What pisses me off is how many blindly wave their little flags and defend ANY policy by "their company" like its a fricking ballclub when in reality ALL of the companies would happily have you run over with a steamroller if it would give them a 20% bounce in stock price.
So let us be clear folks, NONE of these companies are your "friends" NONE of these companies "have your interests at heart" at the end it ALL comes down to their bottom line and the agenda of the corp, no amount of flag waving or treating them like ballclubs will change that.
Alright that is it, i'm throwing a flag, bullshit on the field. Dude how many strippers have you even met? Because not only have I dated one but I had to go to more strip clubs than you had hot dinners because the lead singer's GF was a featured performer at multiple clubs and I always got roped into doing the driving because she knew that I have honor and don't cheat on my GFs so i could be sitting backstage waiting for her to get off stage without trying to pick up the girls.
Let me tell ya something bud, those girls that work in American strip clubs? NOT stupid and they sure as fuck weren't slaves, in fact a lot of them were going to college for this or that degree and were able to pay for their education IN CASH without being buried alive in student loans like so many are. Since they all knew I wasn't the type to try to get into their panties I quickly became friends with most of them and I don't think I ever even heard a hard luck story more than this or that girl had a BF that was an asshole. Nobody was holding a gun to their heads, they could have just as easily got a job at the mall, they chose to do striping (or as they called it "exotic dancing" which I always replied "yeah and I'm not the fixit guy, I'm a "technical systems engineer and integrator" which always got a laugh) and frankly most of them were making more in a night than i do in a month.
So while i'm sure it happens some places, hell everything has happened at least once somewhere at sometime,painting strippers with that broad brush really does a disservice to a lot of really smart women that choose that profession. hell I had a stripper doing mine and my dad's books and if she wouldn't have had to move to take care of her sick dad she'd still be doing them, that woman was crazy good at navigating tax codes.
Human trafficking? Really? from what orifice did you pull THAT one out of, because as somebody who fixes PCs all damned day I get exposed to more porn ads than anybody and its nearly always videos or toys, occasionally you'll have adult chat sites but if you actually believe the one on the other end is a hot babe and not some 40 year old guy named Larry getting paid by the hour I have some swampland you may be interested in.
Does human trafficking take place? I'm sure it does but that isn't what you are seeing on those sites, what you are seeing is the same 3 or 4 porn shops selling the same vids and sex toys everybody else does. No this is about Google wanting a cut while doing a CYA for fear they may get blocked by some nanny state filter, that is all. All this is doing is moving more and more away from Google, just as their insane "three strikes from any media group, no actual checking required" has made a huge amount of the net stop hosting their videos on YouTube.
Far be it from me to try to stop a company from blowing their own brains out, like MSFT I'll just grab some popcorn and a cold one and LMAO at their stupidity. Proceed Google, proceed.
Which is why I have been saying for years America needs to grow the fuck up. America, the country where you can't show a tit unless it has a knife buried in it and where we nearly impeached a POTUS for getting a BJ, it more than time for us to grow the fuck up and stop pretending that Leave It To Beaver was an accurate depiction of the 1950s.
Watch How not to hire an American to see how the whole H1-B system has become a scam, they rig the requirements of the job so its impossible for ANY American to meet the requirement (such as demanding 10 years exp on a tech that has only been around 5 years) so that they can hire more indentured servants through H1-B.
For those that beat the globalization drum all you are doing is killing our future, these guys will go back to their own countries and come up with the next new things while we will be left a husk. in my own area the local college is getting ready to pull the plug on their entire IT program, why? Because students have found they can't compete with a guy that paid less than we pay for a new car for a master's degree so are no longer even attempting to go into tech fields, they know it will just leave them buried in debt in a dead end job.
I wish i could take all those that constant scream "free trade" and "free markets" and drag their sorry asses through middle America to see the seeds they have sown, where there is more boarded up businesses than open ones and the business districts look like Escape From New York thanks to all the abandoned factories. there is NO SUCH THING as free trade, all you are doing is exporting misery and pollution, and all you are importing is more indentured servants.
They won't stop until the highest paid IT jobs are less than the manager at a Mickey D's, and when the day comes that countries stop taking our overprinted money they will all leave and we'll be left with another dead sector. Of course it won't phase them as they'll just move, as Thomas Jefferson wisely pointed out:"Merchants have no country. The mere spot they stand on does not constitute so strong an attachment as that from which they draw their gains."
Uhhh...you kinda missed what I was getting at, sorry if I didn't make myself clear enough. What I am talking about is NOT this specific case, as i said I don't have the evidence the police have, i wasn't there, so I have no honest way of knowing anything one way or another in this particular case.
What worries me is this whole blogging based culture allowing ANYBODY to attack anybody without ANY checks or balances, any investigation, I mean what would my life had been like if the crazy bitch would have started stalking me today with the power of the Internet? She could have destroyed my rep, any chance my band had of getting work as long as I was in it, all from the comfort of her living room with no way for me to fight back without several thousand to spend on a lawyer.
