I think they are merely suggesting that the Texas venue just happens to have judges who favor patent holders. In theory, new appointments could change that, but as judges hold terms that can be as long as lifetime appointments, a court packed with patent-holder friendly judges could persist for decades.
I don't think there is actually the assertion that the judges are paid off, although that's not impossible in some cases. If it happened in such a famous jurisdiction, though, you'd think it would have attracted attention by now.
The GPL works like any other license. It give someone a tool to work with, but it is only as good as who is operating it. No one gives a jackhammer to a toddler and suggests that the failure to break up concrete with it means that the jackhammer was the part of the process which was deficient.
SAIC wants you to know that they don't care how reasonable you think you are, or how right you are, if you screw with them, you have better know what the fuck you are doing. They do not even want to set the precedent that they could be anything but right about their use of whatever they are using.
Aside from how evil that sounds, the sad truth is that if these companies show any weakness, they become a target. That is how litigation works in this day and age. Someone with more resources who smells blood in the water with SAIC caving to a smaller player is going to become tempted to try and find that weakness. This is very much a mutually assured destruction world with patents. These companies need you to know that even challenging them is not an option because they are afraid that someone could get very lucky against them.
People think of big corporations like they are some sort of giant malevolent entity. The thing is, they're more like blind, idiot gods who if you interrupt the music that lulls them in their complacency, they annihilate you, purely by reflex. In that company, somewhere, is a lawyer who heard a story about another lawyer who let the company admit fault on something that cost the company money. That lawyer was obliterated. Now all of their lawyers will refuse any possible situation where they could get fired.
As someone recently told me, the difference between big companies and small companies is that in small companies, people come to work to try and make things happen so they can make a profit and succeed. In big companies, they come in to work and do everything they can to avoid being fired. This is why it is ultimately futile to work with big companies unless you really have something they want or you have the resources to defeat them in a straight fight. They don't respond to anything else.
And what is the so-called "truth" about pro-life activists? What is your actual assertion? I don't actually see you making a claim here.
And I totally disagree. I would point out intent is absolutely essential in determining if someone is doing something wrong.
Now yes, it is possible to go too far. And it is possible to make a decision to not pursue a course of action because innocent people may be harmed, even if the bad guys get away. But at some point you have to stand up and counter that or the hostages keep getting taken because the tactic always works.
You could argue that they could stop going after PP just because they provided useful health care services. But is PP the only possible place money can be sent to provide women's health services? And if they believed that they could run women's health care services separately from abortion services more with less problems and less danger to all involved, why wouldn't they? Hell, I might actually donate to Planned Parenthood if I could be certain that not a cent of it ever supported abortions. Providing mammograms or sex ed or sonograms or contraception is 100% a-ok to me. I don't know why you actually believe anyone is trying to stop that.
And that's just it. There's no "War on Women". There's no desire to interrupt women's health care. They just don't like abortion and think its wrong.
Let's be clear. PP has every right to support abortion as part of "women's health care", but a lot of people disagree with that while not disagreeing with the other programs. If those other programs were so important to PP, they have the power to ensure they are scrupulously separate, but they won't. And that's why people oppose PP. PP does not believe that other health care should be separated from abortions, which is a stand they can take, but it doesn't make their opponents the ogres that they would like to portray them as.
What you appear to be missing is a connection between your putative experience and your conclusion. One example of such would be the facts that you are using to back up your assertion.
They did say that the attack had similarities to the Sony Pictures hack, which was also believed to be NK. I don't think they just picked NK out of a hat before making the assertion.
The Kims are the closest thing to a bunch of real-life Bond villains that the world has ever seen. This is definitely not out of character for them.
You start a movement to elect people who promise to eliminate riders and punish those who do not. And maintain consistency. There are groups out there that can be that insistent and get what they want (NRA, Norquist, etc), no reason that you can't get what you want... eventually.
I do wish we could have some sort of referendum process for overriding Congress, though. Eliminating riders would be an excellent first step.
Yes. If they want to get a provision in, they should write their own bill to do so. Or at the very least, have an extremely strict and difficult process for unfriendly amendments.
Unfriendly amendments do have a place, but the completely unrelated nature of a lot of amendments out there just shits all over the value of the concept.
