I tend to have the same impression that you do. I don't feel this artist speaks to a broad audience. In fact, I have heard Aesop Rock before, and I like the sound, but I haven't the foggiest idea what the fuck is being said.
However, there are people out there who are either smarter than I, or have a shared context, or who are simply enamored with finding meanings in dense text who probably love this artist for the lyrics.
In that sense, they're not wrong, but it can be argued that such an artist is not speaking to the common experience of a widespread population... and he doesn't have to.
There's no less value in speaking to a niche group than there is to speaking to a larger audience.
I would use other examples. Considering Shakespeare or Dante to be the equivalent to T.S. Eliot is anachronistic.
Shakespeare in particular wrote for the "groundlings". The only reason we find his plays to be something that requires literary analysis is that our modern society does not even speak English in the same manner as a common man at the turn of the 17th Century in England did. His plays were not only completely comprehensible to commoners, they contained many jokes considered quite vulgar at the time. The problem is that we associate Shakespeare with intellectuals because common English of the time has been forgotten by everyone but experts, and so we assume that he was word salad or full of hidden meanings to the people he was playing to. It wasn't.
There may have been some witty double meanings, but his plays were not inaccessible to the crowds. He'd have died a pauper if they had been because he made his money on performing plays for as many people as he could pack into the Globe.
Dante was one of the first users of the Italian language for poetry. His goals were somewhat more intellectual, because his audience was different, but he was still a lot more comprehensible to the people of his time than many people give him credit for being today. Instead of Latin, he was using the vulgar tongue, and like Shakespeare, he was speaking to people in their everyday language and talking about people who were well known to the common people at the time. He probably was no more inaccessible than well-written satire is today.
Whether the doctor/hospital was harming the child or not is a matter that the state and the courts were involved in. Where does this individual, acting under the Anonymous label, gain anything for anyone by injecting themselves into the debate with an attack?
This was a DDoS attack, not a fishing expedition to find incriminating documents. In the latter case, I could at least see a value to one side or another in freeing information. In this case, they just denied service to users, which in the case of a hospital, is hard to justify unless you think that BCH is equivalent to Dr. Mengele's laboratory.
I have no idea who is right or who is wrong in the original situation, but I see no utility in executing a DDoS in this scenario. It feels like the DDoS in the hands of some hackers is a "solution" looking for a problem. Or to put it more bluntly, it's used when someone who knows how to execute a DDoS just gets mad about something and wants to show how mad they are about it.
In the sense that it has private ownership of business, but the government coordinates the business, they're actually starting to look like a textbook fascist state. If you take away the very negative connotations of the word fascist and look at the economic and political setup of Fascist Italy and Spain and Germany, the parallels are striking.
It is true that China is not burning minorities in ovens, but Italy or Spain did not do that either.
From a purely neutral connotation, China is realizing the goal of the state coordinated fascist economy. Part of fascism is strong nationalism and the need to keep the People as a united front working with unions, the party, and business to move forward the State. Information control is an important part of keeping a united front as people become concerned with the ways that such a state does deals between the power brokers in a manner that excludes the People from any say in what happens.
Kayaking in shit. Brazil. The land of the poor and stupid.
Poor, yes. Stupid, no. The got the Olympics. I'd say they outsmarted everyone.
The stupidity is on the part of the IOC who actually thought that Brazil could achieve that monumental feat without any real change in the situation in Brazil.
I know. I have to use the word "tenant" frequently in my business, so I just typed the homonym without thinking about it. It happens sometimes. *shrug*
There is probably some resale and refurb for downstream markets, but honestly, it is mostly e-waste. Apple gains no advantage in causing the market to be filled with old versions of their hardware.
I agree that we should be calling a spade a spade, but we need to understand the true underlying reason for some Muslims to become terrorists or sympathizers.
In the "motherland", they are becoming radicalized because of politics and ethnic issues. Their governments suck, and they have a shitty standard of living. They may even be a minority (Sunnis in Iraq) that are clinging to power, or are afraid of the backlash from the majority.
In the West, these are people who feel alien to the Western culture. But ultimately, this tends to be an ethnic, language, and economic issue more than a religious issue. Their religion is a defining feature, but in much the same way that being black is a defining feature, whether you like it or not. They feel like they don't belong in the West, and so they attach themselves to people of their religion elsewhere so they can feel solidarity in a struggle.
It is important to note, however, that the Western converts aren't looking to fight for Islam, per se. They're looking for something to belong to, and radical Islamic groups are eating that right up.