I'm sorry but while our current system is FAR from perfect and yes sometimes the bad guys get away the ability to destroy somebody by using the net frankly scares the hell out of me because I know things aren't always black and white and the ability to fight back if you are the one being accused is VERY limited unless you have money. maybe its just me but i don't think you should have to "buy" your reputation or livelihood yet with everything becoming more and more blog centric that is what we seem to be heading towards and that bothers the hell out of me.
I consider Bay and Abrams the STDs of movies, because just like an STD their lens flare gasoline explosion bullshit just spreads like fricking crazy. Like I said Battleship COULD have been a truly great movie, a flick about a bunch of tough old bastards facing long odds and refusing to give up, instead it ended up another Bay style "How much douchebaggery and SFX can we stuff into a movie" snorefest.
The sad part is i have seen movies made for less than Bay spends on Red Bulls that could run rings around Bay and Abrams when it came to plots and making you actually think, check out "The Man From Earth" if you want an example, that movie didn't cost even 50k but had a better sci-fi plot than the last 4 Bay and Abrams movies put together. They took the most basic of premises, what would it be like to be truly immortal but not have the ability to "turn" others, and used it to make a damned interesting movie, while all Bay and Abrams do is crank the fireballs (and lens flares in the case of Abrams and his followers) up to 11, no thought required and in fact lack of thought required thanks to their plots not making a lick of sense.
I have NO problem with CGI if you need it to tell a good story, LOTR and The Avengers spring to mind, but with Bay and Abrams it all feels like nothing but cynical cash grabs. Maybe its me but when I see one of these I'm always left feeling there was a meeting where they said "Hey just have lots of douchebaggery for the bros and asplosions and its all good,fuck plot, characters, or pacing, the sheeple will bite anyway" and sadly they are often correct, just look at the Transformers franchise where you can almost feel the hatred Bay has for the audience, even he has gone on record saying how much he hates making "movies about toy robots" but as long as he keeps the formula, a little T&A, mix in some racism and sexism, throw in lots of assplosions? The masses will keep buying that shit. I believe it was Confused Matthew that said "Well at least they are in the movie theater instead of behind the wheel or in a voting booth" and I have to say I agree, the kind of people that cheer those movies frankly make me weep for society, it looks more and more like idiocracy is just a warning like 1984 instead of a comedy.
Actually I've talked to the Amish plenty of times, we have a small group of them in my area and they sell cookies and blankets in the fall so they can buy supplies for the winter. While its true you can't just drive up to their farms and start a debate (to be fair the kind of life they live keeps them pretty busy) when they aren't working they are happy to talk, hell I'll even concede that if we were to have a major technocrash they would be just fine. In fact talking to them they really have a lot in common with the old hippie communes, it all comes down to "taking care of your own" and not relying on the state for your daily bread, can't fault them for that.
Now as far as the "shunning" things goes all I can say is based on this particular sect, there are probably as many variation of Amish as their is Christians, but the few that have left the community basically wanted to bring the tech into the community which isn't allowed. they are still allowed to write letters and talk to their family (they have a communal phone at the entrance to their farms) they just aren't allowed to bring in all their tech toys. Honestly I can't see anything wrong with that, anymore than how most churches wouldn't be comfortable with me wearing my 2112 T-shirt.
But as I said it'll cost you over $100k (last figures I saw had it at $117K) to even find out the core beliefs of the CoS and ANY questioning or even debate of these beliefs are verbotten, whereas every other mainstream religion I've ever seen is happy to talk all day about what they believe and even debate any points you want. Like I said you walk into Charles' church and he'll be happy to debate anything from Genesis to Revelations, nothing is off the table.
THANK YOU. And you want moist and delicious irony, I get modded flamebait for pointing out how this "spirit" bullshit turns things into quagmires, and what is posted AS A REPLY TO ME? A dozen fucking interpretations of the spirit, none of which fucking agree!
This is the WHOLE POINT OF CONTRACTS, to have EVERYTHING spelled out in black white precisely so I DON'T have to play "guess WTF you want" so all these GPLers pushing this "spirit" bullshit are doing is making damned sure nobody trusts the GPL because you have to play "Guess WTF they want" because now its not just in the contract, you have to guess what the "spirit" of the contract is!
A perfect example is TiVo, they followed the contract TO THE LETTER, and then they get written into GPL V3 as a monster because they didn't follow the "spirit" which frankly is WTF ever RMS feels like this week, see how RMS said you could charge for documentation...until devs started not releasing docs as GPL (because there is no way to charge for anything you can just copy endlessly for free) then "Documentation wants to be free!". NO you loonie, a piece of data doesn't "want" anything, YOU WANT people to do WTF ever you say and when it turns out you suck at writing contracts you want to get all pissy that they can't guess what the "spirit" is!
Spirits are for movies and seances folks, NOT contracts, if you can't write a damned contract without pulling that "spirit" bullshit that is YOUR FAULT, write a better damned contract!
