This seems kind of like making the tired point that 'people in Europe travel WAY more than Americans and Americans are durr durr durr durr", which really tends to forget the point that there are plenty of european countries crammed into the size of an American state, while I can drive for six days in a line and still be in the same country and have to cross an ocean to reach anything but North and South America. Likewise, if I lived down the street from where I work, I wouldn't care about a car, either. However, if my employer is on the other side of town, I can't really add four or five hours a day to my commute just for the joy of riding on a bus or light rail filled with smelly homeless people and meth heads shooting up in the back.
I don't have a car (I gave it away). I've never had a license. I have no interest in ever having one. I don't care to drive. I hate driving. I hate traffic. I hate commutes. I'm in a fortunate position where I don't have to worry about such things - but I'm in a very *rare* position.
Pretty ignorant. There's a lot of great programming on. Not enough to justify the cable bill, but there's a ton. Don't paint it all as shit just because all you consume is shit. There's a lot of shit books out there. And shit internet sites. And shit podcasts. And shit music. And PLENTY of shit movies. Myself, I pick the good stuff and don't waste my time with crap. In any medium. I'll take Game of Thrones, Breaking Bad, The Wire, The Killing and such over 80% of the movies that have come out in the last decade any time.
You do realize that you don't *have* to watch the shit television, right? I mean, just because there's Jersey Shore and a shit ton of idiotic "Wedding Story/Marriage Story/Relationship Story/Dating Story/Single Story/Makeover Story/Baby Story" shows on The Ladies Channel doesn't mean you can't ignore all that and just watch The Wire.
Television is not any more lazy and stupid than any other medium and it's fairly naive or ignorant for people to keep saying so. The laziness and stupidity is in the content you choose to consume. If your television watching is filled with utter shit, then that's a failing on the viewer's part.
You mean, like when I was watching some show over at my friend's the other day and all of the cans on the table were turned so the labels were facing the camera and they kept mentioning the brand of their cell phone like ten times while sitting on the sofa in front of the camera?
Fortunately, I think content like that is going to be shortly lived, because people are smart enough to know when they're being directly marketed to like that and find it distasteful.
When it comes down to it, I don't need eight hours of television to watch every day. I know that until recent years, the average American watches something like 8 hours a day of television (which I found shocking until I read a statistic that the Japanese during the same period watched about 9 hours a day). I don't even watch a hour worth of "television" content (meaning content that is essentially television content whether or not I'm watching it live and directly from the television).
If I'm only watching a few hours a month of "television" content, then that content needs to be high quality and I'm willing to pay a couple bucks total for it. I'll pay two bucks a month to watch Game of Thrones, for example. But I won't watch Game of Thrones with advertising or product placement, even if it's free.
Yeah, this "technology" seems irrelevant to an increasingly large portion of the population. I haven't had cable TV in many years and I don't even have access to over the air television. Or, I do, but I haven't bought a digital receiver and plugged it in and all that, because I don't care. Everything I watch on my televisiont hat isn't a videogame is streaming from Netflix. The few current things I need to watch (well, one current thing) I just get online.
Don't get me wrong - there is a LOT of awesome stuff on television these days. More now than ever before. Better in quality and quantity. However, the price for that content continues to go up, to. Even if I watch four shows consistently every single week, that isn't worth $100+ per month when I can get 90% of that experience for $8 on, say, Netflix.
As a rational personal driven by science rather than sentiment and sensationalism, I am of two minds.
On one, there's no reason to necessarily fear well operated nuclear power plants. Unfortunately, we hear countless stories of power plants that are not being maintained and funded properly and with poor operational and maintenance attention. Hardly the place where you want to skimp.
On the other hand, with your plane analogy . . . when a plane goes seriously bad, it kills some people on board. Maybe kills a couple people on the ground. Maybe spills some fuel all over the ground in a biggish area. I'm not sure when the last plane crashed (that wasn't carrying nuclear material) which resulted in tens of miles around it's crash site being unlivable for multiple lifetimes, possibly contaminating vast food and water supplies, and reaching potentially dangerous levels hundreds or thousands of miles away, with the air currents.
