That presumes the cops can be bothered to get off their backsides and go do anything about it... which they don't... and the thieves know it.
Otherwise, who in their right mind would steal a radio transmitter equipped with GPS that can be activated remotely with "Find my iPhone", or the android equivalent, in the first place?
It's not the talking to the cashier that I don't like. It's the waiting in line to get to the cashier in the first place... especially since so many stores cheap out and staff an inadequate number of cashiers these days... that I hate with a burning passion. Frankly, I'd take any of the solutions: enough cashiers to handle the customers in a timely manner, self-checkouts that aren't flakey as hell with scales that are out-of-calibration and always need an override, or totally cashier-less stores.
You and your "ordinary Americans" of which you speak have directly harmed me and my friends and my peers. And even without the economic and, in some cases, physical attacks, I get around the internet, and I see the invective that they spew:
- "libtard" - "snowflake" - "moonbat" - "San Francisco values" used as a slur against Nancy Pelosi (Particularly scummy because her whole damn job is LITERALLY to represent the values and wishes of her constituents, ie. San Francisco. So either they have a profound ignorance of the constitution and what the House of Representatives is for; or they want to eliminate our representation and make us second-class not-quite-citizens.) - "Peoples' Republic of California" - "sodom by the Bay" - "Californians/New Yorkers aren't 'real americans'" - "It's okay for NK to have nukes, as long as their missiles can only reach as far as California." - celebration of the electoral collage shenanigans that disenfranchise millions of our voters. - "Fine people" in the ranks of the swastika-bearing, gun-toting, pedestrian running-over, Charlottesville mob.
And it goes so on and so on and so on. You make it pretty clear that you lot hate my living guts and want to see me and mine at least kicked out of the country, and ideally dead.
And you're surprised and butthurt and dismayed that some of the antipathy is returned? Cry me a bloody river.
... particularly with the current president and his repeatedly-stated intention to abuse law enforcement as a tool with which to attack his political enemies. I wonder why Tim Cook flip-flopped and gave in to the thuggery.
The BBC produces a plethora of worthwhile content that not only stands and competes on its own merits; but is so sought-after that many people don't even wait for it to be legitimately available.
Even in the '90s, before moving large video files around on the internet was feasible; things like Red Dwarf and old-school Doctor Who had huge and thriving bootleg PAL to NTSC converted VHS scenes. And when they re-introduced Doctor Who in 2005? Well, more than a few people started using BitTorrent that year, because BBC America was not available in their cable market at the time. Then there's Top Gear, Torchwood, Broadchurch, AbFab, Graham Norton, and Downton Abby, the original versions of The Office, Queer as Folk, and Skins, and of course the various iterations of BBC News.
But no, EU; don't bother producing good content that can stand on it's own. Abuse the law to force crap content that no one wants on people. I'd bet if you find the money trail and follow it; there'd be some nicely large campaign contributions at the end.
Dunning Kruger. The good drivers... the ones who dive defensively and, for example, cruise down a road where they know the lights are timed at the speed limit and hit every green... will be the first to understand: "Yeah, a computer can probably do this better than I can.", and trade in their old cars for self-driving models. It's the bad drivers... the ones who weave in and out of the traffic pattern, take every turn too fast, jackrabbit off every green, and slam on the brake at every red... who will never be convinced that they are anything but ABSOLUTELY FUCKING AWESOME at driving and will be the last ones to knock it the hell off and let the machine do the job better.
1) The 90s were when I quit listening to rap; because that's when it quit being happy & fun party music a la the Beastie Boys, Run DMC, Sugarhill Gang, Sir Mix-a-Lot, Will Smith when he was still the Fresh Prince, and so on; and Sugar Knight got his "Death Row" fangs into the genre, and morphed it into the "gangster" genre that it is now. So I'm hardly surprised that the lyrical vernacular has changed. Nor do I particularly care.
2) The fact that I'm so far out-of-date on gang slang should give particular lie to the the DMV drone's claim that I have any sort of gang affiliation.