Frankly after all the NSA spying and how quick these companies were willing to jump on board? I have serious doubts in ANY new network tech not having backdoors of some sort. Maybe after some independent devs have taken the code apart and checked it with a fine tooth comb I'll trust it but as of this moment I honestly don't trust ANY of the major players to have our interests at heart.
As the old saying goes treat everything as suspect, then if it turns out its not you are pleasantly surprised and if it turns out you are right you aren't blindsided. Kinda sad that we all have to be this cynical but that is one of the nice things about the net, they can't hide their bullshit as easily as they could in the past.
Dude the two things I have found the vast majority of human animals cannot accept? 1.- Life is totally random and your place in life can often be decided by things that are 100% out of your control, like what family you are born to, and 2.- when its over its over, that the mass majority will live and die and never be missed or even have mattered at all less than 2 decades after their passing.
You'd be surprised how many just can NOT accept these two truths, they will happily swallow any bullshit you give them as long as that bullshit removes those two truths from their lives.
Because I'm in the deep south and when its 95f outside with 85%+ humidity an ice cold brew hits the spot? I mean sure in the winter cellar temp is great, but when it gets oppressively hot its nice to have one icey in a frosty mug, it just hits the spot.
Not to mention when its 95f outside if you get one icy cold it will be cellar temp before you get to the bottom anyway, whereas if you got one cellar temp to begin with its gonna be piss warm unless you just chug it and that is just a shame to do to a good beer.
American mass produced beers IS shite friend, and frankly the consistency is VERY unpredictable, especially with the more popular brands like Coors and Bud. Give me one of the smaller microbrewed lagers any day of the week, at least I won't be getting a fricking green beer that looks like piss.
If you want to blame something blame prohibition, as a lot of the beers we have now in the states started out as bathtub beers during prohibition and when it was lifted they just mass produced it because it was cheaper. Does that mean America can't make a good beer? Fuck no, some of the best beers i have ever had have been American, but just like how Mickey D's may sell the most burgers but they are bland tasteless trash so too is the mass produced popular US beers mostly piss water.
To me there is a REALLY easy way to tell if its a cult or not...are you allowed to question their beliefs? if the answer is NO then its a cult.
One of my former bandmates is now a baptist preacher in a small church (even though I don't believe all he has to do is call and I'm there, they run soup kitchens, help the homeless, real nice folks) and I swear to all that is good there is NOTHING that man enjoys more than having someone who doesn't believe come into his church, he will be happy to sit down with a book and debate for days, and is more than happy to concede when you have made a good point or offer a viewpoint that would equally fit the scriptures. he is the first one to admit not all translations may be accurate, that with the ancient languages a word could have 3 different meanings that would fit, but one thing that is NEVER discouraged is a lively discussion and debate, not EVER. I have seen him sit there for hours debating points of a sermon, you got questions? You think he is wrong? he'll be happy to hand you a bible and a soda and you can go back and forth over the issues as long as you want and NOTHING is off the table.
When you compare that to CoS where their church leaders will just walk away in the middle of an interview if you ask them ANY questions other than strictly softball stuff? Yeah its a cult. the fact that it will cost you over $100,000 to even GET to the Xenu story and space opera just shows that its all about the money and control, not about spreading their beliefs.
Nice to see I'm not the only one who feels that way, i don't think the government should be basing taxes on what goes on in your private life.
Time and time again we have seen when the government tries its hand at social engineering it leads to disaster, just look at welfare. Welfare penalizes you if you are married so more and more women end up single mothers. . It shouldn't matter what their skin tone or sex is, it should strictly based on a percentage of income and be done with it.
I had one running BeOS and it ran fricking great, IIRC I also ran OS/2 Warp on it and it ran well there too. Everybody has to remember than it really was Wintel back then, MSFT would incorporate every little thing that Intel did into their OSes while the other guys? Not so much.
Hell that happens to this very day, look at how the Linux guys are claiming great performance out of the AMD bulldozer chips because somebody came up with a patch that shows the OS how to treat BD modules, while if you want anything even remotely similar in windows you HAVE to take that POS Windows 8, as MSFT has already said backporting the scheduler is a "will not fix" as far as they are concerned.
While I prefer Win 7 over Linux (going strong since 09 without a single driver failure) even I will admit Linux has an advantage in that situation, as support for non mainstream chips gets added a LOT quicker than in windows.
Not to mention the whole thing is based on a lie, because there is no "spirit" of a CONTRACT, anybody that brings up that "spirit" shit might as well say "I don't see you doing what i want you doing"...well screw you buddy, should have put it in the damned contract.
Between RMS changing the GPL to target specific companies he doesn't like to those screaming the "spirit!" bullshit frankly the worst enemies of FOSS are the devs and users. If I was looking at software for my company i sure as hell wouldn't use GPL, after all what if i piss off RMS? Get my company dragged through the mud because i couldn't guess what the "spirit" was like trying to guess what munchies a stoner wants? No fricking thanks, I'd do like Sony and Apple and use BSD where its all in black and white and nobody is screaming about spirits like its a damned seance instead of software.
