Before hyperinflation kicks in, we'll declare our creditors to be states harboring terrorism and go to war with them, so that we can erase the debt and pretend it never happened.
British taxation of American Colonials was "legal", too... until the Boston Tea Party and what followed it.
Just because something is currently "legal" doesn't make it ethical.
In the past, violent uprisings and wars have been fought over less cumulative (i.e., visible + hidden) taxation than Americans and other developed nations endure now. That should make those who are doing the taxing now rather nervous, I should think. Will there be another Tea Party, and who's on the guest list?
As some folks know, a lot of physical security products don't really work, either; they give us a false feeling of safety when in fact there is little or no actual benefit. We've got half of America's cities lit up like Christmas trees at night now, burning who knows how many tons of coal every year to do it, but have all those street lights and backyard security lights really made us safer? Some people got a whole lot richer in that process, though.
Another even more striking example close to home: my city took over a formerly "bad" neighborhood and redeveloped it, and part of that "redevelopment" was the installation of wrought-iron fencing around the entire perimeter of the development. It's only about 7 feet tall, mind you, and the bars can be bent and broken by mere mortals (and routinely are). How effective do you suppose that's been at the claimed purpose? Arguably the gates blocking the streets have served the purpose, but the rest of that fencing is an expensive eyesore that did little but make a few politicians look productive and interdict the movement of children with friends on the other side of it. My city, a state capitol no less, has artificially segregated an entire neighborhood in the name of "security", and it failed completely.
So yeah, security products often aren't what they're cracked up to be. Is this really a shock to anyone? Security devices and methods often just pander to humans' natural tendencies toward self-delusion, and make their providers richer at the expense of those who now think they're safer. "False sense of security" isn't clicheed enough, apparently, because people are still being suckered.
Nice funny story about the origins of it. I'm sure the homage must make a few old Commodore coders feel warm and fuzzy. Hey, did you edit the Trivia section to include the mention of the Varnish homage, or was it already there? Ah, wait, checking History... nope, it's actually been there for a while.
I say we launch sharks with frikkin' frakkin' lasers to vaporize the stuff. Who cares if they'd conserve energy and momentum, they're sharks and they fry things!
They weren't before my time, but I never laid a finger on anything branded Commodore, so the humor you see in it just confuses me! Maybe I should change my account to SinclairQL_love?
What's not to love about RSS feeds? It's like the Web for e-mail!:-) No blockage at the Web site proper, though... I clicked through to it from the feed immediately after, and not even so much as a pregnant pause.
Does it really matter whether it's a legitimized and legalized method of disadvantaging others or not? Isn't that really the only difference between "getting the better end of the deal" and "piracy" or "stealing"?
The people who have attained positions of dominance over others would like to preserve that dominance. Short of hiring mercenaries, which was the Old School method, suckering the rest of us into agreeing to - and politicians to codify - laws that benefit them is their means to that end. Many laws are specifically intended to further entrench the minority that is already dominant, not serve the Greater Good or We The People.
I still vote for Goop. Have you ever heard the cliche, "you are what you eat"? I think a corollary might emerge: "you are what you code (in)". Some genius will use Goop to code the first artificially intelligent self-replicating nanobots, and they'll decide we're no more significant than any other raw material and turn us all into....
What makes you think getting rid of Rupert will solve the problem? What makes you think there won't be another prick who will immediately rise to take his place? Do you actually think his attitudes and behavior are all that unique in the corporate world? Have you forgotten Jack Valenti and all his ideological forebears from the last century?
I learned the hard way recently that the latest version 9 of AVG Free has a nasty habit of creating hidden directories and files on every partition, even externals, and then keeping some of those files open for no obvious reason at all. The result is that it becomes impossible to use Windows to reformat those partitions, even when they are otherwise empty and idle; the only way for inexperienced folks to format such partitions is to uninstall AVG entirely, since there's no accessible way to remove or close the offending files and no way to even temporarily disable AVG completely. I suspect it applies to the "premium" product as well. There were reports by others of the same problem.
