some in wheel chair can do tech stuff for the FBI.
There probably are. There is law that lets people declared permanently disabled by the SSA –people on SSDI – "go to the front of the line". Effectively, from the bits I've read, anyone SSDI disabled, applying for a Federal Government job:
* Gets to skip the resume-culling steps that everyone else must pass through—They get to be considered in the last round.
* Is entitled to 'special considerations'. Not just wheelchair ramps, but flexible scheduling and similar accommodations.
* Is a 'diversity hire', scoring the hiring departments political points
The program is intended to have the same % of 'regular' people employed in proper jobs as the $ of SSDI people employed in proper jobs – jobs for which they must be qualified, BTW.
As is often the case, Terry Pratchett had some wise/comic insights which are relevant.
"How Vetinari himself ascended to the Patricianship is a story yet untold. Vetinari's suggestion to "tax the rat farms" provided an early demonstration of his shrewd political insight. "
Relevant and incisive quote indeed!
Then we have the Nixon years were drug laws were actively pushed as a way to attack grass roots political campaigns and to oppose civil rights.
Mod this up!
This was the sole purpose of the War on Drugs.
Search google news for the recent revelation – made after the malfeasors who admitted in interviews that they created this monstrosity – are all safely in their graves.
DO NOT search YouTube for videos of flesh-rotting and live-limb-cutting (to avoid sepsis) un-anesthetized. Unless you have a strong stomach.
Here is a link to test your mettle (excitement begins at 2:20.
But god-forbid that a nipple is visible in a YouTube video (in the US)! That could scandalize someone –especially a child under the age of two!
Due to the krokodil epidemic, the Russian Government put very strict controls on the availability of codeine tablets. It's not over-the-counter any more, so obtaining the main ingredient to home-brew your own highly impure batch of krokodil has become very difficult. That is good.
The active component in krokodil is desomorphine – an opiate discovered about 90 years ago in a search for less addicting painkillers. As it turned out, desomorphine was w-a-a-a-ay more addictive. It is illegal in most countries, even as a hospital-administered pain-management drug. Morphine and dilaudid are what provide the most pain-relief per addictive potential. After surgery, you'll get a push-button morphine drip, but only for three days, to avoid addiction.
Rehabilitation is not easy, especially with such high unemployment. But basically, give them a two-day series of naloxone, plus benzos because accelerated withdrawal sucks. Then keep them on naltrexone for a couple of years. But such programs must include re-entry into society, leading to employment or something that feels meaningful—It was desperation tht drove the to krokodil in the first place.
DO NOT search YouTube for videos of flesh-rotting and live-limb-cutting (to avoid sepsis) un-anesthetized. Unless you have a strong stomach.
Here is a link to test your mettle (excitement begins at 2:20.
If you don't like taxes, from the list of things above, which one(s) should be cut or eliminated? Seriously, which ones would you do away with?
There's one easy way to cut out a couple: Work as a Contract Employee – 1099, instead of being a permanent employee – W-2.
Just don't get injured or become unemployed! Because you chose not to pay into that system, you are not entitled to Unemployment or Short-term Disability benefits. (This is a CA example, but UI & SDI are all state-level).
So go ahead and avoid those taxes. Break a leg!
I missed mentioning that current US Law on 'cyber-security' would mean that most or all of these new companies would be based outside of the US, quite likely putting them beyond the reach of US Law (outside their contracts with the FBI), as long as they chose their country-of-incorporation and activity wisely.
The FBI wants to grow the market-sector of black-hat hacking? (Yes, I know, but language evolves, so I use the 'press-accepted' term here.)
In what reality could this conceivably be a good idea? Tons of new "exploit-mining" companies would spring up. Many would then have the FBI as perhaps one of their clients.
We already saw this with Symantec in the 1980's giving away $50 for each 'new' or even 'variant' of a virus that someone 'discovered'. They helpfully provided examples – you know, for training and reference purposes. We ended up with tons of variants on the first PC viruses, with someone changing a single line of a text string in an irrelevant way – such as changing the text displayed.
Back to the FBI hoping to contract this work out: WTF? That's worse than making this part of the revolving door between government service and private-sector employment.