Then you have never had life take a giant extended shit on you for a couple of years friend. I lost a distant relative to religion but even though I will probably never speak to her again i can see why, she had lost no less than 3 close people in her life in less than 2 years, not to mention the loss of her job and her home which she had paid on for many years.
So while I think cults like CoS should be seen for what they are I DO get the appeal, kinda hard for many to accept its all as random as a roulette wheel and some douchebag that treats everyone like shit can have just the most perfect life while no matter how hard they work things just end in tragedy and sorrow. IRL a lot of times the bad guys DO win and the nice guys finish even worse than last, but many simply can't accept the thought of a truly random life so they turn to religion trying to make sense of what IRL is senseless.
Because just as you could get a D elected in an R state or vice versa just by carving the hell out of the map so too can Google (Or Bing for that matter) shape perception just by what kind of search results you get.
I mean imagine you type in the name of a product and "is shitty" pops up as the first choice in auto complete and all the results you get are bad, would you be more or less likely to buy that product? what about if it was the name of a politician running for office and "is a scammer" and similarly bad results came up? Google has also been accused of making their products show up first, and to have results that show them in a positive light...NOW do you see the comparison?
That depends...is it a decent beer or some of the piss water that passes for beer in the states? if its the former I'll take a nice cold one thanks.
As for Scientology...it just goes to show how much money and fame can buy you in the USA, because if it weren't for the space pope and the money they have to throw around frankly Scientology would be put down with all the other cults. i mean you look at what those that get out report, so called "marathon sessions" and punishment if you don't parrot the correct responses, even those that felt compelled to "fake" their emotions and responses to keep from being singled out from the rest and targeted...its a fucking cult guys, that is what it is.
And before anybody says its anything like Christianity...bullshit, Total fucking bullshit, yes you have a few marginalized nutballs like the WBC but those are treated as the crazies they are and most churches have preachers that LOVE a good and lively debate on beliefs, hell you get into a debate with a Baptist preacher you better bring the beer and popcorn because a good argument over scripture can last for fricking DAYS with them, whereas with Scientology lively debate about the meaning? Oh hell no, your ass better toe the line, and from what we have seen your ass better not bring up Xenu and space opera before them, they will pull the plug right then and there, compare this to most Christian churches where they will be more than happy to debate anything from Genesis on up, NOTHING is off the table.
So to me Scientology just shows you can have a cult in the USA and be treated as a mainstream religion, all you need is cash.
Because just 50 years ago your black butt would have been shot just for looking at a white woman and most states wouldn't have allowed you to marry her because of the skin tone?
I have an easy way i use to tell if a law smells bigoted, replace the group named in the law with black or Jew and if it sounds like something out of the 1930s? Well then its probably just good old fashioned bigotry.
Actually look into the history of gun controls and you know what you'll find is the root cause of many of them? "Fear of an armed negro". The laws make guns more expensive and since more black neighborhoods are poor traditionally this kept blacks from having guns. Its like how the poll taxes kept out some poor white voters but its main goal wasn't that, they were primarily aimed at blacks. this is why you also saw weapons like the so called "Saturday Night Special" demonized along with the little 25 pistols in the 80s...guess who was the largest purchaser of those weapons?
So those that are pro gun law might want to do a little research into their history, they may find they really don't like the company they are keeping. after all it don't matter if you pass laws that make a handgun $5k a pop, rich white folks can afford it, its the blacks that can't.
Read what I wrote above you about being stalked and you'll see why the whole "Internet justice" thing makes me VERY uncomfortable. Yes the system we have in place now is pretty fricking far from perfect but as somebody who found out there are some seriously unbalanced people in this world (I mean for Pete's sake i didn't even sleep with her, i bought her some drinks and played a song for her because she looked sad) the thought that someone can just say "He/she did it" and basically trash somebody without them having a day in court is more than a little fucking scary to me.
While I wouldn't wish what happened to me on anybody if those that were quick to jump on the bandwagon were to encounter someone like her then they'd realize why all these checks and balances are a GOOD thing, the world just isn't that black and white.
I just wanted to know...why in the fuck did they waste 90% of the money on the douchebags, when they had the funny old sailors on the battleship? For fucks sake get rid of the douchebags on the destroyer and just make the movie about the old guys dragging the old ship out to fight one last battle against long odds...that would have been fucking GREAT.
You could have had the destroyers and the aliens trash each other until its just one alien battleship and had the last floundering destroyer call pearl and warn them what was coming and the old guys would be "Not again, not on our watch dammit!" and they'd fire up the mighty Mo for one last great battle, live or die they are gonna hold the line...that would have been a fucking fantastic movie, instead we get a bunch of numbnuts lead by a moron whose big hero moment is....to realize he is too fucking stupid to lead the boat and hands it over to the Japanese captain, just terrible.
