The belief in singularity, a superintelligence improving the human condition, etc., is merely the new religion... The technological singularity hype is merely a manifestation of the second response to the Absurd and as such is philosophical suicide. No proof exists that a singularity will magically solve all of humanity's ills.
There's sort of some opposing forces involved here...
The belief that better computers will improve the human condition is just an extrapolation. It's well-justified by our usual understanding and so far, it has basically held up.
And belief in the singularity is just a way of saying that extrapolation is expected to experience diminishing returns -- or rather, that it already is getting dimishing returns, and the singularity is the point in time when extrapolation ceases to work at all.
Who is hyping that as a solution!? If anything, it's "hyped" (no, that's not quite the right word) as a problem, a new space that we have to learn to adapt to, where you need to be able to handle problems fast instead of just assuming things will go on like they always have. It's instability. It might promise some high rewards, but it's also viewed as high risk. Kind of reminds me of nuclear tech. A lot of people might have predicted wondrous things in the 1950s (e.g. atomic car) but plenty of people expected to die in a fire too. They were all wrong; maybe WW2 and the nuclear cherry on top were a figurative pre-echo of the singularity, a time when the future started getting noticeably harder to predict.
Why aren't you classifying singularity believers as being in your third Absurd Hero group? They're pretty much telling everyone that's what you need to be to maximize your chances of the singularity going well for you, no?
But it's a pretty good reason for deleting it from technical documentation.
You could also write the word "spam" at the bottom of every single function's documentation, and that wouldn't be funny either. It also wouldn't be censorship if someone removed it.
I usually agree with RMS but this is one of those "who the fuck cares?" things.
Then it gets worse:
Carlos O'Donnell, a senior software engineer at Red Hat, suggested that trying to wring humor out of abortion "could be a trigger for certain individuals causing them to relive a traumatic memory. I cannot condone that we add triggers like these to a technical manual, particularly when individuals would not expect such jokes in the manual."
OMG, we're having a contest to see who can be the most stupid. I'm almost back to joining RMS in "demanding" it be put back again. "Triggered?" really? Holy shit.
Fuck anyone and everyone who pretends they're unable to handle reading a certain word. The "joke" needs to be put back in, just to piss on the drama queens.
I love it when atheists pretend they know what.. someone's god supposedly said.
Are atheists' guesses any worse than anyone else's?
If anyone had been in any sort of actual communication with the entity, it wouldn't be mystical and you wouldn't call it a god. All gods' words and opinions are always completely unknown to everyone; They are isolated from us by their lack of existence in the physical world. Pull something out of your own ass all the time, and it always looks the same. But pull something out of someone else's ass, and who knows what you'll find? That's why atheists' conjectures should be welcomed as a fresh perspective.
Perhaps both criticism and collusion. Ask why they might have provided NSA with access. I'm pretty sure I talk tougher when a gun is pointed at someone else, than when the gun at pointed at me.
There's a reason why well designed products get more attention and get used more often. ...
Try this: Sit in front of an iMac with retina display and work for a few weeks.
Tried it, but got bored after a few minutes. Black screen. I don't think I could take a few weeks of this.
Because I couldn't find the fucking power button.
Of all the company's products to bring up in a good-vs-bad design context, you chose one of the very worst, the most incompetent people that ever worked in the industry. The people who decided that power buttons should be invisible not only to the eye, but also not be tactile too.
If it needs to be repaired but it's illegal for you to repair it, then the responsibility lies with the manufacturer. So it would have to be covered by warranty.
Since we have already decided that the federal government should be deeply involved in regulating this (I offer the existence of DMCA as proof of this assertion) it seems reasonable that there should be a federal law requiring this.
When I buy stuff, I tend to usually go with the cheapest supplier. If Newegg has something for $10 less than Amazon, then I'm more likely to order from Newegg. If Amazon is cheaper, then I'm more likely to order from Amazon. (Batching issues (e.g. shipping cost) complicate things a little, of course, but it basically works like that.)
