The "5 people" he tried to murder were illusory, it was in fact a single law enforcement agent on something of an entrapment run. (This information came out in the court transcripts a few days ago.) Law enforcement got Ross to believe there were people who had sensitive information about Silk Road staff and users - the type of information that, if released, would lead to: Ross going to prison, random users of SR going to prison, dealers on SR going to prison and believing Ross ratted them out, subsequently putting a hit out on Ross himself... imo, these hypothetical people who would blackmail to those ends, deserve to be in prison themselves. (And I think the law agrees.)
To be clear, I don't think it's acceptable to have citizens killing people, even if it's justified. But in judging the man you need to look at the circumstances. He wasn't a crazy guy shooting up a school. He wasn't going killing his wife so he can marry someone else. He wasn't killing a family member to collect life insurance. He wasn't killing a store clerk in the midst of a robbery. He was being faced with blackmail amounting to death threats. Putting out hits on the blackmailers was self-defense by proxy.
Someone who is 65 was born in 1950 and reached adulthood around 1968. Are you suggesting that the majority of people in 1968 did not have access to housing, food, and schools? It seems like you don't know that public schooling was implemented between 1852 -1917. Or the Housing Act for public housing was passed 1937. Or that the Food Stamp Act guaranteeing a permanent food stamp program was implemented in 1964.
Furthermore, other things flesh out the story more than the laws. The post-war economic boom of 45-55 is what created the middle class who didn't have to worry about meeting basic needs. Where's the middle class today? Rapidly disappearing. Income inequality has grown steadily for decades, reaching a crescendo. Close to 50% of the country is not participating in the labor force (the <10% "unemployment" stats the gov't puts out are heavily cooked and designed to hide the issue.) Look at the percentage of people who own homes vs. rent, and how drastically that's changed over the past 50 years. These things certainly don't make it easier for the average citizen to lead a life. People are struggling in this country, the problems are getting worse, and I don't see the trend changing any time soon.
From your post, I can tell your grasp on history could use improvement. I won't pretend to know you personally, but it seems possible your own privileges have reinforced your assumption that everyone in 2015 enjoys those privileges.
Well, our middle class is going away fast, and we're back to the model peasants and nobles soon. In that system, unless you're in the 1%... your only choices are to take the abuse, eking out enough calories and a bed to live on, or die. Or, go live as a hermit - but gooood luck with that these days! Even if you have somehow managed to acquire real survival skills, prepare to be arrested for things like trying to feed yourself (no fishing / hunting license) or finding a place to sleep. And trying to find a frontier or unclaimed land? Forget it.
These days, those in power have even more ways to lock you in to indentured servitude than they did historically.
Quite true... some of the on-paper numbers, like the (heavily manipulated) unemployment figures have returned to 2008 levels, but the story is deeper than that. Someone who gets fired from IBM but can only find a 20 hr/wk helpdesk job, or a 35 hr/wk retail job, is on paper "employed". But he's not doing well. The guy who hasn't been able to find a decent replacement job for 10 months and is still jobless is also "employed", by the common presentation of the statistics.
The economic recovery is an illusion, and it won't hold forever - when this one pops, I think we'll see the real pitfall. IMO the slow deterioration of the employment/wealth/economic situation since the 1970s is about to bear its most mature fruit. We have seen each successive ripple being more severe - The dot-com bust, the ca. 9/11/2001 faltering, the 2008 issues, and now get ready for the latest round.
IT in particular seems to be hard hit, especially considering the glamour it had just 15 years ago. I started an IT-related career track including formal education and certs in 2007. So far, it's netted me an $11/hr call center job, a few hundred dollars on the side doing random freelance stuff, and many months of (benefitless) unemployment. I'm starting to think of moving into HVAC repair, electrical work, or similar.
That's because IBM hasn't made consumer products in 10 years, closer to 15. If you have bought anything from the multitude of businesses that still do rely on IBM products or services, you have indirectly supported IBM as well as benefited from their stuff.
It's really shocking how much money these pain clinics are making now - they are making more money than the dope dealers. People will literally start lining up at 4 am waiting for the clinic to open to make sure they get a spot. No appointments, they just process as many customers a day as they can. The customers pay in cash, something like $250 per visit. Due to the laws, lots of "mainstream" pharmacies won't process prescriptions from pain clinics, so the clinics often partner up with a specific pharmacy, where you pay another $100 for the pills themselves. Again cash, of course.