Slashdot Mirror
Uhhh...many places have $10-$50 a year hosting, if you can't even make $50 in a year then frankly you probably shouldn't be bothering at all.
What pisses me off is how many blindly wave their little flags and defend ANY policy by "their company" like its a fricking ballclub when in reality ALL of the companies would happily have you run over with a steamroller if it would give them a 20% bounce in stock price.
So let us be clear folks, NONE of these companies are your "friends" NONE of these companies "have your interests at heart" at the end it ALL comes down to their bottom line and the agenda of the corp, no amount of flag waving or treating them like ballclubs will change that.
Alright that is it, i'm throwing a flag, bullshit on the field. Dude how many strippers have you even met? Because not only have I dated one but I had to go to more strip clubs than you had hot dinners because the lead singer's GF was a featured performer at multiple clubs and I always got roped into doing the driving because she knew that I have honor and don't cheat on my GFs so i could be sitting backstage waiting for her to get off stage without trying to pick up the girls.
Let me tell ya something bud, those girls that work in American strip clubs? NOT stupid and they sure as fuck weren't slaves, in fact a lot of them were going to college for this or that degree and were able to pay for their education IN CASH without being buried alive in student loans like so many are. Since they all knew I wasn't the type to try to get into their panties I quickly became friends with most of them and I don't think I ever even heard a hard luck story more than this or that girl had a BF that was an asshole. Nobody was holding a gun to their heads, they could have just as easily got a job at the mall, they chose to do striping (or as they called it "exotic dancing" which I always replied "yeah and I'm not the fixit guy, I'm a "technical systems engineer and integrator" which always got a laugh) and frankly most of them were making more in a night than i do in a month.
So while i'm sure it happens some places, hell everything has happened at least once somewhere at sometime,painting strippers with that broad brush really does a disservice to a lot of really smart women that choose that profession. hell I had a stripper doing mine and my dad's books and if she wouldn't have had to move to take care of her sick dad she'd still be doing them, that woman was crazy good at navigating tax codes.
Human trafficking? Really? from what orifice did you pull THAT one out of, because as somebody who fixes PCs all damned day I get exposed to more porn ads than anybody and its nearly always videos or toys, occasionally you'll have adult chat sites but if you actually believe the one on the other end is a hot babe and not some 40 year old guy named Larry getting paid by the hour I have some swampland you may be interested in.
Does human trafficking take place? I'm sure it does but that isn't what you are seeing on those sites, what you are seeing is the same 3 or 4 porn shops selling the same vids and sex toys everybody else does. No this is about Google wanting a cut while doing a CYA for fear they may get blocked by some nanny state filter, that is all. All this is doing is moving more and more away from Google, just as their insane "three strikes from any media group, no actual checking required" has made a huge amount of the net stop hosting their videos on YouTube.
Far be it from me to try to stop a company from blowing their own brains out, like MSFT I'll just grab some popcorn and a cold one and LMAO at their stupidity. Proceed Google, proceed.
Which is why I have been saying for years America needs to grow the fuck up. America, the country where you can't show a tit unless it has a knife buried in it and where we nearly impeached a POTUS for getting a BJ, it more than time for us to grow the fuck up and stop pretending that Leave It To Beaver was an accurate depiction of the 1950s.
Watch How not to hire an American to see how the whole H1-B system has become a scam, they rig the requirements of the job so its impossible for ANY American to meet the requirement (such as demanding 10 years exp on a tech that has only been around 5 years) so that they can hire more indentured servants through H1-B.
For those that beat the globalization drum all you are doing is killing our future, these guys will go back to their own countries and come up with the next new things while we will be left a husk. in my own area the local college is getting ready to pull the plug on their entire IT program, why? Because students have found they can't compete with a guy that paid less than we pay for a new car for a master's degree so are no longer even attempting to go into tech fields, they know it will just leave them buried in debt in a dead end job.
I wish i could take all those that constant scream "free trade" and "free markets" and drag their sorry asses through middle America to see the seeds they have sown, where there is more boarded up businesses than open ones and the business districts look like Escape From New York thanks to all the abandoned factories. there is NO SUCH THING as free trade, all you are doing is exporting misery and pollution, and all you are importing is more indentured servants.
They won't stop until the highest paid IT jobs are less than the manager at a Mickey D's, and when the day comes that countries stop taking our overprinted money they will all leave and we'll be left with another dead sector. Of course it won't phase them as they'll just move, as Thomas Jefferson wisely pointed out :"Merchants have no country. The mere spot they stand on does not constitute so strong an attachment as that from which they draw their gains."
Uhhh...you kinda missed what I was getting at, sorry if I didn't make myself clear enough. What I am talking about is NOT this specific case, as i said I don't have the evidence the police have, i wasn't there, so I have no honest way of knowing anything one way or another in this particular case.
What worries me is this whole blogging based culture allowing ANYBODY to attack anybody without ANY checks or balances, any investigation, I mean what would my life had been like if the crazy bitch would have started stalking me today with the power of the Internet? She could have destroyed my rep, any chance my band had of getting work as long as I was in it, all from the comfort of her living room with no way for me to fight back without several thousand to spend on a lawyer.