I agree. More than anything, if you want to hold your representatives accountable, I think a political movement to end riders is possibly one of the best ways to do so. I feel it is on the same level as term limits. Indeed, it may be more important than term limits.
Adding riders to otherwise vital bills has both the effect of ensuring that bad provisions are passed when they wouldn't have on their own merits, but also, it implicates legislators in decisions which they may not have supported if it had been a straight question of that provision.
Let's be perfectly honest here. No one is really trying to shut down the full range of reproductive services for women. This is only the cause because organizations will not separate abortion services from otherwise uncontroversial reproductive services that those uncontroversial services are impacted.
I understand that it would be inefficient and cause inefficiencies to separate them, but that's different than the protesters or anti-abortion activists actually trying to harm the other programs. Calling someone out for that is like someone pulling a hostage in front of them and then blaming the cops for endangering the hostage by not letting the perpetrator get away. When someone uses the "threat to reproductive services" as a counter in that manner, it doesn't quite ring true. You know full well that they aren't trying to accomplish what you accuse them of.
Yes, there are those who have views that are both anti-abortion and unfortunately, also encourage the production of more undesired children. That is not universally the case.
In any event, the positions are entirely separate. You can be 100% in favor of sex education, support for adoption, contraception, and even socialist programs to ensure that the children as a result of unwanted pregnancies are fully supported by the state and you can still be against abortion in almost all cases.
I understand that you probably realize this and are using hyperbole to make a point about the reality of certain political movements. That said, you're just encouraging ignorance by doing so. These matters are important enough that they need to be considered without being seen through the light of rhetoric pointed at reactionary politics.
The question is simple. Can an otherwise viable human be terminated to ensure that the mother is not inconvenienced? While there are cases of severe, and even ruinous inconvenience that come up, the law permits abortion on demand, which implies that the inconvenience can be quite trivial. The legality of such is not in question, there is no doubt the state can make this legal. The question is simply one of ethics and morality. We must consider what the limits of human rights really are in practice.
Well. Since MS and Facebook have customers in many, many countries, they already have data centers in many countries. Azure has been building data centers everywhere.
Thing is, they're not going to close the US ones. They're just going to offer the option for future growth to be local.
I do agree that the privacy snafus have made it hard to host everything in the US. Even Canada doesn't want their data in the US. We're actually considering putting Canadian data in the EU data centers.
Yes, they care more about data privacy than transatlantic latency.
However, they are finalizing the EU Privacy Shield, which should hopefully help a little bit. Ultimately, the US is shooting itself in the foot with some of this. On the other hand, I think some of the people in the foreign countries are probably overreacting. OMG my Facebook data could be seen by someone! I mean... yeah, it can. So, don't post it on Facebook. Seriously. It may be much cheaper than buying a billboard to display your pics, but its about the same idea.
Some do. Older books had much higher quality due to effectively being luxury items. Your standard trade paperback will not last hundreds of years in more or less normal storage. While it will not necessarily crumble to dust, paperbacks are generally bound with adhesives which over time end up failing. The result being single or clumps of pages falling out of the binding here and there. I've experienced that many, many times with old paperbacks.
A hardbound book with sewn-in pages should last more like what you will expect.
Some of the oldest books, both printed and handwritten are actually on vellium, which is much more durable than paper in general. Those books will tend to last the longest and the covers and bindings are very substantial. However, many of those books have been rebound many times over the centuries, although it is not always clear if that is due to need or simply the desire of the current owner.
They can last awhile, but if they haven't been recently producing them, these have probably been stockpiled for 20-40 odd years. The disk media may well last that long, but the mechanical drives have a way of becoming misaligned and destroying the media over time. It's unlikely that in 40 years this has not happened at least a few times. It's one thing to pop a disk in that you've only intermittently used into a drive after 30 years, another entirely to have it either being in that drive all the time, or being inserted and removed repeatedly. You're going to have failures and they're going to need to be replaced every so often. Perhaps they have a large enough stockpile of them, but it would make me pretty nervous to have to rely on them lasting.
But, let's face it, its the government itself who did the study and wants to replace them. They have done the work to determine why they can't be using these forever. I don't even really need to speculate.