In this area, I've never seen heroin but I've certainly seen boatloads of pills. The program to push opiate users off heroin and on to pharmaceuticals was a success.
Hello, former opiate addict here. I wasn't using heroin in particular, but the year or so that I used opiates daily was the most economically productive period of my life. Every day I would be high by the time I came in to work, which involved maintaining Linux servers. I would get my job done without issue. Unless you get to near-overdose levels, opiates don't effect your coordination or higher level thinking to the degree of alcohol or even cannabis. Indeed the biggest negative effects were prohibition-related. The price was heavily increased price due to enforcement measures (3x to 4x increase over as many years) and I had to associate with certain shady people to get it.
It's worth noting that the medically accepted treatments for opiate addiction, like methadone maintenance treatment, simply substitute illegal opiates for legal ones. You're still under the influence of opiates daily, but instead of going by the dope house every morning and shelling out $100 for the illegal pills, you go by the clinic and pay maybe $10 and get legal ones. And that's an improvement. These programs have been in place for decades and their positive effects are well studied.
There aren't typically pedestrians crossing 50 mph roads, and even if there are, those roads are usually straight enough so that they have a good line-of-sight. 20 or 30 mph is where you have cars, peds, and bikes intermingling.
So, are the regulators that monitor emissions going to fly in random drones unannounced? Presumably they would at least let the plant operators know they're coming...
The weird thing is, Beyond Earth runs much more smoothly for me than plain Civ 5. Civ 5 is choppy as hell, and it's not due to the graphics. Specs:
AMD Phenom X4 9850 (ca. 2008)
nForce 4 based motherboard (ca. 2007)
GeForce 275 GTX (ca. a while back)
4 GB ddr2-800 main memory
Starting to get dated now, but Beyond Earth runs very smoothly on it.
Hell, there's more iterations of Outlook than 2. Last year I was working in front line tech support, I was forced to acquaint myself with their existence.
Quite a few US states have outlawed the death penalty. Of those that do allow it, most execute single-digit numbers of prisoners annually. Some don't even tally 1 execution per year. TBH, if the choice is between life in the prison system (30 years? 50, 60?) or a painless death, I'd take door #2. Unfortunately anti-death-penalty advocates have been taking away the "painless" part. It's similar to how the "war on drugs" has actually exacerbated drug-related problems. Recently, states have had to experiment with untested, and not wholly effective, lethal injection drugs due to the suppliers worrying about death penalty-related PR. That's caused several needlessly painful executions. Perhaps the most completely painless option is nitrogen asphyxiation under heavy sedation - but whenever that gets suggested people come out with "OMG they want to gas prisoners like Nazis!" Never mind the fact Nazis used a completely different gas (Zyklon B) that kills by a very painful mode of action...
See also the recent massive protests in Germany over the "Islamization of Europe", by a group called Pegida. Turnouts way higher than any of the US police protests recently. If you're not familiar, most European countries are seeing a huge influx of Muslim immigrants, legal and illegal (understandably, I'd want to leave too.)
Of course the anti-Pegida protests had just as big a turnout, but I see that as caused by German guilt about Nazism, wanting to distance themselves from anything that might be construed as intolerant. As the percentage of Muslims in Europe grows, they may feel more emboldened in their attempts to bring Europe under Sharia law. Notice how this latest attack was not a suicide attack, the gunman fled and were loose for a day or so. Perhaps they feel safer when the majority of people in their neighborhood are Muslim.
That's one of the major things I had in mind when thinking about "crap" - also auto-generated pages with zero content but lots of search keywords. Try to find lyrics or tabs of some obscure song on the internet, and you'll get a million pages titled "Rainbow Ffolly - Labour Exchange lyrics", all of them saying something like "We don't have lyrics for this song yet..."
Slashdot Mirror
The "5 people" he tried to murder were illusory, it was in fact a single law enforcement agent on something of an entrapment run. (This information came out in the court transcripts a few days ago.) Law enforcement got Ross to believe there were people who had sensitive information about Silk Road staff and users - the type of information that, if released, would lead to: Ross going to prison, random users of SR going to prison, dealers on SR going to prison and believing Ross ratted them out, subsequently putting a hit out on Ross himself... imo, these hypothetical people who would blackmail to those ends, deserve to be in prison themselves. (And I think the law agrees.)