I tend to treat local stores like that too. If one grocery store is cheaper than another (for the exact same items -- the catch is that not everything is quite the same), it'll get more attention. (But distance from home or daily commute is a factor.)
As a shopper, I will definitely replace shops, and though I don't put lots of effort into competitive research (depending on what we're talking about, of course), I will use whatever info comes to my attention. If you raise or lower your prices, I'll probably notice. If I'm at a competing store and I see they're better at something, they might replace my current store.
Gosh, I wonder. Maybe everybody does that. Even.. Amazon does it? And my local grocery stores, and Costco and Wal-Mart too?
Everything involves paying somebody. But I guess there's one special type of paying somebody, where you're not supposed to shop around -- where being a cheapskate changes from a virtue to a vice.
Or maybe shopping around is just a vice in the eyes of some people. I bet those people wouldn't ever buy a disk from Newegg instead of Amazon (or vice versa, depending on which company they're supposed to be "loyal" to) just to save $10, abstaining from shopping-by-price on general principles. Now those people are rich! Probably even richer than Bezos.
All these manufacturers that want to ban right to repair laws should be forced to provide a minimum of five years warranty repair on any hardware, and seven years guaranteed continuous software updates.
WTF?! From what orifice did you pull those arbitrary numbers from?
If they're going to use copyright law to make maintenance illegal, then the free warranty should be 95 years from the year of its first publication or a term of 120 years from the year of its creation. That is how long they are demanding that it be illegal for you to repair your items. Once the copyright on the firmware (or whatever bullshit it is) expires, then circumventing the DRM ceases to be prohibited by DMCA and the warranty can end.
It turns out these key cards aren't as secure as first thought
I don't remember anyone ever explaining to me why I should think they're secure at all. They just.. exist. I can't even say they've been misrepresented to me.
I wouldn't have nullified in this particular case, but...
Because they will ask you during "voir dire" whether you will uphold the judges instructions and weigh the evidence against the law... If you say yes, then you just admitted under oath that you will obey the judge's instructions.
"When I said yes, I didn't realize the [judge's instructions | written law] was going to be so nutty. I went into this with faith and confidence but then your fucked up court showed me that its entire purpose is to harm the innocent."
Again, not what I'd have done in this case, but let's face it: most people don't know the details of most laws, but generally expect them to be sane, or at least well-meaning. A person can very easily answer yes before they know what the law is. Once they hear it, and once the judge starts doing things they think are shady, or issuing instructions that appear to be designed to prevent a fair trail from happening, there's nothing wrong with someone changing their mind. That initial "yes" (or more realistically, "I think so") is a question, not a pledge or promise. It's a statement of the juror's opinion. It's a prediction.
That's how I'd take it. If the law and court are reasonably in line with peoples' expectations, there's nothing to worry about.
Face it: words like 'hack' 'drone' and 'troll' have vanished into the collective linguistics of the culture; we're no longer able to recover them and insist they still have the specificity of meaning they used to carry when used by insiders in the tech culture.
I got the impression that he was trying to face that, by giving up on those words and coining some new ones.
Isn't the whole point of inventing a new word for hack, that you're giving up on "hack," abandoning it as a lost cause?
Ends with: It's basically Trump's fault that people in Silicon Valley are in a bubble.
Although TFA actually does use the word "blame" it's obvious that blame isn't what he really meant:
Perhaps we can blame part of it on Trump, even if only indirectly (a man who has gotten ahead in life by saying asinine things).
He's actually citing Trump as an example. And Trump really does say outright obviously stupid, asinine things. Instead of taking that as an attack on Trump, though, maybe people ought to take that as evidence that it's ok to say stupid, asinine things. Maybe it really is ok to talk out your ass. Just what are the consequences?
If you say stupid things, people won't hold that against you in a voting booth.
If your service is stupid, inconvenient and causes harm to users, users won't hold that against you.
The problem is that when robots take your job that "working for a living" might just turn into grabbing a Kalashnikov and taking whatever you want. Especially if there's no other option available. ...