Your sarcasm is misplaced and missing the point. Nowhere did I suggest that a commodity rule was required for this. There is a middle ground.
As for independent systems, you know that the military uses things like Windows, right? On warships. And for passing classified messages. It's not Windows 10, but it's not like we have to handcraft our operating systems.
You think that the code written in assembler stored on 8-inch floppies makes something secure? You'll be lucky if there is any security features on it at all. The reason it is secure isn't that it is secured by obscurity, it's because it is secured behind (mostly physical) measures that work to protect the entire US nuclear weapons control system. If Iran guarded their air-gapped Windows based control systems for their centrifuges as well as we guard our nuclear weapons, we wouldn't have been able to get a USB drive or 3.5 inch floppy into their machines either.
If the Government uses 1970s tech they can train new people to support it. Just like they have done for nearly 50 years. It's not like when Joe retires he takes all of his worldly knowledge with him. Good grief, it that were true then long ago someone died and that explains why nobody can ever balance a checkbook again!
Actually... balancing a checkbook may be on its way out in a generation or two. Who actually uses one any more? But aside from that, I should point out that the difference between nuclear weapons control systems and balancing checkbooks is that the skill set behind checkbooks is simple math and it used to have universal adoption, the other not so much. And humans certainly can lose skills through the passage of time and neglect if it isn't something with a ready source of reinforcement.
More to the point, I'm less concerned about those operating these systems, as they were built to be run by 18 year olds. I'm more concerned with what happens when they break, or we actually need a new *feature*.
You assume we can train someone because we seem to have before, but that's a huge assumption. Where are the schools that are teaching this? Sure, the Air Force can teach operators, but this is written in Assembler. Here's what the report actually said:
" For example, one agency (SSA) reported re-hiring retired employees to maintain its COBOL systems."
COBOL was a widely used language at one point. No one is learning it now. One guy I know who has used it went to a job fair and no one at it who knew COBOL was under 50 years old. Do you think that someone who knows how to code for the specialized hardware for the nuclear control systems is going to be even that easy to find?
They're not re-training... they're using the already trained people until they die. There are no replacements.
The answer is actually going to be that when it does break or a new feature needs to be had, they won't find these people to train. They will spend time and effort of building it from scratch all over again. In a new language. With parts that have actually been in a full production run in the last decade. And they fail, fail, fail until they get it right again, and the government promptly neglects it for another 40 years. And the failure only builds up every year that they hold out.
So, sure, don't install the latest version of Windows or buy your components off Amazon, but there has to be a better way than what they're doing.
They were probably *all* piles of failure at one point. The nice thing about having 40-50 years to work on something is that eventually you don't just fix a few bugs, you've probably re-written the whole thing about three times over with all that patches that went into it. And that's just the first twenty years *before* it was shoved into "evergreen" neglect mode for the following twenty years.
Yes, that's great until you start running out of living humans with the ability to actually operate that stuff. I'm not saying I dislike quality or custom gear for the military, but support and logistics is a real thing.
And unlike the wishful thinking about aliens and black ops the real reason we have $20,000 toilet seats is because the government can't just use something that everyone else does. And half the time, the reason isn't even something as intelligent as security or reliability, it's because someone wrote some dumb-ass regulation that everyone has forgotten why it existed in the first place but its chiseled right there in that stone tablet that everyone has to abide by or they get thrown in jail.
The fact that it just happens to be more secure was more of an accident than anything else. That's a shaky premise for good security. If you could find someone with enough motivation to learn how, it would be trivial to break this stuff.
That's the major problem though. It's not that it is a bad thing, precisely, to have a system that works for 50 years. The problem is that logistics and support is horrendously complicated.
Probably the only way that this is still even partially maintainable is because the government is single-handedly propping up production of 8-inch floppies, which probably now cost something like $20,000 a piece. Not only because they are low production runs, but because on top that, they probably have to be built to a particular government standard that no one has updated since 1970 to make them able to be trusted for controlling nuclear weapons while also being handled by barely trained 18 year olds.
