All I can hear is the Adam Smith song from South Park.
Dum dum dum dum dumb!
You know, being born will get you killed. Faith, cynicism, not going to change it either way. Bruce really wasn't particularly deep or insightful there...
It would have been nice if the candidates had been personally damaged by whatever data was revealed, obviously not enough that it would compromise their personal safety or anything like that, but enough that they would not want it to happen again, perhaps something that caused them some political embarrassment.
You mean, it would have made you feel good about your preconceived notions if they had been ratified by this event. Except, oh darn, they were not. So, just like everyone else, you reassure us that the sky might fall next time, and urge us to take your concerns seriously in the absence of evidence that we should.
If you saw someone else in such circumstances, wouldn't you think to yourself, "Wow, you'd think he'd question his position after something like this. Clearly, he's not connected to what's going on in the world, or he wouldn't be able to seriously entertain these notions." I know I do.
They sold the first taste of Heroin at less than cost in the hopes of locking people into an ongoing profit stream, and their hopes didn't materialize. That's terrible. Those poor business people.
The hackers did show a lack of savvy. They were trying to help people who have no means to pay, and they put themselves in a position where they were relying on a for-profit corporation to achieve their goals. That's just stupid. Make deals with the devil, end up on fire. They should have known better than to leave themselves vulnerable to external leverage like that.
The point of his invention wasn't that it gave you free power in unlimited supply, it was that it allowed you to tap into the power of the Niagra Falls dam from anywhere on the earth without the need to create any transmission infrastructure. How much is it worth to stop building and maintaining those structures? How much is it worth to get all that metal back and have the opportunity to use it elsewhere? How many natural sources of power would become practical to exploit where they previously were not?
That was the promise of Tesla and his invention. The reason we don't have it? You can't put a meter on it. That's it, that's all, thanks for coming out, if we can't take it away from people when we want and leave them in the dark, we're not interested in it.
There is no distinction between free speech and free beer. They are the same. The distinction is a con. Capitalism hates plenty, because you can't sell something that is plentiful. So organizations either restrict supply, or reduce production, or if necessary buy laws preventing unrestricted supply, all in an effort to achieve control and leverage. Which is what money is an abstraction of.
Oh, and I've been working for a living for 17 years. I've worn A LOT of different shoes in that time, which is probably why I'm not so naive as you about these things.
Why does this illustrate the need for privacy in a democracy again? "I leave it to the reader to imagine the terrible consequences this could have, like if some hick sherriff decided to throw Obama in a cell because he didn't like his progressive politics." is not exactly compelling.
If anything, this article illustrates how insignificant peoples privacy is, how illusional it is, and how inconsequencial it is when it's violated.
Well, there are all sorts of unscrupulous folks who could be using the anonymity that your open wireless point provides. So why don't we just be reasonable and charge you with reckless endangerment for leaving the open wireless point, and make you an accessory to any illegal actions that might be committed using it. Including theft of the internet providers services in violation of your service agreement.
It's only reasonable, after all. It's not your infrastructure you're acting recklessly with, leaving your access point open when the hardware was shipped to you with security tools and instructions on how to use them.
The prototyping nature of JavaScript makes it a lot more practical to use running JavaScript to write new JavaScript that will be running in the same process, which is something that has been put to good effect by a lot of people. Class based objects don't seem quite as useful for the tasks JavaScript is meant to do.
And what the hell is wrong with primitives, anyways? Everything doesn't need to be an object.
Use VMWare. You can use tools from VMWares site to convert your existing Windows installation to a virtual machine, then install VMWare server on Ubuntu using the GUI, grab a license key for free from VMWares site, and fire up your newly created virtual machine. Then you shouldn't lose anything, and you can run them both simultaneously.
You want to talk about respect, how about you secure your router so it doesn't show up on a hundred peoples computers who live in the region.