I do think that a Christian, who is actually practicing Christianity, and probably a Muslim, actually practicing Islam, might well consider themselves to be justified in not accepting "blame" for these terrorists. As long as they condemn these attacks and don't suggest the superiority of their "freedom fighters/martyrs", they certainly can consider themselves blameless. They do need to come out against these sorts of atrocities, however. I know Christianity requires you to not stand by and stay silent, and I am fairly certain that Islam has similar things to say.
But if believers do come out against terrorism in all it's forms, and do not provide any shelter, either philosophically or physically, I think they should not have to take the blame, simply because some guys wearing a "Jesus" or "Mohammad" jersey are blowing shit up.
Ultimately, this isn't a religious, but a political battle. It's just couched in religious terms. The only real link the IRA has to Catholicism is that Catholicism is a defining feature of the ethnic group that the IRA actually represented. The Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland basically punished the Irish for not assimilating into the Anglo-Irish culture and religion, but the religion was actually more of a political ball than anything else.
Today, the same thing is happening. Islam has certain tenants that can be used to justify this sort of terrorism, but ultimately, this isn't about Islam or Christianity. It's about the perceived Western dominance over their lives, and the corrupt regimes that are in their home countries. They're using Islam to generate sympathy globally, but this is all about political and ethnic goals. The new "Caliph" will use their extremely strict interpretation of Islam as a means of control, but even the existence of a Caliph himself isn't really grounded in the original teachings of Muhammad. It came about when he died and they had an empire to run which was unified by a single religion and its leader.
You will solve the "religious" problem when you solve the political and ethnic problem. Most of these religions are very easily used to justify non-violence as much as violence. I agree that Islam has a more militaristic bent due to its prophet building an empire, as opposed to someone like Christ who let himself be crucified, but even a religion like Christianity was easily perverted by political aims into a Crusading religion. I just think at that point, the religion is more like a team name than an actual statement of beliefs of the people involved.
Although the idea of buying a cheaper, tested fighter is not a terrible one, buying it from Russia is probably not the greatest idea, even if we license produce it in the USA. Russia is still an antagonist state at the moment.
Additionally, if they can iron the kinks out of the F-35, it will actually be a decent fighter and bring something to the table. Unfortunately, it was supposed to be the "cheaper" alternative to the F-22, which it utterly failed at being.
Even if they *did* use encryption, the NSA, DST, DGSE, or whoever was supposed to be watching would have had to have known to decrypt the specific communications to stop that attack. I suppose they could have gotten lucky with a dragnet approach, but the reality is that there is zero guarantee that they could have intercepted this attack, even if they had exactly what they wanted.
I saw no indication that they knew this attack was planned through other channels like HUMINT. I don't know why they think being able to decrypt random cell phone comms would have ensured that they stopped this attack.
Not for long. The first land developer who realizes that the land is cheap just because of pointless fear will redevelop it on the cheap, probably even begging for some money out of the government to "help" them.
We nuked the shit out of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They're not ghost towns today, they're cities with significant populations. You'd need an output like Chernobyl to really cause area denial like this, and this isn't even close to the sort of material you'd need for that effect.
In the event you didn't see his constant ads, APK's activities were a commercial activity on this site, which an ad supported, non-government operated site has every right to block. The fact that he was incredibly annoying and abusive about dealing with criticism is just icing on the cake.
Get back to me when they start dealing with people who aren't billboards for a commercial product whose only other activity is trolling people who provide criticisms of said product.
Possibly 0, because it was patched before it was publicized.
However, there are those out there who are able to independently discover and make use of these bugs before the rest of us. Whether they did or not will probably not be known until the appropriate information is declassified.
I don't know why they compared cattail pollen to "honeybee pollen". Pollen is produced by a variety of plants and collected by bees. Other than the collection method, it doesn't matter in the slightest that it was collected via bees, so you have a whole group of pollen types.
And then cattail pollen is a specific species of plant pollen. It's not serviced by honeybees, but it's odd to compare it to a whole bag of pollen types.
It's like comparing the performance of the Corvette C7 Z06 to "all light trucks".
Tor is useful when you need it and really have no better choice, but its not going to be a mass solution. There's too many things you have to get right for it to work the way it is intended and not expose you to discovery.
And yes, it is slow. Painfully slow.
Another thing I consider when I look at encrypted or otherwise more purposely "secure" transmission methods is that if you're using them, you're now in a group of people that is passing more "interesting" traffic. Observers may or may not be able to read what you are saying, but they're a whole lot more interested in whatever it is you are saying, if you show that you're taking more than the usual precautions with it.