Except Gawker and the like don't give a shit about "normal people" anyway. Billionaires and celebs are who they get their content on. Is Gawker going to run a story on the average Slashdot reader's sex life? Even though I am certain there are a few freaks on this board, nobody outside a small local group gives a shit if a normal person passes around their spouse or significant other or has random kinks. In fact, I generally prefer to not know.
So yeah, the future Gawkers could find themselves tamed a bit if the billionaires and celebs fight back. That's their primary prey. I doubt it will end that brand of "journalism", but it might change it a bit.
He may well be a piece of shit, but let's face it, even if he wasn't, Gawker would have run the same story if it was there to run. That's what they *do*.
So, yeah, Hogan may deserve a little bit of his own comeuppance, but that doesn't mean he can't be a useful means of making sure Gawker gets *theirs*.
Yes, you can argue that if Hogan really wanted to punish Gawker for an intrusion into his personal life, it is very likely that he would pick the tactic that would hurt *Gawker* the most. Hogan has no beef with their insurance company.
A big payout doesn't hurt as much when your target isn't even paying most of it.
Now, many people might just want a payout because they know that there's nothing that revenge will do and they want to make bank off it. I'd think Hulk Hogan would be one of a group of people who could probably forgo the payout to retaliate more directly.
Well, I don't think it is so much that he admitted that the media is an arm of the liberals so much as the media can be played like a fiddle by anyone with enough skill and resources.
The media's problem is that it is like those sharks that can't stop swimming and eating or they die. They need access and people to give them scoops because they will lose readership if they have nothing substantial to report. Every. Single. Day. That gives the government a lot of power over them. All that is needed is someone media savvy in government to use that against them.
Think about all the "slow news day" complaints you hear about certain soft or human interest stories. If that's on a front page, the media outlet is literally starving for something to put up. Too many days like that and they're toast. Or rather, the editor who pissed off the government is toast and the media outlet simply ditches them and hires a new one who plays ball. The media can only go just so far in the balance between reporting the news, and pissing off their sources.
Slashdot Mirror
I think they are merely suggesting that the Texas venue just happens to have judges who favor patent holders. In theory, new appointments could change that, but as judges hold terms that can be as long as lifetime appointments, a court packed with patent-holder friendly judges could persist for decades.
I don't think there is actually the assertion that the judges are paid off, although that's not impossible in some cases. If it happened in such a famous jurisdiction, though, you'd think it would have attracted attention by now.
The GPL works like any other license. It give someone a tool to work with, but it is only as good as who is operating it. No one gives a jackhammer to a toddler and suggests that the failure to break up concrete with it means that the jackhammer was the part of the process which was deficient.
SAIC wants you to know that they don't care how reasonable you think you are, or how right you are, if you screw with them, you have better know what the fuck you are doing. They do not even want to set the precedent that they could be anything but right about their use of whatever they are using.
Aside from how evil that sounds, the sad truth is that if these companies show any weakness, they become a target. That is how litigation works in this day and age. Someone with more resources who smells blood in the water with SAIC caving to a smaller player is going to become tempted to try and find that weakness. This is very much a mutually assured destruction world with patents. These companies need you to know that even challenging them is not an option because they are afraid that someone could get very lucky against them.
People think of big corporations like they are some sort of giant malevolent entity. The thing is, they're more like blind, idiot gods who if you interrupt the music that lulls them in their complacency, they annihilate you, purely by reflex. In that company, somewhere, is a lawyer who heard a story about another lawyer who let the company admit fault on something that cost the company money. That lawyer was obliterated. Now all of their lawyers will refuse any possible situation where they could get fired.
As someone recently told me, the difference between big companies and small companies is that in small companies, people come to work to try and make things happen so they can make a profit and succeed. In big companies, they come in to work and do everything they can to avoid being fired. This is why it is ultimately futile to work with big companies unless you really have something they want or you have the resources to defeat them in a straight fight. They don't respond to anything else.
And what is the so-called "truth" about pro-life activists? What is your actual assertion? I don't actually see you making a claim here.
And I totally disagree. I would point out intent is absolutely essential in determining if someone is doing something wrong.
Now yes, it is possible to go too far. And it is possible to make a decision to not pursue a course of action because innocent people may be harmed, even if the bad guys get away. But at some point you have to stand up and counter that or the hostages keep getting taken because the tactic always works.