Even without mindless string matching, there are pinhead bureaucrats who will equally mindlessly reject reasonable requests for harmless strings on similarly specious grounds. A few years back, seeing that it was (by some miracle, I thought) untaken, I tried to snag "YT-1300" as a personalized license place. Yes, I'm that nerdly. Also, nothing good with "1701" was available. Some pencil-pusher at the DMV actually denied the application on the claim that YT-1300 is a "gang-related" term. WTF?!?!? Yeah. I'm to believe that there're gangs of Star Wars fans out there somewhere doing drive-bys at Star Trek conventions, hoping to "pop a cap in the ass" of the Trekkies. Sure Mr. DMV person. And you wonder why we all hate you and your kind.
Okay. Disney may have had something to say on copyright or trademark grounds if I *HAD* gotten the plate. But still...
The really frustrating thing is that the problems with the DMCA could be easily be solved, if the congresscritters weren't so despicably corrupt. It'd take just two simple steps:
1) Abolish mass and automated takedown notices. Mandate that every takedown be reviewed by a single, responsible, and identifiable individual who swears, under that currently-uninforced "penalty of perjury" clause, that he is the owner or their representative thereof of the copyrighted work and that the online content is, in fact, infringing. Require these notices to be delivered, in writing, via a tracked and audible service such as FedEx, DHL, or certified or registered mail.
2) Put some teeth into the "under penalty of perjury" that accusers of infringement are supposed to swear upon. If the content is found to be owned by someone else, or by someone the accuser doesn't represent, or fair use, or satire, or journalistic, or in any other way non-infringing; off to jail with the perjurer. A nice schedule, I think, would be 30 days in county for the first offense, 90 days for the second, and a year in the state pen plus permanent disbarment and a ban on holding corporate office or trading on the stock market for the third offense.
Easy-pasey, lemon-squeasy... the fraudulent and frivolous DMCA filings would evaporate overnight.
> We used to buy DVDs or video cassettes; now > viewers stream movies or TV shows with Netflix.
> Music lovers used to buy compact discs; now Spotify > and YouTube are more commonly used to hear our > favorite tunes.
The erosion of property rights, and the elimination of the notion of personal ownership of media you've bought, isn't dying from lack of interest. It's been under assault for decades by powerful corporate thugs like Hillary Rosen, Lars Ulrich, and Jack Valenti. That lot has already bought laws, such as the DMCA, to the effect that, even if you've bought and brought home the physical property itself; it's not *really* yours to do with as you please without the RIAA/Metallica/MPAA being able to veto you.
What's going in here is simply the current generation adapting to the times. If you don't truly own what you buy, why pay full purchase price at all, when you can get the vast majority of the benefits for $10/month to Apple or Spotify? I honestly can't remember the last time I actually bought a CD. And I had a collection in the high hundreds by the end of the '90s.
"roman_mir" routinely posts claims that he is a business owner who employs only people in ex-soviet satellite nations in Eastern Europe and in third-world nations; specifically so that he can take advantage of the lack of worker protections in those countries so that he can get away with mistreating and underpaying said workers. There are two ways that can break down:
1). He's a liar and therefore a troll account; which deserves a "-1 Troll" mod every single time.
or
2). He's telling the truth and is simply a walking, talking, stack of shit who really does get off on abusing his workers. Being truthful about such may absolve him of "-1 Troll" mods. But the way he brags about said abuses could rightfully be considered "-1 Flamebait."
So it's really just a matter of whether or not one believes he is being truthful in his claims of business ownership and worker abuses. Either way, the -1s and the default score are richly deserved.
> Just a shitty game full of griefers that puts you off > playing anyway.
If fairness though, you just described pretty much *every* online game since Blizzard took away private LAN play amongst closed groups of friends, and forced everyone onto battle.net.
There are way too many assholes amongst the general unfiltered public for online gamine to be enjoyable; even without cheating clients in play. These days, I judge games almost entirely by their single-player experience; with only the rare exceptions for the few that still allow one to host a local server on a closed and private network. So I really see no reason to give a damn about the existence of multi-player cheats at all. And there are plenty of legit and cool things you can so with cheats and hacks in single-player. So really, screw Take-Two and screw this judge.