It also means that even if they can't see you, there are specific Tor.onion sites which are only a small subset of the Internet, and those sites can become infected with malware that talks back to the investigators, as it has been seen in the past. In that way, a Tor user may be more likely to get caught in the dragnet and investigated. And it doesn't have to be something like a Silk Road type of site either, although you're certainly a target if you look at one of those kind of sites.
So, when I hear of people trying to take this sort of thing mainstream, I can totally see why you'd want to do that. It makes it less likely that you're a higher priority surveillance target just for using it.
Unfortunately, most people have to have a good reason to be inconvenienced in this manner during normal transmission of data because they just want to send a message or look at a site and don't care who knows where they browse. We'll need something a lot more user friendly (and more secure) than Tor for that sort of adoption.
I have both knowledge and experience with the product, unfortunately.
I'm not entirely certain how you go from Point A to Point B with me having no experience with it. Why would I hate it if I had never used it?
No, my experience using it is very, very real. Which leads me to ask if *you* have ever used it, because if you have ever used Notes for mail, you know it isn't the difference between merely an editor. Everything in the mail client was a hassle from adding recipients to actually sending the mail.
It occurs to me that I should point out, if you were an administrator, you may have felt differently about it, because it may have been decent to operate the server and I heard you could do some interesting things with applications with it. In this case, I was an end user of it and didn't care about anything other than sending emails with it. And that was a complete failure.
It taught me the valuable lesson that just because it may be easy to make applications out of, and relatively okay to administer, a piece of software is nothing if people hate using it for their work.
Mind you, we went from the admittedly limited, but relatively effortless use of a normal IMAP server and Netscape client for email to the intolerably bad Notes client. I was not a great lover of the old Thunderbird/Netscape stuff, but it didn't get in your way at just about every step. And there was no way to reconfigure it to make it easier.
Steve Jobs was as much a result of his life experiences as he was his genes. Jobs learned a lot while out of Apple and was taught a hard lesson. It is entirely possible that Jobs himself would have run Apple into the ground if he hadn't been fired the first time.
In any case, I do think that designer babies will become possible, and people will do it. Why? Because if it is possible, it will be done. Maybe not today, but tomorrow. We're very good at overcoming our own qualms about things in the name of progress. We like to pretend that there is a line somewhere that no one will cross. The reality is that the only line we won't cross is one that won't make a profit. And I assure you, designer babies will be very profitable.
They may even become almost required. After all, wouldn't it be "child abuse" if you leave genes in your child that could expose them to genetic disease of any kind? How could you even consider allowing that to happen?
Nothing is really stopping us from building a ship that goes an appreciable fraction of light speed other than applying the necessary resources to do so. It would cost trillions to do it, of course, but it is not outside of the capabilities of humanity at this point. The major problems are supplies, protection from radiation and particle impacts, and the big one, fuel. All of those could be brute forced, however, with the suitable expenditure of money and resources.
The reality is that we'd have to change our priorities too much to do so at this level of technological advancement because the cost would be literally astronomical.
In the end, no one is actually suggesting that we even try this at the moment because we really have nowhere to go that is worth the effort. It is unlikely that the closest stars to the solar system have Earth-like planets, and we have not refined our search techniques to be able to find habitable planets elsewhere yet.
While there is a lot of empty space out there, I wouldn't overestimate the effect of distance. The solutions aren't going to be as simple as "make a faster spaceship", but the problems aren't intractable.
I think the real problem is that parents should be addressing what is in porn with their kids, but a lot of porn out on the Internet, has completely out-ranged the comfort zone of many parents. And quite possibly the experience level of most parents.
I think there should be a rating system for those sites where there is a standard that parents and filters can understand easily. And I think that system should probably distinguish certain types of porn from others, instead of calling them all some form of 'X' or 'Forbidden' category.
In any event, we can't simply have the Internet and call people who want some sort of control to be overzealous conservatives. Back in the day, it used to be that everyone had to go to a particular part of town or a particular store to pick up that material up. It was easy to not have to have filters and such, and while kids still got their hands on porn, it wasn't everywhere. Now... it's completely different, and I don't think it is reactionary to point out that perhaps things have started moving a lot more quickly on that front, and that the effect of that is not uniformly positive.
You used "Lotus Notes" and "friggin awesome" in the same sentence. Are you trying to cause Skynet's brain to melt down through a logic bomb?
Notes may well have been secure, but it was probably the worst mail client that I have ever used, and that includes using 'mail' from the command line. It was horrific, absolutely horrific. It is one of the few software products that I considered leaving a job for when they employed it. Their usage of that product quite literally convinced me that the company hated the people who worked for it.