You know your antivirus software is FUBAR when it breaks fundamental operating system features that have been present for two decades. It's arguably a cure worse than the disease at that point. Would you pay money for software sporting such features?
Sure it will! The mass migration of billions of people to the New Tropic of Cancer will tilt the earth over on its axis a bit so that Norway gets all the rays.
Have you forgotten about global warming? Soon enough Norway might be the new Costa Rica: hot weather AND women. The food will probably be hot and spicy, too. But will the women still be fair-skinned and blonde? Hope you like the Latin/Caribbean/Mediterranean look.
Figuring out what conditions distinguish your positive experience from some of the other very negative ones described here seems to be the real challenge. There aren't very many here in my neck of the woods.
I know what you're saying, but in spite of all the stupidity I witness daily I guess I still get too altruistic/optimistic where reason and intelligence are concerned. I think I know why: I still just can't truly comprehend, believe, that people aren't rational, even after witnessing evidence to the contrary. I have a limited "theory of mind".
Why not gouge a UPC barcode into them as well? Hey, wait... can we do this with babies when they're born? Can we zap a barcode into their foreheads that will stay put? I call dibs on one that translates to 666.
... to mediate traffic instead of traffic signals, they wouldn't have needed the aging old single-point-of-failure computer in the first place, because roundabouts (a) require no computers, (b) require no electronics at all, (c) require no electricity, and (d) don't require maintenance. What's more, since they allow motorists to preserve some momentum in all but the most congested traffic, gas consumption from forced arbitrary deceleration and acceleration is reduced. The only intelligence they require isn't of the artificial sort at all, only a smidgen of it from the motorists using them. They are un-powered and self-adjusting to traffic flow.
Would anyone like to take a stab at how much energy and man-hours is expended on the traffic signal network in the United States every year?
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Before hyperinflation kicks in, we'll declare our creditors to be states harboring terrorism and go to war with them, so that we can erase the debt and pretend it never happened.
Those Indian costumes were just a meatspace version of Tor: an anonymous proxy way ahead of its time.
British taxation of American Colonials was "legal", too... until the Boston Tea Party and what followed it.
Just because something is currently "legal" doesn't make it ethical.
In the past, violent uprisings and wars have been fought over less cumulative (i.e., visible + hidden) taxation than Americans and other developed nations endure now. That should make those who are doing the taxing now rather nervous, I should think. Will there be another Tea Party, and who's on the guest list?
As some folks know, a lot of physical security products don't really work, either; they give us a false feeling of safety when in fact there is little or no actual benefit. We've got half of America's cities lit up like Christmas trees at night now, burning who knows how many tons of coal every year to do it, but have all those street lights and backyard security lights really made us safer? Some people got a whole lot richer in that process, though.
Another even more striking example close to home: my city took over a formerly "bad" neighborhood and redeveloped it, and part of that "redevelopment" was the installation of wrought-iron fencing around the entire perimeter of the development. It's only about 7 feet tall, mind you, and the bars can be bent and broken by mere mortals (and routinely are). How effective do you suppose that's been at the claimed purpose? Arguably the gates blocking the streets have served the purpose, but the rest of that fencing is an expensive eyesore that did little but make a few politicians look productive and interdict the movement of children with friends on the other side of it. My city, a state capitol no less, has artificially segregated an entire neighborhood in the name of "security", and it failed completely.
So yeah, security products often aren't what they're cracked up to be. Is this really a shock to anyone? Security devices and methods often just pander to humans' natural tendencies toward self-delusion, and make their providers richer at the expense of those who now think they're safer. "False sense of security" isn't clicheed enough, apparently, because people are still being suckered.
Nice funny story about the origins of it. I'm sure the homage must make a few old Commodore coders feel warm and fuzzy. Hey, did you edit the Trivia section to include the mention of the Varnish homage, or was it already there? Ah, wait, checking History... nope, it's actually been there for a while.
I say we launch sharks with frikkin' frakkin' lasers to vaporize the stuff. Who cares if they'd conserve energy and momentum, they're sharks and they fry things!