You could argue that they could stop going after PP just because they provided useful health care services. But is PP the only possible place money can be sent to provide women's health services? And if they believed that they could run women's health care services separately from abortion services more with less problems and less danger to all involved, why wouldn't they? Hell, I might actually donate to Planned Parenthood if I could be certain that not a cent of it ever supported abortions. Providing mammograms or sex ed or sonograms or contraception is 100% a-ok to me. I don't know why you actually believe anyone is trying to stop that.
And that's just it. There's no "War on Women". There's no desire to interrupt women's health care. They just don't like abortion and think its wrong.
Let's be clear. PP has every right to support abortion as part of "women's health care", but a lot of people disagree with that while not disagreeing with the other programs. If those other programs were so important to PP, they have the power to ensure they are scrupulously separate, but they won't. And that's why people oppose PP. PP does not believe that other health care should be separated from abortions, which is a stand they can take, but it doesn't make their opponents the ogres that they would like to portray them as.
What you appear to be missing is a connection between your putative experience and your conclusion. One example of such would be the facts that you are using to back up your assertion.
They did say that the attack had similarities to the Sony Pictures hack, which was also believed to be NK. I don't think they just picked NK out of a hat before making the assertion.
The Kims are the closest thing to a bunch of real-life Bond villains that the world has ever seen. This is definitely not out of character for them.
You start a movement to elect people who promise to eliminate riders and punish those who do not. And maintain consistency. There are groups out there that can be that insistent and get what they want (NRA, Norquist, etc), no reason that you can't get what you want... eventually.
I do wish we could have some sort of referendum process for overriding Congress, though. Eliminating riders would be an excellent first step.
Yes. If they want to get a provision in, they should write their own bill to do so. Or at the very least, have an extremely strict and difficult process for unfriendly amendments.
Unfriendly amendments do have a place, but the completely unrelated nature of a lot of amendments out there just shits all over the value of the concept.
I agree. More than anything, if you want to hold your representatives accountable, I think a political movement to end riders is possibly one of the best ways to do so. I feel it is on the same level as term limits. Indeed, it may be more important than term limits.
Adding riders to otherwise vital bills has both the effect of ensuring that bad provisions are passed when they wouldn't have on their own merits, but also, it implicates legislators in decisions which they may not have supported if it had been a straight question of that provision.
Maybe, but he has a point. Nowhere has Sanders been involved in this, yet. Will he? No idea. Maybe.
Mind you, I have no intention of supporting Sanders or his platform, but it's not necessary to make shit up about him.
Let's be perfectly honest here. No one is really trying to shut down the full range of reproductive services for women. This is only the cause because organizations will not separate abortion services from otherwise uncontroversial reproductive services that those uncontroversial services are impacted.
I understand that it would be inefficient and cause inefficiencies to separate them, but that's different than the protesters or anti-abortion activists actually trying to harm the other programs. Calling someone out for that is like someone pulling a hostage in front of them and then blaming the cops for endangering the hostage by not letting the perpetrator get away. When someone uses the "threat to reproductive services" as a counter in that manner, it doesn't quite ring true. You know full well that they aren't trying to accomplish what you accuse them of.
Yes, there are those who have views that are both anti-abortion and unfortunately, also encourage the production of more undesired children. That is not universally the case.
In any event, the positions are entirely separate. You can be 100% in favor of sex education, support for adoption, contraception, and even socialist programs to ensure that the children as a result of unwanted pregnancies are fully supported by the state and you can still be against abortion in almost all cases.
I understand that you probably realize this and are using hyperbole to make a point about the reality of certain political movements. That said, you're just encouraging ignorance by doing so. These matters are important enough that they need to be considered without being seen through the light of rhetoric pointed at reactionary politics.
The question is simple. Can an otherwise viable human be terminated to ensure that the mother is not inconvenienced? While there are cases of severe, and even ruinous inconvenience that come up, the law permits abortion on demand, which implies that the inconvenience can be quite trivial. The legality of such is not in question, there is no doubt the state can make this legal. The question is simply one of ethics and morality. We must consider what the limits of human rights really are in practice.
Well. Since MS and Facebook have customers in many, many countries, they already have data centers in many countries. Azure has been building data centers everywhere.