Think of [UBI] as a tax so the pitchforks don't come for you and other smart-alecs.
Whoa.. you had two ideas there which, I think just combined into my loony idea of the day.
NOT SO FAST ON PREVENTING THE PITCHFORKS!! Maybe they're exactly what we need, but as tools rather than as weapons.
Instead of free cash, how about 40 acres and a mule (or modern replacement)? Anyone with a shack and a field, doesn't need a job.
If industry can't get people the income to be fed, maybe that just means that our economy has (partially) regressed to pre-industrial. Well, a pre-industrial economy isn't the end of the world. It's the world that we came from, after all.
People think they can't compete with modern industrial farms, and that's true in terms of selling your food for profit. But growing it to feed yourself? You know that's possible with even ancient tech. Sure, it costs less to just buy food from the industrial farms, but I guess people can't even afford to do that, because they have no money all thanks to unemployment. So, in fact, if you grow it to feed yourself, you are competing with modern industrial farming, and there's no reason it shouldn't work. A random dude from 1800 or 1500 or 1200 or 500 or 1000BC can do it, so why not us? We'd be better at it, thanks to tech.
PS I don't wanna be a farmer. Fuck that. But if I had to choose between starving to death, farming, or stabbing innocent people with my pitchfork, maybe farming ain't so bad after all. And you can always mix the three: be a mediocre farmer who doesn't make quite enough food, so you occasionally resort to cannibalism...
if you have a smart phone it is highly likely that person also has an amazon prime account.
Why? What would cause that?
Maybe I'm part of your 2% but I tried Prime for a month a while back, saw that I basically get nothing out of it, and canceled at the end of the trial. It was going to cost money and get me virtually nothin'.
What might make more sense is: if you have a computer, you probably have an Amazon account. Probably. (I could accept that's 98%.) But Amazon Prime? It costs money and unless you do a lot of shopping on Amazon (e.g. you've fired Costco, etc) it's not particularly compelling.
Not that I think people who do it are stupid. Maybe they're always in a hurry for everything, or like I said, they stopped going to stores because they live in an area with great delivery service, or whatever. But it's really hard to believe that'd be anywhere near 98%. Maybe 50%? I don't know.
But everyone who is everyone will continue to be like everyone and continue paying that Prime membership (see Netflix as an example).
Though it conflicts with my experience, I'm not really saying you're wrong, but.. you didn't explain why.
And same goes for Netflix. It needs weird software and I don't do that, so...? Netflix never made their case to me so they're still waiting for their first dollar. At least Amazon got me to try it for a month.
I think it's somewhat uninteresting that the media is still talking about this shooting. The reason they're doing it, is that approximately half the people in media favor gun control, and they know everyone has heard of this one, so they feel it (as a well-known reference) strengthens their arguments that something has to be done.
I'm not sure why you think anybody gives a fuck about gender, nationality, and gun type. The anti-gun people I hear from all the time, don't seem to care a lot about those things (at least they don't mention them in their.. what did you call it? their "parameters"). They care about guns, and any kind of gun frightens them. If you're expecting the advocacy to be more.. specialized, then you should try some more racist media. But beware that you might find less anti-gun advocacy among racists.
If you think this story didn't get covered, I have to conclude you intentionally filtered it out. And if you think anti-gun people have a reason to not cover it, then you must have forgotten that she used a gun and shot other people.
It's uninteresting because it's mundane and exactly what you'd expect. It takes deviations and new information, for things to be interesting.
we had no marches, no politicians screaming "think of the children", and calling legal gun owners murderers, or trying to vilify the NRA
Wow. When I said above that you intentionally filtered this story out, what I meant is that you obviously moved to another planet and haven't been in contact with Earth for the last six months, so you've filtered out all the stories. The stuff you mention has been ubiquitous. It's almost as though you're reading the headlines and then wondering why nobody is talking about that stuff. I suppose you think nobody is talking about the latest air disaster or the president's lawyer, too.
I think it was news worthy what...maybe 2 days tops?