I'm sorry but while our current system is FAR from perfect and yes sometimes the bad guys get away the ability to destroy somebody by using the net frankly scares the hell out of me because I know things aren't always black and white and the ability to fight back if you are the one being accused is VERY limited unless you have money. maybe its just me but i don't think you should have to "buy" your reputation or livelihood yet with everything becoming more and more blog centric that is what we seem to be heading towards and that bothers the hell out of me.
I consider Bay and Abrams the STDs of movies, because just like an STD their lens flare gasoline explosion bullshit just spreads like fricking crazy. Like I said Battleship COULD have been a truly great movie, a flick about a bunch of tough old bastards facing long odds and refusing to give up, instead it ended up another Bay style "How much douchebaggery and SFX can we stuff into a movie" snorefest.
The sad part is i have seen movies made for less than Bay spends on Red Bulls that could run rings around Bay and Abrams when it came to plots and making you actually think, check out "The Man From Earth" if you want an example, that movie didn't cost even 50k but had a better sci-fi plot than the last 4 Bay and Abrams movies put together. They took the most basic of premises, what would it be like to be truly immortal but not have the ability to "turn" others, and used it to make a damned interesting movie, while all Bay and Abrams do is crank the fireballs (and lens flares in the case of Abrams and his followers) up to 11, no thought required and in fact lack of thought required thanks to their plots not making a lick of sense.
I have NO problem with CGI if you need it to tell a good story, LOTR and The Avengers spring to mind, but with Bay and Abrams it all feels like nothing but cynical cash grabs. Maybe its me but when I see one of these I'm always left feeling there was a meeting where they said "Hey just have lots of douchebaggery for the bros and asplosions and its all good,fuck plot, characters, or pacing, the sheeple will bite anyway" and sadly they are often correct, just look at the Transformers franchise where you can almost feel the hatred Bay has for the audience, even he has gone on record saying how much he hates making "movies about toy robots" but as long as he keeps the formula, a little T&A, mix in some racism and sexism, throw in lots of assplosions? The masses will keep buying that shit. I believe it was Confused Matthew that said "Well at least they are in the movie theater instead of behind the wheel or in a voting booth" and I have to say I agree, the kind of people that cheer those movies frankly make me weep for society, it looks more and more like idiocracy is just a warning like 1984 instead of a comedy.
Actually I've talked to the Amish plenty of times, we have a small group of them in my area and they sell cookies and blankets in the fall so they can buy supplies for the winter. While its true you can't just drive up to their farms and start a debate (to be fair the kind of life they live keeps them pretty busy) when they aren't working they are happy to talk, hell I'll even concede that if we were to have a major technocrash they would be just fine. In fact talking to them they really have a lot in common with the old hippie communes, it all comes down to "taking care of your own" and not relying on the state for your daily bread, can't fault them for that.
Now as far as the "shunning" things goes all I can say is based on this particular sect, there are probably as many variation of Amish as their is Christians, but the few that have left the community basically wanted to bring the tech into the community which isn't allowed. they are still allowed to write letters and talk to their family (they have a communal phone at the entrance to their farms) they just aren't allowed to bring in all their tech toys. Honestly I can't see anything wrong with that, anymore than how most churches wouldn't be comfortable with me wearing my 2112 T-shirt.
But as I said it'll cost you over $100k (last figures I saw had it at $117K) to even find out the core beliefs of the CoS and ANY questioning or even debate of these beliefs are verbotten, whereas every other mainstream religion I've ever seen is happy to talk all day about what they believe and even debate any points you want. Like I said you walk into Charles' church and he'll be happy to debate anything from Genesis to Revelations, nothing is off the table.
THANK YOU. And you want moist and delicious irony, I get modded flamebait for pointing out how this "spirit" bullshit turns things into quagmires, and what is posted AS A REPLY TO ME? A dozen fucking interpretations of the spirit, none of which fucking agree!
This is the WHOLE POINT OF CONTRACTS, to have EVERYTHING spelled out in black white precisely so I DON'T have to play "guess WTF you want" so all these GPLers pushing this "spirit" bullshit are doing is making damned sure nobody trusts the GPL because you have to play "Guess WTF they want" because now its not just in the contract, you have to guess what the "spirit" of the contract is!
A perfect example is TiVo, they followed the contract TO THE LETTER, and then they get written into GPL V3 as a monster because they didn't follow the "spirit" which frankly is WTF ever RMS feels like this week, see how RMS said you could charge for documentation...until devs started not releasing docs as GPL (because there is no way to charge for anything you can just copy endlessly for free) then "Documentation wants to be free!". NO you loonie, a piece of data doesn't "want" anything, YOU WANT people to do WTF ever you say and when it turns out you suck at writing contracts you want to get all pissy that they can't guess what the "spirit" is!
Spirits are for movies and seances folks, NOT contracts, if you can't write a damned contract without pulling that "spirit" bullshit that is YOUR FAULT, write a better damned contract!