Thing is, they're not going to close the US ones. They're just going to offer the option for future growth to be local.
I do agree that the privacy snafus have made it hard to host everything in the US. Even Canada doesn't want their data in the US. We're actually considering putting Canadian data in the EU data centers.
Yes, they care more about data privacy than transatlantic latency.
However, they are finalizing the EU Privacy Shield, which should hopefully help a little bit. Ultimately, the US is shooting itself in the foot with some of this. On the other hand, I think some of the people in the foreign countries are probably overreacting. OMG my Facebook data could be seen by someone! I mean... yeah, it can. So, don't post it on Facebook. Seriously. It may be much cheaper than buying a billboard to display your pics, but its about the same idea.
Some do. Older books had much higher quality due to effectively being luxury items. Your standard trade paperback will not last hundreds of years in more or less normal storage. While it will not necessarily crumble to dust, paperbacks are generally bound with adhesives which over time end up failing. The result being single or clumps of pages falling out of the binding here and there. I've experienced that many, many times with old paperbacks.
A hardbound book with sewn-in pages should last more like what you will expect.
Some of the oldest books, both printed and handwritten are actually on vellium, which is much more durable than paper in general. Those books will tend to last the longest and the covers and bindings are very substantial. However, many of those books have been rebound many times over the centuries, although it is not always clear if that is due to need or simply the desire of the current owner.
They can last awhile, but if they haven't been recently producing them, these have probably been stockpiled for 20-40 odd years. The disk media may well last that long, but the mechanical drives have a way of becoming misaligned and destroying the media over time. It's unlikely that in 40 years this has not happened at least a few times. It's one thing to pop a disk in that you've only intermittently used into a drive after 30 years, another entirely to have it either being in that drive all the time, or being inserted and removed repeatedly. You're going to have failures and they're going to need to be replaced every so often. Perhaps they have a large enough stockpile of them, but it would make me pretty nervous to have to rely on them lasting.
But, let's face it, its the government itself who did the study and wants to replace them. They have done the work to determine why they can't be using these forever. I don't even really need to speculate.
Your sarcasm is misplaced and missing the point. Nowhere did I suggest that a commodity rule was required for this. There is a middle ground.
As for independent systems, you know that the military uses things like Windows, right? On warships. And for passing classified messages. It's not Windows 10, but it's not like we have to handcraft our operating systems.
You think that the code written in assembler stored on 8-inch floppies makes something secure? You'll be lucky if there is any security features on it at all. The reason it is secure isn't that it is secured by obscurity, it's because it is secured behind (mostly physical) measures that work to protect the entire US nuclear weapons control system. If Iran guarded their air-gapped Windows based control systems for their centrifuges as well as we guard our nuclear weapons, we wouldn't have been able to get a USB drive or 3.5 inch floppy into their machines either.
If the Government uses 1970s tech they can train new people to support it. Just like they have done for nearly 50 years. It's not like when Joe retires he takes all of his worldly knowledge with him. Good grief, it that were true then long ago someone died and that explains why nobody can ever balance a checkbook again!
Actually... balancing a checkbook may be on its way out in a generation or two. Who actually uses one any more? But aside from that, I should point out that the difference between nuclear weapons control systems and balancing checkbooks is that the skill set behind checkbooks is simple math and it used to have universal adoption, the other not so much. And humans certainly can lose skills through the passage of time and neglect if it isn't something with a ready source of reinforcement.
More to the point, I'm less concerned about those operating these systems, as they were built to be run by 18 year olds. I'm more concerned with what happens when they break, or we actually need a new *feature*.
You assume we can train someone because we seem to have before, but that's a huge assumption. Where are the schools that are teaching this? Sure, the Air Force can teach operators, but this is written in Assembler. Here's what the report actually said:
" For example, one agency (SSA) reported re-hiring retired employees to maintain its COBOL systems."
COBOL was a widely used language at one point. No one is learning it now. One guy I know who has used it went to a job fair and no one at it who knew COBOL was under 50 years old. Do you think that someone who knows how to code for the specialized hardware for the nuclear control systems is going to be even that easy to find?