It's very hard, even with statistics, to mentally overcome the sheer potential damage of a nuclear plant gone really wrong. It's like saying "hey, the mutually assured destruction policy between America and Russia actually kept us safe for so many decades, because we both had tens of thousands of warheads pointed at each other that could wipe away all life on earth in an hour, but that sheer fact meant nobody would ever do it". Only . . . the reality is that on more than one occasion, we came seriously fucking close to letting nukes loose on the other guy due to human error. Flocks of geese being mistaken for a flight of warheads over the ocean. Test missiles being mistaken for a strike (because of human error; not notifying people higher up that it was occurring and that it should not be taken as an attack).
All it takes is one fuck up and we're a species that is as capable of mind-shattering fuck-ups as we are raw ingenuity.
So, while I tend to want to say "hurrah! clean, safe, cheap, awesome nuclear power!", there's another part of me that says "let's not".
We need to do even more business with the Chinese. Because, of course, i've been told my entire life as an American that capitalism in the form of sweat shops, then KFCs and Walmarts are the way to overthrow governments and win the hearts and minds of people. So the more evil China does, the more business we need to do with them, FOR FREEDOM! Or something.
It doesn't matter, anyway. GameStop is a terrible operation that should be avoided at all costs. You could pre-order a game in May that comes out in June and that doesn't guarantee that when you show up to get your game in June that it will actually be there. On top of that, the employees often swipe the codes that come with games for redemption, so even if your pre-order is supposed to come with one . . . it might not.
All pre-ordering does is get you a chance at possibly getting the game on release date. They may give it to someone else, instead. Or not have enough in the first place. So saying that they're "honoring pre orders" for DNF is pretty meaningless, since they don't really honor pre-orders to begin with.
Gamestop is a desperation move. Kind of like shopping at Best Buy or Radio Shack or Walmart. You might do it, but only when you have no other choice and have exhausted all other options.
America has one of these. It let's the president claim _anyone_ including a citizen is an enemy combatant and whisk them away to gitmo without representation or a trial or any other rights granted to a citizen.
The first is, the US gave moon rocks to a bunch of other nations as gifts several decades ago, so presumably one would get them by stealing or buying it from one of those gifted sources.
Second is that the moon rocks we gave other countries as gifts were bullshit and were actually made of petrified wood. So if this woman is guilty of anything, it's probably more like "selling stolen wood". If you think I'm bullshitting you, ask the Dutch.
In more than one documentary, I've seen a scene where they monitor the health of the cows (who are essentially being poisoned by the cornfeed they're given non-stop to promote such fast growth that it's essentially killing the cows) by cutting a giant hole in the top of their body that goes directly into one of their stomaches and has a giant rubber plug. The guy pulls the plug out and reaches his entire arm into the cow and pulls out what's in it to see how sick the cows are from the feeding they're getting and how much antibiotics to give them to counter it. I have had nightmares of that scene for weeks afterward. It horrifies me kind of on the same level as the whole Silence of the Lambs scene where what's his name from Goodfellas has the top of his head cut off and a part of his brain fried and served to him.
It's one of the many government organizations staffed by executives from the companies that they regulate, so that they can facilitate the wishes of the corporations. For example, push through bovine growth hormone without due diligence and then have to reverse the decision years later, after it lead to far more contamination in the milk we drink as well as hideous "mutations" that can only be described as nightmarishly inhumane occurred in the cows themselves.
And, you know, then all the Monsanto evilness . . . since they have Monsanto executives in their mix. And the whole magic "now that we have people who are directly tied to the success of aspartame being approved sitting on the committee, we're going to go ahead and just approve aspartame" thing.