They weren't before my time, but I never laid a finger on anything branded Commodore, so the humor you see in it just confuses me! Maybe I should change my account to SinclairQL_love?
I think there must have been a crack in the Varnish.
What's not to love about RSS feeds? It's like the Web for e-mail! :-) No blockage at the Web site proper, though... I clicked through to it from the feed immediately after, and not even so much as a pregnant pause.
... the RSS feed for this article fails to load!
Does it really matter whether it's a legitimized and legalized method of disadvantaging others or not? Isn't that really the only difference between "getting the better end of the deal" and "piracy" or "stealing"?
The people who have attained positions of dominance over others would like to preserve that dominance. Short of hiring mercenaries, which was the Old School method, suckering the rest of us into agreeing to - and politicians to codify - laws that benefit them is their means to that end. Many laws are specifically intended to further entrench the minority that is already dominant, not serve the Greater Good or We The People.
I still vote for Goop. Have you ever heard the cliche, "you are what you eat"? I think a corollary might emerge: "you are what you code (in)". Some genius will use Goop to code the first artificially intelligent self-replicating nanobots, and they'll decide we're no more significant than any other raw material and turn us all into....
I think they should call it Goop. So much code produced by humans has looked like a blob from a bad sci-fi movie that it seems fitting.
What makes you think getting rid of Rupert will solve the problem? What makes you think there won't be another prick who will immediately rise to take his place? Do you actually think his attitudes and behavior are all that unique in the corporate world? Have you forgotten Jack Valenti and all his ideological forebears from the last century?
You must be new here.
I learned the hard way recently that the latest version 9 of AVG Free has a nasty habit of creating hidden directories and files on every partition, even externals, and then keeping some of those files open for no obvious reason at all. The result is that it becomes impossible to use Windows to reformat those partitions, even when they are otherwise empty and idle; the only way for inexperienced folks to format such partitions is to uninstall AVG entirely, since there's no accessible way to remove or close the offending files and no way to even temporarily disable AVG completely. I suspect it applies to the "premium" product as well. There were reports by others of the same problem.
You know your antivirus software is FUBAR when it breaks fundamental operating system features that have been present for two decades. It's arguably a cure worse than the disease at that point. Would you pay money for software sporting such features?
Sure it will! The mass migration of billions of people to the New Tropic of Cancer will tilt the earth over on its axis a bit so that Norway gets all the rays.
Hey, that's my dick you're talkin' about, you insensitive clod!
I'm investing in a sunscreen manufacturer right now!
Have you forgotten about global warming? Soon enough Norway might be the new Costa Rica: hot weather AND women. The food will probably be hot and spicy, too. But will the women still be fair-skinned and blonde? Hope you like the Latin/Caribbean/Mediterranean look.
Didn't Cap'n Crunch (Draper) hang out there back in the day? That kinda proves your point.
Figuring out what conditions distinguish your positive experience from some of the other very negative ones described here seems to be the real challenge. There aren't very many here in my neck of the woods.
I know what you're saying, but in spite of all the stupidity I witness daily I guess I still get too altruistic/optimistic where reason and intelligence are concerned. I think I know why: I still just can't truly comprehend, believe, that people aren't rational, even after witnessing evidence to the contrary. I have a limited "theory of mind".
Why not gouge a UPC barcode into them as well? Hey, wait... can we do this with babies when they're born? Can we zap a barcode into their foreheads that will stay put? I call dibs on one that translates to 666.
Yay!
... to mediate traffic instead of traffic signals, they wouldn't have needed the aging old single-point-of-failure computer in the first place, because roundabouts (a) require no computers, (b) require no electronics at all, (c) require no electricity, and (d) don't require maintenance. What's more, since they allow motorists to preserve some momentum in all but the most congested traffic, gas consumption from forced arbitrary deceleration and acceleration is reduced. The only intelligence they require isn't of the artificial sort at all, only a smidgen of it from the motorists using them. They are un-powered and self-adjusting to traffic flow.
Would anyone like to take a stab at how much energy and man-hours is expended on the traffic signal network in the United States every year?