How about if you do configure it so that everyone has their own networks polluted with signals from your establishment that are not secured, we send the police around to your house, just like a noise complaint?
That sounds a good deal more reasonable than having illegal icons on everyones computers that you put there and then charging them when they click em.
ISO doesn't matter anymore. They didn't matter because they were "The ISO", they mattered because they were a place where politics could be set aside and everyone could work together to make standards that work. That was a unique and precious thing. Now they're not these things anymore, and therefore, they are defunct.
MS didn't drag themselves up a notch here, they just destroyed something special in the world because it got in the way of their dominance. A sad thing.
A better analogy would be if you put a splitter on your outdoor plug, then attached a hundred extension cords to it, then ran around the neighborhood leaving one in each persons yard, actively using technology to bring access to your service right into other peoples homes at personal expense.
Because when you set up a wireless access point and make the choice not to secure it, that's exactly what you're doing.
When my computer sends out a wireless signal looking for access and you put something in your house and specifically configured it to reply to that request for service, that was your choice, and responsibility for that choice is all yours.
How is it fatalistic or nihilistic. Science is a tool, a means of understanding the universe.
It is nihilistic because it has an inherent skepticism about all ideas. If an idea cannot be deconstructed and reproduced within the scientific method, it is considered without value. But the value of an idea doesn't spring from its inherent truth, but from the utility to which the idea can be put to use when you embrace it. If embracing a bunch of nonsense as gospel makes you survive, reproduce and thrive where others who reject it as nonsense do not, then the nonsense has more value than "the truth". A zealot derives a great deal of power and utility from his embrace of nonsense. So do salespeople, police officers and soldiers. This is where the crux of the divide lies, and where concepts of science and faith can be brought together and measured against each other.
There is something lacking in the world, that we do not have a framework by which we can acknowledge and weigh these conflicting aspects of the human experience against each other and make judgments as to their value and pick up and discard such ideas as tools instead of making them part of our identities and attacking anyone who devalues "who we are".
Sorry if that came out rather muddled, but it's hard to even find the words to talk about these concepts...
Religions are full of metaphor, but they're trying to communicate things that are scientifically sound.
The reason people get so screwed up is because they interpret things literally, when all those personifications are meant to be a device to allow wisdom and knowledge about the universe to be preserved and propagated through an oral tradition.
Once you get this into your head, religions make a lot of sense. Spirits = Germs Personified. God = Cold Hard Reality Personified. And so on and so forth.
Science has limitations. The scientific process can't be applied to lifestyle choices, because the experiments you'd need to do would take longer than the span of your own life to create a set of relevant data.
That's where religion fits. Religions spring up like mutations, and most of them die because their inherent flaws kill off their followers, leading to the death of the religion. The ones that still exist in the world today are the ones that were proven over generations to be effective ways to survive and thrive.
If we're going to improve the systems by which we live, and thus improve our own lives, there is just as much need for the scientific community to acknowledge that there are things that science cannot answer as there is for the religious community to stop interpreting things in such a literal and close-minded fashion.
The modern scientific mindset is very fatalistic and nihilistic, and that is a real problem that needs to be dealt with if we are all going to come together and have frank and sane discussions about how we run our lives.
Takes an awful lot of distance and detachment to see it.
I would think that the reason that you'd go about creating something is because you have something important to say, and that you'd be rewarded if people took the time to listen.
If what you have to say is so unimportant that it means nothing to you if people hear it, and the only motive you have is to sell someone elses message, well, maybe you should find something better to do. Because what you're doing now clearly isn't important enough to waste your time on.
It was your generation that decided not to reproduce itself.
It was your generation that made it seem like a good idea to poison your womb so you can get an education rather than be forced into a dead end job because no one cares about helping and they'd rather you be productive now than breed and have productive people around later.
It was your generation that decided they'd rather have human rights than human beings.