If the FDA ever does anything even remotely right, I can only assume it's done as a "okay, we're getting too much heat so lets at least do some token action to get people off our backs so we can continue being evil as shit".
Typical revolving door government, along the lines of "I"m Ken Lay and I run Enron and the president has just appointed me as security advisor and I'm going to advise that we deregulate energy to directly benefit my shady practices in fucking over California and manufacturing a non-existent energy crises so I can get rich".
Radio Shack needs to change their name to something that more accurately conveys what they really are. Unfortunately, I think "The Place Your Grandmother Shops To Buy You Cheap Electronic Crap Like an Electronic PIggy Bank Or A Really Low End RC Car That Runs On a Pair of AA Batteries On Your Birthday and Christmas" is too long.
Exactly. When I think of Radio Shack, I think of over-priced electronic trinkets and being annoyed by cell-phone sales attempts every time I buy something and having to dodge the "name, phone number, address, date of birth, mother's maiden name, blood type, dna sample" gathering for every fucking purchase. I don't think I ever bought anything useful there in my entire life.
The only reason I'd ever go to a Radio Shack is the same reason I'd go to a Best Buy - I'm desperate and I need something RIGHT NOW and it can't wait 48hrs for me to order it online and have it shipped to my door.
What choice do you have? The machinery of aristocracy and control is well beyond the need for your support. They're self-sustaining and the level of corruption in all aspects of government and politics so unbelievably extensive and deep and convoluted that there is no way to simply excise the foreign tissue by itself.
Naomi Wolf does a great job of describing the process that seems to be occurring right now (including this event) in her book "The End of America".
I mean, we live in a country where our president's (last president) family did extensive business with the family of the man that killed thousands of Americans. We live in a country where government officials who are employees of Goldman Sachs take a trillion dollars from the tax payers to bail out Goldman Sachs. We live in a country where our president appoints Ken Lay as energy advisor to deregulate his own industry on his own terms. We live in a country where we allow our government to pass bills that allow the president to point at a citizen and make them disappear. Off to gitmo for torture, if he wants. Without representation or a trial. We live in a country where judges are paid off in millions of dollars by the private prison industry to fuel their business by unfairly punishing minor juvenile violators with many months in juvenile detention (google it - in Pennsylvania).
It's probably not too late to force change, but by the time you could ever even remotely possibly convince enough of the population to give a flying fuck and get their heads out of their Bible and Twilight or their "durr durr abortion" and "durr durr immigration" and "durr durr religion" bullshit to actually do something about the real problems facing us, it'll definitely be too fucking late.
Look, I'm a die-hard libertarian and I've always been a "you'll have to kill me before you take my liberties" kind of guy.
However, the writing is on the wall. We've lost a ton of our civil liberties and privacy in the last decade after 9/11. We try to recover from it, somewhat futilely. But what happens the next time there is an attack? All it's going to take is one more attack - which I think is inevitable, given the rapidity at which we seem dead set on making enemies around the world. It may not happen this year. Or next. But some day, it'll happen again. And when it does, everything we embrace and everything the country stands for goes out the window. One more attack and the entire population will be shitting itself and we'll be *demanding* that the government give every man, woman and child a fucking anal probe at the airline security gates. We'll *demand* that the government read every email and keep track of every purchase and every library checkout. We will bend backwards to remit our every liberty and freedom.
A lot of law-enforcement entities in the united states consider the act of concealing contents or communications (encryption, etc) to itself be a suspicious act, which means it would be much easier to acquire a right to search. Not that you need a right to search anymore.
Are you inside the US? If you're inside the US or your email will transmit through the US, then you're no more protected than having your content hosted outside of the states.
Slashdot Mirror
This seems kind of like making the tired point that 'people in Europe travel WAY more than Americans and Americans are durr durr durr durr", which really tends to forget the point that there are plenty of european countries crammed into the size of an American state, while I can drive for six days in a line and still be in the same country and have to cross an ocean to reach anything but North and South America. Likewise, if I lived down the street from where I work, I wouldn't care about a car, either. However, if my employer is on the other side of town, I can't really add four or five hours a day to my commute just for the joy of riding on a bus or light rail filled with smelly homeless people and meth heads shooting up in the back.