Except that's not how the geniuses are trained. (Yeah, it's a silly name. But silly name or no, they're sharp, well trained, and good at customer service. When I used to hire desktop support people and junior sysadmins; poaching from the local Genius Bar produced some of the best candidates and hires.) When I had a battery problem with my 6s, all I had to do was demonstrate it in-store. The genius told me: "Yeah, it shouldn't do that.", asked if I had my data backed up (Which I did. I always do.), and fetched a replacement from the back. Another five minutes to move the SIM and wipe the old one, and I walked out with a new phone. Hell, when I broke a screen through my own clumsiness and brought it in for an AppleCare repair; they also simply gave me a new unit, with no question besides how I'd pay the deductible.
If it hadn't been a defective unit, and the battery's capacity was depleted by heavy usage, they wouldn't have told me to buy a new one; they'd have offered the battery replacement service.
The Apple retail people aren't on commission. They're not evaluated by how much product they move. Their evaluations are based on customer surveys and satisfaction metrics. That's why, if you go in and buy something or have it serviced, you'll shortly get an email mentioning the employee by name and asking how your experience was.
I bet one could make a pretty penny in LA if you could work out a way to weave thin metal wire into shirt fabric such that its otherwise invisible but shows up as obscene text or images on these body scanners.
The problem is twofold. ie. when an amber alert sounds, you're either:
1) Driving. In which case, you should be driving and not... stupidly, irresponsibly, and in many states illegally... screwing around reading messages on your phone. And you also have an unusual screeching alarm going off to distract you from driving itself, actively making the roads less safe for everyone. And then add the extra distraction from the instinct to find and silence the source of the noise.
or
2) Not driving. In which case you're not on the road to see the kidnapper's car in th first place. So do they expect everyone who gets the alert to hop in their cars and go out hunting? Looking for every car of the make and model in the alert, and getting close enough to read the license plate? And hundreds or maybe thousands of others doing the same? Yeah... *try* to tell me that's not counterproductive.
Yeah. And that's why the news is always about the EU attacking companies like Google, Apple, or Facebook; and not taking to task companies like EADS/Airbus, Total S.A., Royal Dutch Shell, and (pre-brexit) BP for all of their malfeasance and shenanigans; right?
We remember the time when MySpace was king and Facebook was a startup and Zuckerberg was a nobody. Or we remember MySpace knocking off Tribe, which knocked out Friendster, which stole away all of the LiveJournal user base.
Or we remember when Google was just a cute misspelling of the word for a 1 followed by 100 zeros, and we did our searching with Lycos, AltaVista, LookSmart, AskJeeves, or just welled on the Yahoo directory to find cool pages.
Or we remember when Microsoft was the unstoppable evil empire. And Apple was "beleaguered" and Mikey Dell was threatening a hostile takeover so he could "shut it all down and refund the money to the shareholders."
Or we remember when there was no Amazon and Barnes & Noble and Borders were the monolithic behemoths putting neighborhood bookstores out of business.
The real oldsters remember the days of IBM being the evil empire that even the US government was incapable of reigning in, and no one would buy a computer named after a fruit, and Gates and co. were rotting in a New Mexico desert writing an OS for a computer that communicated vis das blinkenlights.
Dominance in tech is fleeting, and has been for at least 50 years. I expect most startup founders are as aware of that history as anyone. And they probably all have dreams of. themselves, being that scrappy underdog that punches out an established player to become the king of the mountain. So it shouldn't be too surprising that they're wary of inviting the government in to interfere.
I mean... it's not like every other attempt to ban or regulate what sort of software people are allowed to write and use has failed comically or anything. Yup. PGP, Gnutella, Bittorrent... they're all just distant memories that no one uses anymore.
That's not for lack of trying. 45 is a whole lot more malicious and malignant than the worst hyperbole ever uttered about Bush #2. The difference is that Dubya knew enough to surround himself with competent people like Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Rove. 45, OTOH, tolerates the presence of no one who is not a sycophantic yes-man.
Really. Just do it. Critical thinking is a good thing.