All these years, the wealth your generation enjoyed came from a strong imbalance between the number of dependents and the number of healthy working adults caused by the baby boom. But it wasn't enough... you had to neuter your population so no new dependents would come along and screw things up for you.
So, fuck off and die. And take your daughter with you.
Come to think of it, I should put that in writing and put it in the safe with my daughters nest egg.
I have no desire to linger on past my time. I know how many chapters there are in my life, and I have no desire to try to cheat the universe. I expect I will be basking in the radiance of my many accomplishments, marveling at what my progeny are doing with their lives and be rather tired of struggling by the time they're ready to start sticking tubes and pins into me, and that's ok with me.
Organlegging is a symptom of a culture in which the choice of who to treat lies not with who has a future ahead of them, nor with who will benefit society, but only with how much money you have.
This will have to change, because there aren't enough young people to service all the old people, so the system will collapse if it continues to run as it has been. But it would be better if we could stop wasting resources on treating old sick people and start using them to treat young people with a future ahead of them.
I look forward to watching all these bastards with their overdeveloped sense of entitlement coughing out their last breaths in some ditch searching for their last meal. I give it a decade or two.
If there's nothing wrong with keeping people in ignorance, then no, copyright isn't evil.
If there's nothing wrong with estranging people from their common culture to the point that they can't sing happy birthday without having thugs show up demanding so much money it shuts your business down, and , then no, copyright isn't evil.
If there's nothing wrong with telling a brilliant inventor that they can't share what they've created with their fellow man, because some group owns that idea, and they've decided not to develop it because it would reduce their power if it existed, then no, copyright isn't evil.
Yes, it is true that screaming "fire" in a crowded theater could potentially hurt people. Screaming "shit" on the television? I fail to see the potential for damage there. Could you please provide an example that illustrates swearing on TV's ability to cause harm?
Example: Joe is having a bad day, and he's been trying to keep himself calm so he doesn't do anything stupid.
His wife has been having a bad day too, and she's giving him a hard time about something stupid he did on the weekend, but trying to be civil.
They're keeping it relatively sane, but tensions are high.
Then he hears a bunch of angry rap music come drifting in his window from someones car, and they're swearing and yelling and saying all the things he wished he could have said to his boss. And his wife for that matter. He's been trying to stay away from things that instigate him all day, and now this.
God fucking damn it, he's going to tell her where to go, he's had enough of this shit.
Now she's swearing too, the angry music outside is gone, but the two of them are off on a tear now. All he can hear is his mother yelling and swearing at him like she did when he was in high school, all she can see is her father who ignored any concerns anyone in their family had and did what he wanted.
He tries to escape from the whole situation, and his wife, who doesn't care about anything except making her husband listen at this point, throws a wooden spoon at him.
At this point, he's already pissed and ready to scrap, and when she acts aggressively, he hits her. Then he realizes what he's done, despite all his efforts to keep his temper, and runs out the door to escape the situation before things get any worse.
If the most intelligent thing you can find to say to back up your claims that we should abandon the government is to use inflammatory speech that awakens my lizard brain and gets it all fired up, then your message doesn't deserve to be broadcast.
There is a difference between censoring things because of the things they say and censoring things because they make you feel a certain way without really saying anything.
Psychologists help advertisers do the same thing that swearing does. They help them make us feel things about something without telling us anything concrete. It's wrong. It's psychological warfare. They should be working to make sure it DOESN'T happen, not making a buck in the private sector with the skills that are no longer in demand like they were during the cold war.
There needs to be more censorship. A lot more. Swearing is just the obvious example, low hanging fruit that anyone can understand, assuming that they haven't already decided they don't want to.
Slashdot Mirror
All I can hear is the Adam Smith song from South Park.
Dum dum dum dum dumb!
You know, being born will get you killed. Faith, cynicism, not going to change it either way. Bruce really wasn't particularly deep or insightful there...