If you're tired of this one, then go shoot someone in some kind of new and interesting way (novel motives count!), so that you can earn the headlines for a while. You can be a media star!
Or just bear it. People will simultaneously grow bored of the Youtube shooter story, while newer shootings happen. (My town has already had some pretty sick ones that most of the locals are chatty about nowdays.) It will fade by degrees over time, overwhelmed by sheer numbers. I'm not saying the stories will ever completely stop (fuck, I think a couple years ago even John Hinkley (!) was in the news) but it will gradually decay. Hang in there.
Incredible. You know this, and yet you completely overlook all the information packed into the words.
Yes, these words have a lot of information. They're subtly trying to tell you that the pilot is destined to die of cancer.
It works like this: braveness is a thing that you find in every single person who ever tragically died of cancer. These are tragedies, and all tragedies are caused by character flaws (hamartia), which psychically manifest in the cells. The flaw brings them down, but they always face it courageously in spite of their fears. That is: bravery and cancer-causing character flaws are linked. While the cause/effect hasn't been sorted out yet, we're pretty sure that either bravery causes the flaw that causes the cancer, or the flaw that causes cancer also causes bravery.
Anyway, if someone does something brave, that tends to imply they have cancer. Here you are, getting all pedantic while the press is trying to tastefully slip you interesting information without getting all sensational or embarrassingly personal about it. Shame on you.
He has the right to not be marked as a criminal, and everyone else has the right to remember whatever they've observed.
If the existence of memories of his crime is the same as him being marked as a criminal, I would call that an error on the part of the person who perceives/interprets the "mark."
This seems to be a problem of us all being unforgiving assholes, but I think the cure (government asserting power over our own memories) is worse, from a human dignity standpoint.
So, Telegram is.. general-purpose? This is like worrying about the fact that Harry Mudd uses the same kind of spaceship fuel as the rest of us. Your problem is with Harry Mudd, not the spaceship fuel. If you make it about the spaceship fuel, you're going to become the enemy of many space captains.
why don't you go down to your local school board and get them to pre-fund their pension 75 years out
Because I'm an American. Therefore, I hate education and anyone connected to it. You're supposed to go threaten teachers with violence (especially science teachers), not offer them money, you silly!
Why not, according to you it is merely being 'fiscally responsible'?
Financally responsible is a vice, anyway. Most Americans habitually vote against that, and it's one of the things that all Democrat and Republican voters agree on, in bipartisan brotherhood. "I'm financially responsible" == "Please vote for one of my opponents."
Slashdot Mirror
There's sort of some opposing forces involved here...
The belief that better computers will improve the human condition is just an extrapolation. It's well-justified by our usual understanding and so far, it has basically held up.
And belief in the singularity is just a way of saying that extrapolation is expected to experience diminishing returns -- or rather, that it already is getting dimishing returns, and the singularity is the point in time when extrapolation ceases to work at all.
Who is hyping that as a solution!? If anything, it's "hyped" (no, that's not quite the right word) as a problem, a new space that we have to learn to adapt to, where you need to be able to handle problems fast instead of just assuming things will go on like they always have. It's instability. It might promise some high rewards, but it's also viewed as high risk. Kind of reminds me of nuclear tech. A lot of people might have predicted wondrous things in the 1950s (e.g. atomic car) but plenty of people expected to die in a fire too. They were all wrong; maybe WW2 and the nuclear cherry on top were a figurative pre-echo of the singularity, a time when the future started getting noticeably harder to predict.
Why aren't you classifying singularity believers as being in your third Absurd Hero group? They're pretty much telling everyone that's what you need to be to maximize your chances of the singularity going well for you, no?
Wait, what? I couldn't disagree more. Ethics is all about rationality. To some of us, ethics is hard to distinguish from game theory.
But it's a pretty good reason for deleting it from technical documentation.
You could also write the word "spam" at the bottom of every single function's documentation, and that wouldn't be funny either. It also wouldn't be censorship if someone removed it.