The thing is, it's ALWAYS been possible to manipulate these sorts of platforms. Recall the results that Google used to return for "more evil than satan himself" and "miserable failure"? No? Fine... go ahead and Google for "Santorum". You'll still get more than a dozen mixtures of lube and fecal matter before you get to the actual stack of crap that used to be a senator. And this is nothing new to the internet. Howard Stern used to engage in the pastime of having his listeners prank call news stations with "reports" blaming everything from the death of John Kennedy Jr. to the bomb attack in the old WTC's parking garage on his producer: "ba ba booey". And none other than Dan Rather once got fooled by a fake report wrt/ George Bush #2's national guard service.
The fact that media platforms can be manipulated and fooled doesn't make them inherently untrustworthy. It means that they're designed and operated by human beings. And humans are inherently prone to making mistakes; particularly when they're deliberately misled. That doesn't mean anyone should distrust legitimate and reputable media and run off into conspiracy theory and they're-out-to-get-me paranoia land. It means you should just check multiple sources and apply critical thinking skills to what you read and hear.
Why must you screw up so many science fiction plots? How's the protomolecule supposed to get loose on Eros if the Cant' isn't hauling all of that ice from Saturn to Ceres?
It's neither dishonesty nor hyperbole when 45's "fine people" are literally marching in the streets with the swastika. Sorry, not sorry... if it talks like a nazi, goose-steps like a nazi, and sieg heil's like a nazi; it's a goddamned nazi.
Why focus only on single individuals? It doesn't have the emotional value of those commercials with survivors of cancer caused by smoking; but it shouldn't be too hard to find quantifiable property damages. Parts of Miami Beach are already routinely underwater, thanks to rising sea levels caused by climate change. The flooding has undoubtedly caused damages that could be assigned a dollar value. Florida is already committed to spending at least half a billion dollars or so trying to mitigate it with pumps and seawalls. And if it gets so bad that significant parts of Florida, or any other state, needs to construct a system of Netherlands-style dykes to hold back the sea, the construction costs would be public record. And just speculative; but I imagine having a new flood zone spring up around your house would negatively affect its property value. And floods themselves damage personal property as well.
The oil and coal companies should be won the hook for all of that.
Slashdot Mirror
That presumes the cops can be bothered to get off their backsides and go do anything about it... which they don't... and the thieves know it.
Otherwise, who in their right mind would steal a radio transmitter equipped with GPS that can be activated remotely with "Find my iPhone", or the android equivalent, in the first place?
Market between 6th and 7th? Yeah. Good luck with that, guys.
It's not the talking to the cashier that I don't like. It's the waiting in line to get to the cashier in the first place... especially since so many stores cheap out and staff an inadequate number of cashiers these days... that I hate with a burning passion. Frankly, I'd take any of the solutions: enough cashiers to handle the customers in a timely manner, self-checkouts that aren't flakey as hell with scales that are out-of-calibration and always need an override, or totally cashier-less stores.
You and your "ordinary Americans" of which you speak have directly harmed me and my friends and my peers. And even without the economic and, in some cases, physical attacks, I get around the internet, and I see the invective that they spew:
- "libtard"
- "snowflake"
- "moonbat"
- "San Francisco values" used as a slur against Nancy Pelosi (Particularly scummy because her whole damn job is LITERALLY to represent the values and wishes of her constituents, ie. San Francisco. So either they have a profound ignorance of the constitution and what the House of Representatives is for; or they want to eliminate our representation and make us second-class not-quite-citizens.)
- "Peoples' Republic of California"
- "sodom by the Bay"
- "Californians/New Yorkers aren't 'real americans'"
- "It's okay for NK to have nukes, as long as their missiles can only reach as far as California."
- celebration of the electoral collage shenanigans that disenfranchise millions of our voters.
- "Fine people" in the ranks of the swastika-bearing, gun-toting, pedestrian running-over, Charlottesville mob.
And it goes so on and so on and so on. You make it pretty clear that you lot hate my living guts and want to see me and mine at least kicked out of the country, and ideally dead.
And you're surprised and butthurt and dismayed that some of the antipathy is returned? Cry me a bloody river.
... particularly with the current president and his repeatedly-stated intention to abuse law enforcement as a tool with which to attack his political enemies. I wonder why Tim Cook flip-flopped and gave in to the thuggery.
The BBC produces a plethora of worthwhile content that not only stands and competes on its own merits; but is so sought-after that many people don't even wait for it to be legitimately available.