Frankly after all the NSA spying and how quick these companies were willing to jump on board? I have serious doubts in ANY new network tech not having backdoors of some sort. Maybe after some independent devs have taken the code apart and checked it with a fine tooth comb I'll trust it but as of this moment I honestly don't trust ANY of the major players to have our interests at heart.
As the old saying goes treat everything as suspect, then if it turns out its not you are pleasantly surprised and if it turns out you are right you aren't blindsided. Kinda sad that we all have to be this cynical but that is one of the nice things about the net, they can't hide their bullshit as easily as they could in the past.
Dude the two things I have found the vast majority of human animals cannot accept? 1.- Life is totally random and your place in life can often be decided by things that are 100% out of your control, like what family you are born to, and 2.- when its over its over, that the mass majority will live and die and never be missed or even have mattered at all less than 2 decades after their passing.
You'd be surprised how many just can NOT accept these two truths, they will happily swallow any bullshit you give them as long as that bullshit removes those two truths from their lives.
Because I'm in the deep south and when its 95f outside with 85%+ humidity an ice cold brew hits the spot? I mean sure in the winter cellar temp is great, but when it gets oppressively hot its nice to have one icey in a frosty mug, it just hits the spot.
Not to mention when its 95f outside if you get one icy cold it will be cellar temp before you get to the bottom anyway, whereas if you got one cellar temp to begin with its gonna be piss warm unless you just chug it and that is just a shame to do to a good beer.
American mass produced beers IS shite friend, and frankly the consistency is VERY unpredictable, especially with the more popular brands like Coors and Bud. Give me one of the smaller microbrewed lagers any day of the week, at least I won't be getting a fricking green beer that looks like piss.
If you want to blame something blame prohibition, as a lot of the beers we have now in the states started out as bathtub beers during prohibition and when it was lifted they just mass produced it because it was cheaper. Does that mean America can't make a good beer? Fuck no, some of the best beers i have ever had have been American, but just like how Mickey D's may sell the most burgers but they are bland tasteless trash so too is the mass produced popular US beers mostly piss water.
To me there is a REALLY easy way to tell if its a cult or not...are you allowed to question their beliefs? if the answer is NO then its a cult.
One of my former bandmates is now a baptist preacher in a small church (even though I don't believe all he has to do is call and I'm there, they run soup kitchens, help the homeless, real nice folks) and I swear to all that is good there is NOTHING that man enjoys more than having someone who doesn't believe come into his church, he will be happy to sit down with a book and debate for days, and is more than happy to concede when you have made a good point or offer a viewpoint that would equally fit the scriptures. he is the first one to admit not all translations may be accurate, that with the ancient languages a word could have 3 different meanings that would fit, but one thing that is NEVER discouraged is a lively discussion and debate, not EVER. I have seen him sit there for hours debating points of a sermon, you got questions? You think he is wrong? he'll be happy to hand you a bible and a soda and you can go back and forth over the issues as long as you want and NOTHING is off the table.
When you compare that to CoS where their church leaders will just walk away in the middle of an interview if you ask them ANY questions other than strictly softball stuff? Yeah its a cult. the fact that it will cost you over $100,000 to even GET to the Xenu story and space opera just shows that its all about the money and control, not about spreading their beliefs.
Nice to see I'm not the only one who feels that way, i don't think the government should be basing taxes on what goes on in your private life.
Time and time again we have seen when the government tries its hand at social engineering it leads to disaster, just look at welfare. Welfare penalizes you if you are married so more and more women end up single mothers. . It shouldn't matter what their skin tone or sex is, it should strictly based on a percentage of income and be done with it.
I had one running BeOS and it ran fricking great, IIRC I also ran OS/2 Warp on it and it ran well there too. Everybody has to remember than it really was Wintel back then, MSFT would incorporate every little thing that Intel did into their OSes while the other guys? Not so much.
Hell that happens to this very day, look at how the Linux guys are claiming great performance out of the AMD bulldozer chips because somebody came up with a patch that shows the OS how to treat BD modules, while if you want anything even remotely similar in windows you HAVE to take that POS Windows 8, as MSFT has already said backporting the scheduler is a "will not fix" as far as they are concerned.
While I prefer Win 7 over Linux (going strong since 09 without a single driver failure) even I will admit Linux has an advantage in that situation, as support for non mainstream chips gets added a LOT quicker than in windows.
Not to mention the whole thing is based on a lie, because there is no "spirit" of a CONTRACT, anybody that brings up that "spirit" shit might as well say "I don't see you doing what i want you doing"...well screw you buddy, should have put it in the damned contract.
Between RMS changing the GPL to target specific companies he doesn't like to those screaming the "spirit!" bullshit frankly the worst enemies of FOSS are the devs and users. If I was looking at software for my company i sure as hell wouldn't use GPL, after all what if i piss off RMS? Get my company dragged through the mud because i couldn't guess what the "spirit" was like trying to guess what munchies a stoner wants? No fricking thanks, I'd do like Sony and Apple and use BSD where its all in black and white and nobody is screaming about spirits like its a damned seance instead of software.