I usually agree with RMS but this is one of those "who the fuck cares?" things.
Then it gets worse:
OMG, we're having a contest to see who can be the most stupid. I'm almost back to joining RMS in "demanding" it be put back again. "Triggered?" really? Holy shit.
Fuck anyone and everyone who pretends they're unable to handle reading a certain word. The "joke" needs to be put back in, just to piss on the drama queens.
Are atheists' guesses any worse than anyone else's?
If anyone had been in any sort of actual communication with the entity, it wouldn't be mystical and you wouldn't call it a god. All gods' words and opinions are always completely unknown to everyone; They are isolated from us by their lack of existence in the physical world. Pull something out of your own ass all the time, and it always looks the same. But pull something out of someone else's ass, and who knows what you'll find? That's why atheists' conjectures should be welcomed as a fresh perspective.
Yep, that's Sally.
Perhaps both criticism and collusion. Ask why they might have provided NSA with access. I'm pretty sure I talk tougher when a gun is pointed at someone else, than when the gun at pointed at me.
Tried it, but got bored after a few minutes. Black screen. I don't think I could take a few weeks of this.
Because I couldn't find the fucking power button.
Of all the company's products to bring up in a good-vs-bad design context, you chose one of the very worst, the most incompetent people that ever worked in the industry. The people who decided that power buttons should be invisible not only to the eye, but also not be tactile too.
If it needs to be repaired but it's illegal for you to repair it, then the responsibility lies with the manufacturer. So it would have to be covered by warranty.
Since we have already decided that the federal government should be deeply involved in regulating this (I offer the existence of DMCA as proof of this assertion) it seems reasonable that there should be a federal law requiring this.
When I buy stuff, I tend to usually go with the cheapest supplier. If Newegg has something for $10 less than Amazon, then I'm more likely to order from Newegg. If Amazon is cheaper, then I'm more likely to order from Amazon. (Batching issues (e.g. shipping cost) complicate things a little, of course, but it basically works like that.)
I tend to treat local stores like that too. If one grocery store is cheaper than another (for the exact same items -- the catch is that not everything is quite the same), it'll get more attention. (But distance from home or daily commute is a factor.)
As a shopper, I will definitely replace shops, and though I don't put lots of effort into competitive research (depending on what we're talking about, of course), I will use whatever info comes to my attention. If you raise or lower your prices, I'll probably notice. If I'm at a competing store and I see they're better at something, they might replace my current store.
Gosh, I wonder. Maybe everybody does that. Even .. Amazon does it? And my local grocery stores, and Costco and Wal-Mart too?
Everything involves paying somebody. But I guess there's one special type of paying somebody, where you're not supposed to shop around -- where being a cheapskate changes from a virtue to a vice.
Or maybe shopping around is just a vice in the eyes of some people. I bet those people wouldn't ever buy a disk from Newegg instead of Amazon (or vice versa, depending on which company they're supposed to be "loyal" to) just to save $10, abstaining from shopping-by-price on general principles. Now those people are rich! Probably even richer than Bezos.
WTF?! From what orifice did you pull those arbitrary numbers from?
If they're going to use copyright law to make maintenance illegal, then the free warranty should be 95 years from the year of its first publication or a term of 120 years from the year of its creation. That is how long they are demanding that it be illegal for you to repair your items. Once the copyright on the firmware (or whatever bullshit it is) expires, then circumventing the DRM ceases to be prohibited by DMCA and the warranty can end.
I don't remember anyone ever explaining to me why I should think they're secure at all. They just .. exist. I can't even say they've been misrepresented to me.
"When I said yes, I didn't realize the [judge's instructions | written law] was going to be so nutty. I went into this with faith and confidence but then your fucked up court showed me that its entire purpose is to harm the innocent."
Again, not what I'd have done in this case, but let's face it: most people don't know the details of most laws, but generally expect them to be sane, or at least well-meaning. A person can very easily answer yes before they know what the law is. Once they hear it, and once the judge starts doing things they think are shady, or issuing instructions that appear to be designed to prevent a fair trail from happening, there's nothing wrong with someone changing their mind. That initial "yes" (or more realistically, "I think so") is a question, not a pledge or promise. It's a statement of the juror's opinion. It's a prediction.