They're not re-training... they're using the already trained people until they die. There are no replacements.
The answer is actually going to be that when it does break or a new feature needs to be had, they won't find these people to train. They will spend time and effort of building it from scratch all over again. In a new language. With parts that have actually been in a full production run in the last decade. And they fail, fail, fail until they get it right again, and the government promptly neglects it for another 40 years. And the failure only builds up every year that they hold out.
So, sure, don't install the latest version of Windows or buy your components off Amazon, but there has to be a better way than what they're doing.
They were probably *all* piles of failure at one point. The nice thing about having 40-50 years to work on something is that eventually you don't just fix a few bugs, you've probably re-written the whole thing about three times over with all that patches that went into it. And that's just the first twenty years *before* it was shoved into "evergreen" neglect mode for the following twenty years.
Yes, that's great until you start running out of living humans with the ability to actually operate that stuff. I'm not saying I dislike quality or custom gear for the military, but support and logistics is a real thing.
And unlike the wishful thinking about aliens and black ops the real reason we have $20,000 toilet seats is because the government can't just use something that everyone else does. And half the time, the reason isn't even something as intelligent as security or reliability, it's because someone wrote some dumb-ass regulation that everyone has forgotten why it existed in the first place but its chiseled right there in that stone tablet that everyone has to abide by or they get thrown in jail.
The fact that it just happens to be more secure was more of an accident than anything else. That's a shaky premise for good security. If you could find someone with enough motivation to learn how, it would be trivial to break this stuff.
That's the major problem though. It's not that it is a bad thing, precisely, to have a system that works for 50 years. The problem is that logistics and support is horrendously complicated.
Probably the only way that this is still even partially maintainable is because the government is single-handedly propping up production of 8-inch floppies, which probably now cost something like $20,000 a piece. Not only because they are low production runs, but because on top that, they probably have to be built to a particular government standard that no one has updated since 1970 to make them able to be trusted for controlling nuclear weapons while also being handled by barely trained 18 year olds.
Except Gawker and the like don't give a shit about "normal people" anyway. Billionaires and celebs are who they get their content on. Is Gawker going to run a story on the average Slashdot reader's sex life? Even though I am certain there are a few freaks on this board, nobody outside a small local group gives a shit if a normal person passes around their spouse or significant other or has random kinks. In fact, I generally prefer to not know.
So yeah, the future Gawkers could find themselves tamed a bit if the billionaires and celebs fight back. That's their primary prey. I doubt it will end that brand of "journalism", but it might change it a bit.
He may well be a piece of shit, but let's face it, even if he wasn't, Gawker would have run the same story if it was there to run. That's what they *do*.
So, yeah, Hogan may deserve a little bit of his own comeuppance, but that doesn't mean he can't be a useful means of making sure Gawker gets *theirs*.
Yes, you can argue that if Hogan really wanted to punish Gawker for an intrusion into his personal life, it is very likely that he would pick the tactic that would hurt *Gawker* the most. Hogan has no beef with their insurance company.
A big payout doesn't hurt as much when your target isn't even paying most of it.
Now, many people might just want a payout because they know that there's nothing that revenge will do and they want to make bank off it. I'd think Hulk Hogan would be one of a group of people who could probably forgo the payout to retaliate more directly.
Well, I don't think it is so much that he admitted that the media is an arm of the liberals so much as the media can be played like a fiddle by anyone with enough skill and resources.
The media's problem is that it is like those sharks that can't stop swimming and eating or they die. They need access and people to give them scoops because they will lose readership if they have nothing substantial to report. Every. Single. Day. That gives the government a lot of power over them. All that is needed is someone media savvy in government to use that against them.
Think about all the "slow news day" complaints you hear about certain soft or human interest stories. If that's on a front page, the media outlet is literally starving for something to put up. Too many days like that and they're toast. Or rather, the editor who pissed off the government is toast and the media outlet simply ditches them and hires a new one who plays ball. The media can only go just so far in the balance between reporting the news, and pissing off their sources.
Maybe they're collecting information on escaping from their jail cells for unpaid taxes.
I wonder if France will accept payment of taxes in wine and cheese.
Don't worry, with inflation moving along, we'll all eventually be making ten million dollars a year.