I don't have a car (I gave it away). I've never had a license. I have no interest in ever having one. I don't care to drive. I hate driving. I hate traffic. I hate commutes. I'm in a fortunate position where I don't have to worry about such things - but I'm in a very *rare* position.
No, they said this was the activists doing this; not Monsanto.
Pretty ignorant. There's a lot of great programming on. Not enough to justify the cable bill, but there's a ton. Don't paint it all as shit just because all you consume is shit. There's a lot of shit books out there. And shit internet sites. And shit podcasts. And shit music. And PLENTY of shit movies. Myself, I pick the good stuff and don't waste my time with crap. In any medium. I'll take Game of Thrones, Breaking Bad, The Wire, The Killing and such over 80% of the movies that have come out in the last decade any time.
If there is a way to reverse the process and TRANSMIT images of your dong, someone will do it.
You do realize that you don't *have* to watch the shit television, right? I mean, just because there's Jersey Shore and a shit ton of idiotic "Wedding Story/Marriage Story/Relationship Story/Dating Story/Single Story/Makeover Story/Baby Story" shows on The Ladies Channel doesn't mean you can't ignore all that and just watch The Wire.
Television is not any more lazy and stupid than any other medium and it's fairly naive or ignorant for people to keep saying so. The laziness and stupidity is in the content you choose to consume. If your television watching is filled with utter shit, then that's a failing on the viewer's part.
You mean, like when I was watching some show over at my friend's the other day and all of the cans on the table were turned so the labels were facing the camera and they kept mentioning the brand of their cell phone like ten times while sitting on the sofa in front of the camera?
Fortunately, I think content like that is going to be shortly lived, because people are smart enough to know when they're being directly marketed to like that and find it distasteful.
When it comes down to it, I don't need eight hours of television to watch every day. I know that until recent years, the average American watches something like 8 hours a day of television (which I found shocking until I read a statistic that the Japanese during the same period watched about 9 hours a day). I don't even watch a hour worth of "television" content (meaning content that is essentially television content whether or not I'm watching it live and directly from the television).
If I'm only watching a few hours a month of "television" content, then that content needs to be high quality and I'm willing to pay a couple bucks total for it. I'll pay two bucks a month to watch Game of Thrones, for example. But I won't watch Game of Thrones with advertising or product placement, even if it's free.
Yeah, this "technology" seems irrelevant to an increasingly large portion of the population. I haven't had cable TV in many years and I don't even have access to over the air television. Or, I do, but I haven't bought a digital receiver and plugged it in and all that, because I don't care. Everything I watch on my televisiont hat isn't a videogame is streaming from Netflix. The few current things I need to watch (well, one current thing) I just get online.
Don't get me wrong - there is a LOT of awesome stuff on television these days. More now than ever before. Better in quality and quantity. However, the price for that content continues to go up, to. Even if I watch four shows consistently every single week, that isn't worth $100+ per month when I can get 90% of that experience for $8 on, say, Netflix.
As a rational personal driven by science rather than sentiment and sensationalism, I am of two minds.
On one, there's no reason to necessarily fear well operated nuclear power plants. Unfortunately, we hear countless stories of power plants that are not being maintained and funded properly and with poor operational and maintenance attention. Hardly the place where you want to skimp.
On the other hand, with your plane analogy . . . when a plane goes seriously bad, it kills some people on board. Maybe kills a couple people on the ground. Maybe spills some fuel all over the ground in a biggish area. I'm not sure when the last plane crashed (that wasn't carrying nuclear material) which resulted in tens of miles around it's crash site being unlivable for multiple lifetimes, possibly contaminating vast food and water supplies, and reaching potentially dangerous levels hundreds or thousands of miles away, with the air currents.