Even in the '90s, before moving large video files around on the internet was feasible; things like Red Dwarf and old-school Doctor Who had huge and thriving bootleg PAL to NTSC converted VHS scenes. And when they re-introduced Doctor Who in 2005? Well, more than a few people started using BitTorrent that year, because BBC America was not available in their cable market at the time. Then there's Top Gear, Torchwood, Broadchurch, AbFab, Graham Norton, and Downton Abby, the original versions of The Office, Queer as Folk, and Skins, and of course the various iterations of BBC News.
But no, EU; don't bother producing good content that can stand on it's own. Abuse the law to force crap content that no one wants on people. I'd bet if you find the money trail and follow it; there'd be some nicely large campaign contributions at the end.
Dunning Kruger. The good drivers... the ones who dive defensively and, for example, cruise down a road where they know the lights are timed at the speed limit and hit every green... will be the first to understand: "Yeah, a computer can probably do this better than I can.", and trade in their old cars for self-driving models. It's the bad drivers... the ones who weave in and out of the traffic pattern, take every turn too fast, jackrabbit off every green, and slam on the brake at every red... who will never be convinced that they are anything but ABSOLUTELY FUCKING AWESOME at driving and will be the last ones to knock it the hell off and let the machine do the job better.
Well...
1)
The 90s were when I quit listening to rap; because that's when it quit being happy & fun party music a la the Beastie Boys, Run DMC, Sugarhill Gang, Sir Mix-a-Lot, Will Smith when he was still the Fresh Prince, and so on; and Sugar Knight got his "Death Row" fangs into the genre, and morphed it into the "gangster" genre that it is now. So I'm hardly surprised that the lyrical vernacular has changed. Nor do I particularly care.
2)
The fact that I'm so far out-of-date on gang slang should give particular lie to the the DMV drone's claim that I have any sort of gang affiliation.
Even without mindless string matching, there are pinhead bureaucrats who will equally mindlessly reject reasonable requests for harmless strings on similarly specious grounds. A few years back, seeing that it was (by some miracle, I thought) untaken, I tried to snag "YT-1300" as a personalized license place. Yes, I'm that nerdly. Also, nothing good with "1701" was available. Some pencil-pusher at the DMV actually denied the application on the claim that YT-1300 is a "gang-related" term. WTF?!?!? Yeah. I'm to believe that there're gangs of Star Wars fans out there somewhere doing drive-bys at Star Trek conventions, hoping to "pop a cap in the ass" of the Trekkies. Sure Mr. DMV person. And you wonder why we all hate you and your kind.
Okay. Disney may have had something to say on copyright or trademark grounds if I *HAD* gotten the plate. But still...
The really frustrating thing is that the problems with the DMCA could be easily be solved, if the congresscritters weren't so despicably corrupt. It'd take just two simple steps:
1) Abolish mass and automated takedown notices. Mandate that every takedown be reviewed by a single, responsible, and identifiable individual who swears, under that currently-uninforced "penalty of perjury" clause, that he is the owner or their representative thereof of the copyrighted work and that the online content is, in fact, infringing. Require these notices to be delivered, in writing, via a tracked and audible service such as FedEx, DHL, or certified or registered mail.
2) Put some teeth into the "under penalty of perjury" that accusers of infringement are supposed to swear upon. If the content is found to be owned by someone else, or by someone the accuser doesn't represent, or fair use, or satire, or journalistic, or in any other way non-infringing; off to jail with the perjurer. A nice schedule, I think, would be 30 days in county for the first offense, 90 days for the second, and a year in the state pen plus permanent disbarment and a ban on holding corporate office or trading on the stock market for the third offense.
Easy-pasey, lemon-squeasy... the fraudulent and frivolous DMCA filings would evaporate overnight.
> We used to buy DVDs or video cassettes; now
> viewers stream movies or TV shows with Netflix.
> Music lovers used to buy compact discs; now Spotify
> and YouTube are more commonly used to hear our
> favorite tunes.