It would have been nice if the candidates had been personally damaged by whatever data was revealed, obviously not enough that it would compromise their personal safety or anything like that, but enough that they would not want it to happen again, perhaps something that caused them some political embarrassment.
You mean, it would have made you feel good about your preconceived notions if they had been ratified by this event. Except, oh darn, they were not. So, just like everyone else, you reassure us that the sky might fall next time, and urge us to take your concerns seriously in the absence of evidence that we should.
If you saw someone else in such circumstances, wouldn't you think to yourself, "Wow, you'd think he'd question his position after something like this. Clearly, he's not connected to what's going on in the world, or he wouldn't be able to seriously entertain these notions." I know I do.
Don't you mean "In a fascist society like this one"?
They sold the first taste of Heroin at less than cost in the hopes of locking people into an ongoing profit stream, and their hopes didn't materialize. That's terrible. Those poor business people.
The hackers did show a lack of savvy. They were trying to help people who have no means to pay, and they put themselves in a position where they were relying on a for-profit corporation to achieve their goals. That's just stupid. Make deals with the devil, end up on fire. They should have known better than to leave themselves vulnerable to external leverage like that.
http://www.haarp.alaska.edu/
Tell them that. For something based on physics that don't work, they sure seem to be spending a lot of time and effort working on it.
The point of his invention wasn't that it gave you free power in unlimited supply, it was that it allowed you to tap into the power of the Niagra Falls dam from anywhere on the earth without the need to create any transmission infrastructure. How much is it worth to stop building and maintaining those structures? How much is it worth to get all that metal back and have the opportunity to use it elsewhere? How many natural sources of power would become practical to exploit where they previously were not?
That was the promise of Tesla and his invention. The reason we don't have it? You can't put a meter on it. That's it, that's all, thanks for coming out, if we can't take it away from people when we want and leave them in the dark, we're not interested in it.
There is no distinction between free speech and free beer. They are the same. The distinction is a con. Capitalism hates plenty, because you can't sell something that is plentiful. So organizations either restrict supply, or reduce production, or if necessary buy laws preventing unrestricted supply, all in an effort to achieve control and leverage. Which is what money is an abstraction of.
Oh, and I've been working for a living for 17 years. I've worn A LOT of different shoes in that time, which is probably why I'm not so naive as you about these things.
Free means unrestricted, not "brought to you by magic faeries."
The opposite of free isn't "expensive", it's "controlled".
Money has no meaning beyond self-aggrandizement when there's enough to meet everyones needs.
That's exactly it. Capitalism hates plenty, and it will destroy it when it finds it.
Why does this illustrate the need for privacy in a democracy again? "I leave it to the reader to imagine the terrible consequences this could have, like if some hick sherriff decided to throw Obama in a cell because he didn't like his progressive politics." is not exactly compelling.
If anything, this article illustrates how insignificant peoples privacy is, how illusional it is, and how inconsequencial it is when it's violated.
Well, there are all sorts of unscrupulous folks who could be using the anonymity that your open wireless point provides. So why don't we just be reasonable and charge you with reckless endangerment for leaving the open wireless point, and make you an accessory to any illegal actions that might be committed using it. Including theft of the internet providers services in violation of your service agreement.
It's only reasonable, after all. It's not your infrastructure you're acting recklessly with, leaving your access point open when the hardware was shipped to you with security tools and instructions on how to use them.
The prototyping nature of JavaScript makes it a lot more practical to use running JavaScript to write new JavaScript that will be running in the same process, which is something that has been put to good effect by a lot of people. Class based objects don't seem quite as useful for the tasks JavaScript is meant to do.
And what the hell is wrong with primitives, anyways? Everything doesn't need to be an object.
Use VMWare. You can use tools from VMWares site to convert your existing Windows installation to a virtual machine, then install VMWare server on Ubuntu using the GUI, grab a license key for free from VMWares site, and fire up your newly created virtual machine. Then you shouldn't lose anything, and you can run them both simultaneously.