It's very hard, even with statistics, to mentally overcome the sheer potential damage of a nuclear plant gone really wrong. It's like saying "hey, the mutually assured destruction policy between America and Russia actually kept us safe for so many decades, because we both had tens of thousands of warheads pointed at each other that could wipe away all life on earth in an hour, but that sheer fact meant nobody would ever do it". Only . . . the reality is that on more than one occasion, we came seriously fucking close to letting nukes loose on the other guy due to human error. Flocks of geese being mistaken for a flight of warheads over the ocean. Test missiles being mistaken for a strike (because of human error; not notifying people higher up that it was occurring and that it should not be taken as an attack).
All it takes is one fuck up and we're a species that is as capable of mind-shattering fuck-ups as we are raw ingenuity.
So, while I tend to want to say "hurrah! clean, safe, cheap, awesome nuclear power!", there's another part of me that says "let's not".
We need to do even more business with the Chinese. Because, of course, i've been told my entire life as an American that capitalism in the form of sweat shops, then KFCs and Walmarts are the way to overthrow governments and win the hearts and minds of people. So the more evil China does, the more business we need to do with them, FOR FREEDOM! Or something.
Your view of the degree of freedom of speech (and presumably, assembly and protest) in this country appears very naive.
It doesn't matter, anyway. GameStop is a terrible operation that should be avoided at all costs. You could pre-order a game in May that comes out in June and that doesn't guarantee that when you show up to get your game in June that it will actually be there. On top of that, the employees often swipe the codes that come with games for redemption, so even if your pre-order is supposed to come with one . . . it might not.
All pre-ordering does is get you a chance at possibly getting the game on release date. They may give it to someone else, instead. Or not have enough in the first place. So saying that they're "honoring pre orders" for DNF is pretty meaningless, since they don't really honor pre-orders to begin with.
Gamestop is a desperation move. Kind of like shopping at Best Buy or Radio Shack or Walmart. You might do it, but only when you have no other choice and have exhausted all other options.
We'd all be a lot better off if we take an axe to that first layer.
America has one of these. It let's the president claim _anyone_ including a citizen is an enemy combatant and whisk them away to gitmo without representation or a trial or any other rights granted to a citizen.
There's two points in response to your question:
The first is, the US gave moon rocks to a bunch of other nations as gifts several decades ago, so presumably one would get them by stealing or buying it from one of those gifted sources.
Second is that the moon rocks we gave other countries as gifts were bullshit and were actually made of petrified wood. So if this woman is guilty of anything, it's probably more like "selling stolen wood". If you think I'm bullshitting you, ask the Dutch.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8226075.stm
Lines on a piece of paper aren't children. They're lines on a piece of paper.
In more than one documentary, I've seen a scene where they monitor the health of the cows (who are essentially being poisoned by the cornfeed they're given non-stop to promote such fast growth that it's essentially killing the cows) by cutting a giant hole in the top of their body that goes directly into one of their stomaches and has a giant rubber plug. The guy pulls the plug out and reaches his entire arm into the cow and pulls out what's in it to see how sick the cows are from the feeding they're getting and how much antibiotics to give them to counter it. I have had nightmares of that scene for weeks afterward. It horrifies me kind of on the same level as the whole Silence of the Lambs scene where what's his name from Goodfellas has the top of his head cut off and a part of his brain fried and served to him.
It's one of the many government organizations staffed by executives from the companies that they regulate, so that they can facilitate the wishes of the corporations. For example, push through bovine growth hormone without due diligence and then have to reverse the decision years later, after it lead to far more contamination in the milk we drink as well as hideous "mutations" that can only be described as nightmarishly inhumane occurred in the cows themselves.
And, you know, then all the Monsanto evilness . . . since they have Monsanto executives in their mix. And the whole magic "now that we have people who are directly tied to the success of aspartame being approved sitting on the committee, we're going to go ahead and just approve aspartame" thing.