To be clear, I don't think it's acceptable to have citizens killing people, even if it's justified. But in judging the man you need to look at the circumstances. He wasn't a crazy guy shooting up a school. He wasn't going killing his wife so he can marry someone else. He wasn't killing a family member to collect life insurance. He wasn't killing a store clerk in the midst of a robbery. He was being faced with blackmail amounting to death threats. Putting out hits on the blackmailers was self-defense by proxy.
Someone who is 65 was born in 1950 and reached adulthood around 1968. Are you suggesting that the majority of people in 1968 did not have access to housing, food, and schools?
It seems like you don't know that public schooling was implemented between 1852 -1917. Or the Housing Act for public housing was passed 1937. Or that the Food Stamp Act guaranteeing a permanent food stamp program was implemented in 1964.
Furthermore, other things flesh out the story more than the laws. The post-war economic boom of 45-55 is what created the middle class who didn't have to worry about meeting basic needs. Where's the middle class today? Rapidly disappearing. Income inequality has grown steadily for decades, reaching a crescendo. Close to 50% of the country is not participating in the labor force (the <10% "unemployment" stats the gov't puts out are heavily cooked and designed to hide the issue.) Look at the percentage of people who own homes vs. rent, and how drastically that's changed over the past 50 years. These things certainly don't make it easier for the average citizen to lead a life. People are struggling in this country, the problems are getting worse, and I don't see the trend changing any time soon.
From your post, I can tell your grasp on history could use improvement. I won't pretend to know you personally, but it seems possible your own privileges have reinforced your assumption that everyone in 2015 enjoys those privileges.
Well, our middle class is going away fast, and we're back to the model peasants and nobles soon. In that system, unless you're in the 1%... your only choices are to take the abuse, eking out enough calories and a bed to live on, or die.
Or, go live as a hermit - but gooood luck with that these days! Even if you have somehow managed to acquire real survival skills, prepare to be arrested for things like trying to feed yourself (no fishing / hunting license) or finding a place to sleep. And trying to find a frontier or unclaimed land? Forget it.
These days, those in power have even more ways to lock you in to indentured servitude than they did historically.
Texas is on the Gulf Coast.
Quite true... some of the on-paper numbers, like the (heavily manipulated) unemployment figures have returned to 2008 levels, but the story is deeper than that. Someone who gets fired from IBM but can only find a 20 hr/wk helpdesk job, or a 35 hr/wk retail job, is on paper "employed". But he's not doing well. The guy who hasn't been able to find a decent replacement job for 10 months and is still jobless is also "employed", by the common presentation of the statistics.
The economic recovery is an illusion, and it won't hold forever - when this one pops, I think we'll see the real pitfall. IMO the slow deterioration of the employment/wealth/economic situation since the 1970s is about to bear its most mature fruit. We have seen each successive ripple being more severe - The dot-com bust, the ca. 9/11/2001 faltering, the 2008 issues, and now get ready for the latest round.
IT in particular seems to be hard hit, especially considering the glamour it had just 15 years ago. I started an IT-related career track including formal education and certs in 2007. So far, it's netted me an $11/hr call center job, a few hundred dollars on the side doing random freelance stuff, and many months of (benefitless) unemployment. I'm starting to think of moving into HVAC repair, electrical work, or similar.
That's because IBM hasn't made consumer products in 10 years, closer to 15. If you have bought anything from the multitude of businesses that still do rely on IBM products or services, you have indirectly supported IBM as well as benefited from their stuff.
Not too far off from using random notebook papers (that were deemed highly sensitive and subject to destruction) as building insulation.
IE 5 was actually my browser of choice in the Mac OS 9 era. Completely different than the Windows version.
It's really shocking how much money these pain clinics are making now - they are making more money than the dope dealers. People will literally start lining up at 4 am waiting for the clinic to open to make sure they get a spot. No appointments, they just process as many customers a day as they can. The customers pay in cash, something like $250 per visit. Due to the laws, lots of "mainstream" pharmacies won't process prescriptions from pain clinics, so the clinics often partner up with a specific pharmacy, where you pay another $100 for the pills themselves. Again cash, of course.