You want to talk about respect, how about you secure your router so it doesn't show up on a hundred peoples computers who live in the region.
How about if you do configure it so that everyone has their own networks polluted with signals from your establishment that are not secured, we send the police around to your house, just like a noise complaint?
That sounds a good deal more reasonable than having illegal icons on everyones computers that you put there and then charging them when they click em.
ISO doesn't matter anymore. They didn't matter because they were "The ISO", they mattered because they were a place where politics could be set aside and everyone could work together to make standards that work. That was a unique and precious thing. Now they're not these things anymore, and therefore, they are defunct.
MS didn't drag themselves up a notch here, they just destroyed something special in the world because it got in the way of their dominance. A sad thing.
A better analogy would be if you put a splitter on your outdoor plug, then attached a hundred extension cords to it, then ran around the neighborhood leaving one in each persons yard, actively using technology to bring access to your service right into other peoples homes at personal expense.
Because when you set up a wireless access point and make the choice not to secure it, that's exactly what you're doing.
When my computer sends out a wireless signal looking for access and you put something in your house and specifically configured it to reply to that request for service, that was your choice, and responsibility for that choice is all yours.
How is it fatalistic or nihilistic. Science is a tool, a means of understanding the universe.
It is nihilistic because it has an inherent skepticism about all ideas. If an idea cannot be deconstructed and reproduced within the scientific method, it is considered without value. But the value of an idea doesn't spring from its inherent truth, but from the utility to which the idea can be put to use when you embrace it. If embracing a bunch of nonsense as gospel makes you survive, reproduce and thrive where others who reject it as nonsense do not, then the nonsense has more value than "the truth". A zealot derives a great deal of power and utility from his embrace of nonsense. So do salespeople, police officers and soldiers. This is where the crux of the divide lies, and where concepts of science and faith can be brought together and measured against each other.
There is something lacking in the world, that we do not have a framework by which we can acknowledge and weigh these conflicting aspects of the human experience against each other and make judgments as to their value and pick up and discard such ideas as tools instead of making them part of our identities and attacking anyone who devalues "who we are".
Sorry if that came out rather muddled, but it's hard to even find the words to talk about these concepts...
Religions are full of metaphor, but they're trying to communicate things that are scientifically sound.
The reason people get so screwed up is because they interpret things literally, when all those personifications are meant to be a device to allow wisdom and knowledge about the universe to be preserved and propagated through an oral tradition.
Once you get this into your head, religions make a lot of sense. Spirits = Germs Personified. God = Cold Hard Reality Personified. And so on and so forth.
Science has limitations. The scientific process can't be applied to lifestyle choices, because the experiments you'd need to do would take longer than the span of your own life to create a set of relevant data.
That's where religion fits. Religions spring up like mutations, and most of them die because their inherent flaws kill off their followers, leading to the death of the religion. The ones that still exist in the world today are the ones that were proven over generations to be effective ways to survive and thrive.
If we're going to improve the systems by which we live, and thus improve our own lives, there is just as much need for the scientific community to acknowledge that there are things that science cannot answer as there is for the religious community to stop interpreting things in such a literal and close-minded fashion.
The modern scientific mindset is very fatalistic and nihilistic, and that is a real problem that needs to be dealt with if we are all going to come together and have frank and sane discussions about how we run our lives.
Takes an awful lot of distance and detachment to see it.
I would think that the reason that you'd go about creating something is because you have something important to say, and that you'd be rewarded if people took the time to listen.
If what you have to say is so unimportant that it means nothing to you if people hear it, and the only motive you have is to sell someone elses message, well, maybe you should find something better to do. Because what you're doing now clearly isn't important enough to waste your time on.
It was your generation that decided not to reproduce itself.
It was your generation that made it seem like a good idea to poison your womb so you can get an education rather than be forced into a dead end job because no one cares about helping and they'd rather you be productive now than breed and have productive people around later.