If the FDA ever does anything even remotely right, I can only assume it's done as a "okay, we're getting too much heat so lets at least do some token action to get people off our backs so we can continue being evil as shit".
Typical revolving door government, along the lines of "I"m Ken Lay and I run Enron and the president has just appointed me as security advisor and I'm going to advise that we deregulate energy to directly benefit my shady practices in fucking over California and manufacturing a non-existent energy crises so I can get rich".
What do you need an electronics parts store for unless you're some sort of homegrown terrorist building a terror device?
Sadly, I'm only being partially sarcastic. *sigh*
Radio Shack needs to change their name to something that more accurately conveys what they really are. Unfortunately, I think "The Place Your Grandmother Shops To Buy You Cheap Electronic Crap Like an Electronic PIggy Bank Or A Really Low End RC Car That Runs On a Pair of AA Batteries On Your Birthday and Christmas" is too long.
Exactly. When I think of Radio Shack, I think of over-priced electronic trinkets and being annoyed by cell-phone sales attempts every time I buy something and having to dodge the "name, phone number, address, date of birth, mother's maiden name, blood type, dna sample" gathering for every fucking purchase. I don't think I ever bought anything useful there in my entire life.
The only reason I'd ever go to a Radio Shack is the same reason I'd go to a Best Buy - I'm desperate and I need something RIGHT NOW and it can't wait 48hrs for me to order it online and have it shipped to my door.
What choice do you have? The machinery of aristocracy and control is well beyond the need for your support. They're self-sustaining and the level of corruption in all aspects of government and politics so unbelievably extensive and deep and convoluted that there is no way to simply excise the foreign tissue by itself.
Naomi Wolf does a great job of describing the process that seems to be occurring right now (including this event) in her book "The End of America".
I mean, we live in a country where our president's (last president) family did extensive business with the family of the man that killed thousands of Americans. We live in a country where government officials who are employees of Goldman Sachs take a trillion dollars from the tax payers to bail out Goldman Sachs. We live in a country where our president appoints Ken Lay as energy advisor to deregulate his own industry on his own terms. We live in a country where we allow our government to pass bills that allow the president to point at a citizen and make them disappear. Off to gitmo for torture, if he wants. Without representation or a trial. We live in a country where judges are paid off in millions of dollars by the private prison industry to fuel their business by unfairly punishing minor juvenile violators with many months in juvenile detention (google it - in Pennsylvania).
It's probably not too late to force change, but by the time you could ever even remotely possibly convince enough of the population to give a flying fuck and get their heads out of their Bible and Twilight or their "durr durr abortion" and "durr durr immigration" and "durr durr religion" bullshit to actually do something about the real problems facing us, it'll definitely be too fucking late.
Employers will never think of googling potential employees!
Look, I'm a die-hard libertarian and I've always been a "you'll have to kill me before you take my liberties" kind of guy.
However, the writing is on the wall. We've lost a ton of our civil liberties and privacy in the last decade after 9/11. We try to recover from it, somewhat futilely. But what happens the next time there is an attack? All it's going to take is one more attack - which I think is inevitable, given the rapidity at which we seem dead set on making enemies around the world. It may not happen this year. Or next. But some day, it'll happen again. And when it does, everything we embrace and everything the country stands for goes out the window. One more attack and the entire population will be shitting itself and we'll be *demanding* that the government give every man, woman and child a fucking anal probe at the airline security gates. We'll *demand* that the government read every email and keep track of every purchase and every library checkout. We will bend backwards to remit our every liberty and freedom.
All it will take . . . is one more.
A lot of law-enforcement entities in the united states consider the act of concealing contents or communications (encryption, etc) to itself be a suspicious act, which means it would be much easier to acquire a right to search. Not that you need a right to search anymore.
Are you inside the US? If you're inside the US or your email will transmit through the US, then you're no more protected than having your content hosted outside of the states.