The erosion of property rights, and the elimination of the notion of personal ownership of media you've bought, isn't dying from lack of interest. It's been under assault for decades by powerful corporate thugs like Hillary Rosen, Lars Ulrich, and Jack Valenti. That lot has already bought laws, such as the DMCA, to the effect that, even if you've bought and brought home the physical property itself; it's not *really* yours to do with as you please without the RIAA/Metallica/MPAA being able to veto you.
What's going in here is simply the current generation adapting to the times. If you don't truly own what you buy, why pay full purchase price at all, when you can get the vast majority of the benefits for $10/month to Apple or Spotify? I honestly can't remember the last time I actually bought a CD. And I had a collection in the high hundreds by the end of the '90s.
"roman_mir" routinely posts claims that he is a business owner who employs only people in ex-soviet satellite nations in Eastern Europe and in third-world nations; specifically so that he can take advantage of the lack of worker protections in those countries so that he can get away with mistreating and underpaying said workers. There are two ways that can break down:
1). He's a liar and therefore a troll account; which deserves a "-1 Troll" mod every single time.
or
2). He's telling the truth and is simply a walking, talking, stack of shit who really does get off on abusing his workers. Being truthful about such may absolve him of "-1 Troll" mods. But the way he brags about said abuses could rightfully be considered "-1 Flamebait."
So it's really just a matter of whether or not one believes he is being truthful in his claims of business ownership and worker abuses. Either way, the -1s and the default score are richly deserved.
> Just a shitty game full of griefers that puts you off
> playing anyway.
If fairness though, you just described pretty much *every* online game since Blizzard took away private LAN play amongst closed groups of friends, and forced everyone onto battle.net.
There are way too many assholes amongst the general unfiltered public for online gamine to be enjoyable; even without cheating clients in play. These days, I judge games almost entirely by their single-player experience; with only the rare exceptions for the few that still allow one to host a local server on a closed and private network. So I really see no reason to give a damn about the existence of multi-player cheats at all. And there are plenty of legit and cool things you can so with cheats and hacks in single-player. So really, screw Take-Two and screw this judge.
Except that's not how the geniuses are trained. (Yeah, it's a silly name. But silly name or no, they're sharp, well trained, and good at customer service. When I used to hire desktop support people and junior sysadmins; poaching from the local Genius Bar produced some of the best candidates and hires.) When I had a battery problem with my 6s, all I had to do was demonstrate it in-store. The genius told me: "Yeah, it shouldn't do that.", asked if I had my data backed up (Which I did. I always do.), and fetched a replacement from the back. Another five minutes to move the SIM and wipe the old one, and I walked out with a new phone. Hell, when I broke a screen through my own clumsiness and brought it in for an AppleCare repair; they also simply gave me a new unit, with no question besides how I'd pay the deductible.
If it hadn't been a defective unit, and the battery's capacity was depleted by heavy usage, they wouldn't have told me to buy a new one; they'd have offered the battery replacement service.
The Apple retail people aren't on commission. They're not evaluated by how much product they move. Their evaluations are based on customer surveys and satisfaction metrics. That's why, if you go in and buy something or have it serviced, you'll shortly get an email mentioning the employee by name and asking how your experience was.
I bet one could make a pretty penny in LA if you could work out a way to weave thin metal wire into shirt fabric such that its otherwise invisible but shows up as obscene text or images on these body scanners.
The problem is twofold. ie. when an amber alert sounds, you're either:
1) Driving. In which case, you should be driving and not... stupidly, irresponsibly, and in many states illegally... screwing around reading messages on your phone. And you also have an unusual screeching alarm going off to distract you from driving itself, actively making the roads less safe for everyone. And then add the extra distraction from the instinct to find and silence the source of the noise.
or
2) Not driving. In which case you're not on the road to see the kidnapper's car in th first place. So do they expect everyone who gets the alert to hop in their cars and go out hunting? Looking for every car of the make and model in the alert, and getting close enough to read the license plate? And hundreds or maybe thousands of others doing the same? Yeah... *try* to tell me that's not counterproductive.
I don't really see how you'd fix that.
Why should they give you ANYTHING without getting something in return?
Yeah. And that's why the news is always about the EU attacking companies like Google, Apple, or Facebook; and not taking to task companies like EADS/Airbus, Total S.A., Royal Dutch Shell, and (pre-brexit) BP for all of their malfeasance and shenanigans; right?