It was your generation that decided they'd rather have human rights than human beings.
All these years, the wealth your generation enjoyed came from a strong imbalance between the number of dependents and the number of healthy working adults caused by the baby boom. But it wasn't enough... you had to neuter your population so no new dependents would come along and screw things up for you.
So, fuck off and die. And take your daughter with you.
Now that is funny.
Come to think of it, I should put that in writing and put it in the safe with my daughters nest egg.
I have no desire to linger on past my time. I know how many chapters there are in my life, and I have no desire to try to cheat the universe. I expect I will be basking in the radiance of my many accomplishments, marveling at what my progeny are doing with their lives and be rather tired of struggling by the time they're ready to start sticking tubes and pins into me, and that's ok with me.
Organlegging is a symptom of a culture in which the choice of who to treat lies not with who has a future ahead of them, nor with who will benefit society, but only with how much money you have.
This will have to change, because there aren't enough young people to service all the old people, so the system will collapse if it continues to run as it has been. But it would be better if we could stop wasting resources on treating old sick people and start using them to treat young people with a future ahead of them.
I look forward to watching all these bastards with their overdeveloped sense of entitlement coughing out their last breaths in some ditch searching for their last meal. I give it a decade or two.
If there's nothing wrong with keeping people in ignorance, then no, copyright isn't evil.
If there's nothing wrong with estranging people from their common culture to the point that they can't sing happy birthday without having thugs show up demanding so much money it shuts your business down, and , then no, copyright isn't evil.
If there's nothing wrong with telling a brilliant inventor that they can't share what they've created with their fellow man, because some group owns that idea, and they've decided not to develop it because it would reduce their power if it existed, then no, copyright isn't evil.
But really, when you get right down to it...
There is something wrong with these things.
Copyright is evil.
Those who defend it are evil too.
Yes, it is true that screaming "fire" in a crowded theater could potentially hurt people. Screaming "shit" on the television? I fail to see the potential for damage there. Could you please provide an example that illustrates swearing on TV's ability to cause harm?
Example: Joe is having a bad day, and he's been trying to keep himself calm so he doesn't do anything stupid.
His wife has been having a bad day too, and she's giving him a hard time about something stupid he did on the weekend, but trying to be civil.
They're keeping it relatively sane, but tensions are high.
Then he hears a bunch of angry rap music come drifting in his window from someones car, and they're swearing and yelling and saying all the things he wished he could have said to his boss. And his wife for that matter. He's been trying to stay away from things that instigate him all day, and now this.
God fucking damn it, he's going to tell her where to go, he's had enough of this shit.
Now she's swearing too, the angry music outside is gone, but the two of them are off on a tear now. All he can hear is his mother yelling and swearing at him like she did when he was in high school, all she can see is her father who ignored any concerns anyone in their family had and did what he wanted.
He tries to escape from the whole situation, and his wife, who doesn't care about anything except making her husband listen at this point, throws a wooden spoon at him.
At this point, he's already pissed and ready to scrap, and when she acts aggressively, he hits her. Then he realizes what he's done, despite all his efforts to keep his temper, and runs out the door to escape the situation before things get any worse.
There you go. There's your example.
If the most intelligent thing you can find to say to back up your claims that we should abandon the government is to use inflammatory speech that awakens my lizard brain and gets it all fired up, then your message doesn't deserve to be broadcast.
There is a difference between censoring things because of the things they say and censoring things because they make you feel a certain way without really saying anything.
Psychologists help advertisers do the same thing that swearing does. They help them make us feel things about something without telling us anything concrete. It's wrong. It's psychological warfare. They should be working to make sure it DOESN'T happen, not making a buck in the private sector with the skills that are no longer in demand like they were during the cold war.
There needs to be more censorship. A lot more. Swearing is just the obvious example, low hanging fruit that anyone can understand, assuming that they haven't already decided they don't want to.