In this area, I've never seen heroin but I've certainly seen boatloads of pills. The program to push opiate users off heroin and on to pharmaceuticals was a success.
Hello, former opiate addict here. I wasn't using heroin in particular, but the year or so that I used opiates daily was the most economically productive period of my life. Every day I would be high by the time I came in to work, which involved maintaining Linux servers. I would get my job done without issue. Unless you get to near-overdose levels, opiates don't effect your coordination or higher level thinking to the degree of alcohol or even cannabis. Indeed the biggest negative effects were prohibition-related. The price was heavily increased price due to enforcement measures (3x to 4x increase over as many years) and I had to associate with certain shady people to get it.
It's worth noting that the medically accepted treatments for opiate addiction, like methadone maintenance treatment, simply substitute illegal opiates for legal ones. You're still under the influence of opiates daily, but instead of going by the dope house every morning and shelling out $100 for the illegal pills, you go by the clinic and pay maybe $10 and get legal ones. And that's an improvement. These programs have been in place for decades and their positive effects are well studied.
ElfBlowing.jpg.exe? I have that archived somewhere, you want a copy?
And who is going to check these reputable links? Who is going to check the sources these "reputable links" cite?
If the post is at +1 or 0 and it deserves a -1 due to being false, it is "overrated".
Damn brah, step up your game, I'd tap that
There aren't typically pedestrians crossing 50 mph roads, and even if there are, those roads are usually straight enough so that they have a good line-of-sight. 20 or 30 mph is where you have cars, peds, and bikes intermingling.
So, are the regulators that monitor emissions going to fly in random drones unannounced? Presumably they would at least let the plant operators know they're coming...
People using "shadow" for a password have never heard of /etc/shadow.
The weird thing is, Beyond Earth runs much more smoothly for me than plain Civ 5. Civ 5 is choppy as hell, and it's not due to the graphics. Specs:
AMD Phenom X4 9850 (ca. 2008)
nForce 4 based motherboard (ca. 2007)
GeForce 275 GTX (ca. a while back)
4 GB ddr2-800 main memory
Starting to get dated now, but Beyond Earth runs very smoothly on it.
Hell, there's more iterations of Outlook than 2. Last year I was working in front line tech support, I was forced to acquaint myself with their existence.
Remember when burning a CD took more time than playing it (and maybe took more than 1 disc)?
Quite a few US states have outlawed the death penalty. Of those that do allow it, most execute single-digit numbers of prisoners annually. Some don't even tally 1 execution per year. TBH, if the choice is between life in the prison system (30 years? 50, 60?) or a painless death, I'd take door #2. Unfortunately anti-death-penalty advocates have been taking away the "painless" part. It's similar to how the "war on drugs" has actually exacerbated drug-related problems.
Recently, states have had to experiment with untested, and not wholly effective, lethal injection drugs due to the suppliers worrying about death penalty-related PR. That's caused several needlessly painful executions. Perhaps the most completely painless option is nitrogen asphyxiation under heavy sedation - but whenever that gets suggested people come out with "OMG they want to gas prisoners like Nazis!" Never mind the fact Nazis used a completely different gas (Zyklon B) that kills by a very painful mode of action...
No, I think he's implying that coding has gone out of fashion (or at least no longer guarantees a high-paying job.)
There's cocksuckers around? I'm in a dry spell, someone hook me up...
See also the recent massive protests in Germany over the "Islamization of Europe", by a group called Pegida. Turnouts way higher than any of the US police protests recently. If you're not familiar, most European countries are seeing a huge influx of Muslim immigrants, legal and illegal (understandably, I'd want to leave too.)
Of course the anti-Pegida protests had just as big a turnout, but I see that as caused by German guilt about Nazism, wanting to distance themselves from anything that might be construed as intolerant. As the percentage of Muslims in Europe grows, they may feel more emboldened in their attempts to bring Europe under Sharia law. Notice how this latest attack was not a suicide attack, the gunman fled and were loose for a day or so. Perhaps they feel safer when the majority of people in their neighborhood are Muslim.
That's one of the major things I had in mind when thinking about "crap" - also auto-generated pages with zero content but lots of search keywords. Try to find lyrics or tabs of some obscure song on the internet, and you'll get a million pages titled "Rainbow Ffolly - Labour Exchange lyrics", all of them saying something like "We don't have lyrics for this song yet..."