We remember the time when MySpace was king and Facebook was a startup and Zuckerberg was a nobody. Or we remember MySpace knocking off Tribe, which knocked out Friendster, which stole away all of the LiveJournal user base.
Or we remember when Google was just a cute misspelling of the word for a 1 followed by 100 zeros, and we did our searching with Lycos, AltaVista, LookSmart, AskJeeves, or just welled on the Yahoo directory to find cool pages.
Or we remember when Microsoft was the unstoppable evil empire. And Apple was "beleaguered" and Mikey Dell was threatening a hostile takeover so he could "shut it all down and refund the money to the shareholders."
Or we remember when there was no Amazon and Barnes & Noble and Borders were the monolithic behemoths putting neighborhood bookstores out of business.
The real oldsters remember the days of IBM being the evil empire that even the US government was incapable of reigning in, and no one would buy a computer named after a fruit, and Gates and co. were rotting in a New Mexico desert writing an OS for a computer that communicated vis das blinkenlights.
Dominance in tech is fleeting, and has been for at least 50 years. I expect most startup founders are as aware of that history as anyone. And they probably all have dreams of. themselves, being that scrappy underdog that punches out an established player to become the king of the mountain. So it shouldn't be too surprising that they're wary of inviting the government in to interfere.
I mean... it's not like every other attempt to ban or regulate what sort of software people are allowed to write and use has failed comically or anything. Yup. PGP, Gnutella, Bittorrent... they're all just distant memories that no one uses anymore.
> it's less bad than the Bush 2 era, but still.
That's not for lack of trying. 45 is a whole lot more malicious and malignant than the worst hyperbole ever uttered about Bush #2. The difference is that Dubya knew enough to surround himself with competent people like Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Rove. 45, OTOH, tolerates the presence of no one who is not a sycophantic yes-man.
Really. Just do it. Critical thinking is a good thing.
The thing is, it's ALWAYS been possible to manipulate these sorts of platforms. Recall the results that Google used to return for "more evil than satan himself" and "miserable failure"? No? Fine... go ahead and Google for "Santorum". You'll still get more than a dozen mixtures of lube and fecal matter before you get to the actual stack of crap that used to be a senator. And this is nothing new to the internet. Howard Stern used to engage in the pastime of having his listeners prank call news stations with "reports" blaming everything from the death of John Kennedy Jr. to the bomb attack in the old WTC's parking garage on his producer: "ba ba booey". And none other than Dan Rather once got fooled by a fake report wrt/ George Bush #2's national guard service.
The fact that media platforms can be manipulated and fooled doesn't make them inherently untrustworthy. It means that they're designed and operated by human beings. And humans are inherently prone to making mistakes; particularly when they're deliberately misled. That doesn't mean anyone should distrust legitimate and reputable media and run off into conspiracy theory and they're-out-to-get-me paranoia land. It means you should just check multiple sources and apply critical thinking skills to what you read and hear.
Why must you screw up so many science fiction plots? How's the protomolecule supposed to get loose on Eros if the Cant' isn't hauling all of that ice from Saturn to Ceres?
It's neither dishonesty nor hyperbole when 45's "fine people" are literally marching in the streets with the swastika. Sorry, not sorry... if it talks like a nazi, goose-steps like a nazi, and sieg heil's like a nazi; it's a goddamned nazi.
Why focus only on single individuals? It doesn't have the emotional value of those commercials with survivors of cancer caused by smoking; but it shouldn't be too hard to find quantifiable property damages. Parts of Miami Beach are already routinely underwater, thanks to rising sea levels caused by climate change. The flooding has undoubtedly caused damages that could be assigned a dollar value. Florida is already committed to spending at least half a billion dollars or so trying to mitigate it with pumps and seawalls. And if it gets so bad that significant parts of Florida, or any other state, needs to construct a system of Netherlands-style dykes to hold back the sea, the construction costs would be public record. And just speculative; but I imagine having a new flood zone spring up around your house would negatively affect its property value. And floods themselves damage personal property as well.
The oil and coal companies should be won the hook for all of that.