That's how I'd take it. If the law and court are reasonably in line with peoples' expectations, there's nothing to worry about.
I got the impression that he was trying to face that, by giving up on those words and coining some new ones.
Isn't the whole point of inventing a new word for hack, that you're giving up on "hack," abandoning it as a lost cause?
The summary is way too vague, making references to a "problem" that it doesn't explain.
Anyway, I made myself keep rading, and at one point in I finally spotted this, which I suspect is the entirety of Reddit's actual problem:
And that's pretty much that. Reddit's problem is that it isn't profitable. Not surprising, considering how usable (i.e. not plastered with ads) it is.
It means you have learned: "..keep your enemies closer."
Trump surrounds himself with criminals, so that he can see what they're up to and defeat their evil plans.
Although TFA actually does use the word "blame" it's obvious that blame isn't what he really meant:
He's actually citing Trump as an example. And Trump really does say outright obviously stupid, asinine things. Instead of taking that as an attack on Trump, though, maybe people ought to take that as evidence that it's ok to say stupid, asinine things. Maybe it really is ok to talk out your ass. Just what are the consequences?
If you say stupid things, people won't hold that against you in a voting booth.
If your service is stupid, inconvenient and causes harm to users, users won't hold that against you.
Losing touch with reality is just fine. Dare to be stupid!
Whoa.. you had two ideas there which, I think just combined into my loony idea of the day.
NOT SO FAST ON PREVENTING THE PITCHFORKS!! Maybe they're exactly what we need, but as tools rather than as weapons.
Instead of free cash, how about 40 acres and a mule (or modern replacement)? Anyone with a shack and a field, doesn't need a job.
If industry can't get people the income to be fed, maybe that just means that our economy has (partially) regressed to pre-industrial. Well, a pre-industrial economy isn't the end of the world. It's the world that we came from, after all.
People think they can't compete with modern industrial farms, and that's true in terms of selling your food for profit. But growing it to feed yourself? You know that's possible with even ancient tech. Sure, it costs less to just buy food from the industrial farms, but I guess people can't even afford to do that, because they have no money all thanks to unemployment. So, in fact, if you grow it to feed yourself, you are competing with modern industrial farming, and there's no reason it shouldn't work. A random dude from 1800 or 1500 or 1200 or 500 or 1000BC can do it, so why not us? We'd be better at it, thanks to tech.
PS I don't wanna be a farmer. Fuck that. But if I had to choose between starving to death, farming, or stabbing innocent people with my pitchfork, maybe farming ain't so bad after all. And you can always mix the three: be a mediocre farmer who doesn't make quite enough food, so you occasionally resort to cannibalism...
Why? What would cause that?
Maybe I'm part of your 2% but I tried Prime for a month a while back, saw that I basically get nothing out of it, and canceled at the end of the trial. It was going to cost money and get me virtually nothin'.
What might make more sense is: if you have a computer, you probably have an Amazon account. Probably. (I could accept that's 98%.) But Amazon Prime? It costs money and unless you do a lot of shopping on Amazon (e.g. you've fired Costco, etc) it's not particularly compelling.
Not that I think people who do it are stupid. Maybe they're always in a hurry for everything, or like I said, they stopped going to stores because they live in an area with great delivery service, or whatever. But it's really hard to believe that'd be anywhere near 98%. Maybe 50%? I don't know.
Though it conflicts with my experience, I'm not really saying you're wrong, but .. you didn't explain why.
And same goes for Netflix. It needs weird software and I don't do that, so...? Netflix never made their case to me so they're still waiting for their first dollar. At least Amazon got me to try it for a month.
Holy crap that was a lot of robocalls. Why would someone do such a tedious thing? He should have gotten a robot to do it for him.
...
Thanks, I'll be here all wee- oh shit, they cancelled me. Fuck this crowd, good night.