Then you have never had life take a giant extended shit on you for a couple of years friend. I lost a distant relative to religion but even though I will probably never speak to her again i can see why, she had lost no less than 3 close people in her life in less than 2 years, not to mention the loss of her job and her home which she had paid on for many years.
So while I think cults like CoS should be seen for what they are I DO get the appeal, kinda hard for many to accept its all as random as a roulette wheel and some douchebag that treats everyone like shit can have just the most perfect life while no matter how hard they work things just end in tragedy and sorrow. IRL a lot of times the bad guys DO win and the nice guys finish even worse than last, but many simply can't accept the thought of a truly random life so they turn to religion trying to make sense of what IRL is senseless.
Because just as you could get a D elected in an R state or vice versa just by carving the hell out of the map so too can Google (Or Bing for that matter) shape perception just by what kind of search results you get.
I mean imagine you type in the name of a product and "is shitty" pops up as the first choice in auto complete and all the results you get are bad, would you be more or less likely to buy that product? what about if it was the name of a politician running for office and "is a scammer" and similarly bad results came up? Google has also been accused of making their products show up first, and to have results that show them in a positive light...NOW do you see the comparison?
That depends...is it a decent beer or some of the piss water that passes for beer in the states? if its the former I'll take a nice cold one thanks.
As for Scientology...it just goes to show how much money and fame can buy you in the USA, because if it weren't for the space pope and the money they have to throw around frankly Scientology would be put down with all the other cults. i mean you look at what those that get out report, so called "marathon sessions" and punishment if you don't parrot the correct responses, even those that felt compelled to "fake" their emotions and responses to keep from being singled out from the rest and targeted...its a fucking cult guys, that is what it is.
And before anybody says its anything like Christianity...bullshit, Total fucking bullshit, yes you have a few marginalized nutballs like the WBC but those are treated as the crazies they are and most churches have preachers that LOVE a good and lively debate on beliefs, hell you get into a debate with a Baptist preacher you better bring the beer and popcorn because a good argument over scripture can last for fricking DAYS with them, whereas with Scientology lively debate about the meaning? Oh hell no, your ass better toe the line, and from what we have seen your ass better not bring up Xenu and space opera before them, they will pull the plug right then and there, compare this to most Christian churches where they will be more than happy to debate anything from Genesis on up, NOTHING is off the table.
So to me Scientology just shows you can have a cult in the USA and be treated as a mainstream religion, all you need is cash.
Because just 50 years ago your black butt would have been shot just for looking at a white woman and most states wouldn't have allowed you to marry her because of the skin tone?
I have an easy way i use to tell if a law smells bigoted, replace the group named in the law with black or Jew and if it sounds like something out of the 1930s? Well then its probably just good old fashioned bigotry.
Actually look into the history of gun controls and you know what you'll find is the root cause of many of them? "Fear of an armed negro". The laws make guns more expensive and since more black neighborhoods are poor traditionally this kept blacks from having guns. Its like how the poll taxes kept out some poor white voters but its main goal wasn't that, they were primarily aimed at blacks. this is why you also saw weapons like the so called "Saturday Night Special" demonized along with the little 25 pistols in the 80s...guess who was the largest purchaser of those weapons?
So those that are pro gun law might want to do a little research into their history, they may find they really don't like the company they are keeping. after all it don't matter if you pass laws that make a handgun $5k a pop, rich white folks can afford it, its the blacks that can't.
Read what I wrote above you about being stalked and you'll see why the whole "Internet justice" thing makes me VERY uncomfortable. Yes the system we have in place now is pretty fricking far from perfect but as somebody who found out there are some seriously unbalanced people in this world (I mean for Pete's sake i didn't even sleep with her, i bought her some drinks and played a song for her because she looked sad) the thought that someone can just say "He/she did it" and basically trash somebody without them having a day in court is more than a little fucking scary to me.
While I wouldn't wish what happened to me on anybody if those that were quick to jump on the bandwagon were to encounter someone like her then they'd realize why all these checks and balances are a GOOD thing, the world just isn't that black and white.
I just wanted to know...why in the fuck did they waste 90% of the money on the douchebags, when they had the funny old sailors on the battleship? For fucks sake get rid of the douchebags on the destroyer and just make the movie about the old guys dragging the old ship out to fight one last battle against long odds...that would have been fucking GREAT.
You could have had the destroyers and the aliens trash each other until its just one alien battleship and had the last floundering destroyer call pearl and warn them what was coming and the old guys would be "Not again, not on our watch dammit!" and they'd fire up the mighty Mo for one last great battle, live or die they are gonna hold the line...that would have been a fucking fantastic movie, instead we get a bunch of numbnuts lead by a moron whose big hero moment is....to realize he is too fucking stupid to lead the boat and hands it over to the Japanese captain, just terrible.