I think it's somewhat uninteresting that the media is still talking about this shooting. The reason they're doing it, is that approximately half the people in media favor gun control, and they know everyone has heard of this one, so they feel it (as a well-known reference) strengthens their arguments that something has to be done.
I'm not sure why you think anybody gives a fuck about gender, nationality, and gun type. The anti-gun people I hear from all the time, don't seem to care a lot about those things (at least they don't mention them in their .. what did you call it? their "parameters"). They care about guns, and any kind of gun frightens them. If you're expecting the advocacy to be more .. specialized, then you should try some more racist media. But beware that you might find less anti-gun advocacy among racists.
If you think this story didn't get covered, I have to conclude you intentionally filtered it out. And if you think anti-gun people have a reason to not cover it, then you must have forgotten that she used a gun and shot other people.
It's uninteresting because it's mundane and exactly what you'd expect. It takes deviations and new information, for things to be interesting.
Wow. When I said above that you intentionally filtered this story out, what I meant is that you obviously moved to another planet and haven't been in contact with Earth for the last six months, so you've filtered out all the stories. The stuff you mention has been ubiquitous. It's almost as though you're reading the headlines and then wondering why nobody is talking about that stuff. I suppose you think nobody is talking about the latest air disaster or the president's lawyer, too.
That sounds about right, but I guess there weren't enough interesting shootings so that's why there's been a story about this nearly every single day for the last two weeks. (I quickly found a story every day except the 8th and 10th.)
If you're tired of this one, then go shoot someone in some kind of new and interesting way (novel motives count!), so that you can earn the headlines for a while. You can be a media star!
Or just bear it. People will simultaneously grow bored of the Youtube shooter story, while newer shootings happen. (My town has already had some pretty sick ones that most of the locals are chatty about nowdays.) It will fade by degrees over time, overwhelmed by sheer numbers. I'm not saying the stories will ever completely stop (fuck, I think a couple years ago even John Hinkley (!) was in the news) but it will gradually decay. Hang in there.
Incredible. You know this, and yet you completely overlook all the information packed into the words.
Yes, these words have a lot of information. They're subtly trying to tell you that the pilot is destined to die of cancer.
It works like this: braveness is a thing that you find in every single person who ever tragically died of cancer. These are tragedies, and all tragedies are caused by character flaws (hamartia), which psychically manifest in the cells. The flaw brings them down, but they always face it courageously in spite of their fears. That is: bravery and cancer-causing character flaws are linked. While the cause/effect hasn't been sorted out yet, we're pretty sure that either bravery causes the flaw that causes the cancer, or the flaw that causes cancer also causes bravery.
Anyway, if someone does something brave, that tends to imply they have cancer. Here you are, getting all pedantic while the press is trying to tastefully slip you interesting information without getting all sensational or embarrassingly personal about it. Shame on you.
Saying the Pontiac Aztek is a shitty car is just a smokescreen. They're as easy to drive as anything else. You just don't want to pay for one.
He has the right to not be marked as a criminal, and everyone else has the right to remember whatever they've observed.
If the existence of memories of his crime is the same as him being marked as a criminal, I would call that an error on the part of the person who perceives/interprets the "mark."
This seems to be a problem of us all being unforgiving assholes, but I think the cure (government asserting power over our own memories) is worse, from a human dignity standpoint.
So, Telegram is .. general-purpose? This is like worrying about the fact that Harry Mudd uses the same kind of spaceship fuel as the rest of us. Your problem is with Harry Mudd, not the spaceship fuel. If you make it about the spaceship fuel, you're going to become the enemy of many space captains.
Because I'm an American. Therefore, I hate education and anyone connected to it. You're supposed to go threaten teachers with violence (especially science teachers), not offer them money, you silly!
Financally responsible is a vice, anyway. Most Americans habitually vote against that, and it's one of the things that all Democrat and Republican voters agree on, in bipartisan brotherhood. "I'm financially responsible" == "Please vote for one of my opponents."