If they succeeded at anything, it must have been because the million monkeys that they used to write it actually managed to compose a line or two of Shakespeare while throwing around their feces in whatever cage they were working in.
It's not that no one wanted to "pay" for Notes, it's that no one wanted to pay to use something that they wouldn't even use if they were paid to use it.
Exchange and Outlook is not exactly virtuoso software, but you can actually use it to do your work with and not want to simultaneously kill yourself and everyone else in the general vicinity while you (are trying to) use it. If that combo doesn't do security well, it's probably because no one really cares enough about it. Outlook's sin was always in trying to make your life easier on you whether you wanted it or not. That sort of modus operandi is why it has been horribly insecure at times, but people actually used it. It erred on the side of letting you do things with it. I'm just glad I've never had to be an Exchange admin. I hear that can be shitty.
Slashdot Mirror
I tend to have the same impression that you do. I don't feel this artist speaks to a broad audience. In fact, I have heard Aesop Rock before, and I like the sound, but I haven't the foggiest idea what the fuck is being said.
However, there are people out there who are either smarter than I, or have a shared context, or who are simply enamored with finding meanings in dense text who probably love this artist for the lyrics.
In that sense, they're not wrong, but it can be argued that such an artist is not speaking to the common experience of a widespread population... and he doesn't have to.
There's no less value in speaking to a niche group than there is to speaking to a larger audience.
I would use other examples. Considering Shakespeare or Dante to be the equivalent to T.S. Eliot is anachronistic.
Shakespeare in particular wrote for the "groundlings". The only reason we find his plays to be something that requires literary analysis is that our modern society does not even speak English in the same manner as a common man at the turn of the 17th Century in England did. His plays were not only completely comprehensible to commoners, they contained many jokes considered quite vulgar at the time. The problem is that we associate Shakespeare with intellectuals because common English of the time has been forgotten by everyone but experts, and so we assume that he was word salad or full of hidden meanings to the people he was playing to. It wasn't.
There may have been some witty double meanings, but his plays were not inaccessible to the crowds. He'd have died a pauper if they had been because he made his money on performing plays for as many people as he could pack into the Globe.
Dante was one of the first users of the Italian language for poetry. His goals were somewhat more intellectual, because his audience was different, but he was still a lot more comprehensible to the people of his time than many people give him credit for being today. Instead of Latin, he was using the vulgar tongue, and like Shakespeare, he was speaking to people in their everyday language and talking about people who were well known to the common people at the time. He probably was no more inaccessible than well-written satire is today.
Whether the doctor/hospital was harming the child or not is a matter that the state and the courts were involved in. Where does this individual, acting under the Anonymous label, gain anything for anyone by injecting themselves into the debate with an attack?
This was a DDoS attack, not a fishing expedition to find incriminating documents. In the latter case, I could at least see a value to one side or another in freeing information. In this case, they just denied service to users, which in the case of a hospital, is hard to justify unless you think that BCH is equivalent to Dr. Mengele's laboratory.
I have no idea who is right or who is wrong in the original situation, but I see no utility in executing a DDoS in this scenario. It feels like the DDoS in the hands of some hackers is a "solution" looking for a problem. Or to put it more bluntly, it's used when someone who knows how to execute a DDoS just gets mad about something and wants to show how mad they are about it.
True. They did either shoot or gas them first. I stand corrected.
It is probably a mistranslation of the Chinese, part of an idiom, or perhaps a correct translation that suffers from a lack of context in English.
In the sense that it has private ownership of business, but the government coordinates the business, they're actually starting to look like a textbook fascist state. If you take away the very negative connotations of the word fascist and look at the economic and political setup of Fascist Italy and Spain and Germany, the parallels are striking.
It is true that China is not burning minorities in ovens, but Italy or Spain did not do that either.
From a purely neutral connotation, China is realizing the goal of the state coordinated fascist economy. Part of fascism is strong nationalism and the need to keep the People as a united front working with unions, the party, and business to move forward the State. Information control is an important part of keeping a united front as people become concerned with the ways that such a state does deals between the power brokers in a manner that excludes the People from any say in what happens.
Kayaking in shit. Brazil. The land of the poor and stupid.
Poor, yes. Stupid, no. The got the Olympics. I'd say they outsmarted everyone.
The stupidity is on the part of the IOC who actually thought that Brazil could achieve that monumental feat without any real change in the situation in Brazil.
I know. I have to use the word "tenant" frequently in my business, so I just typed the homonym without thinking about it. It happens sometimes. *shrug*
There is probably some resale and refurb for downstream markets, but honestly, it is mostly e-waste. Apple gains no advantage in causing the market to be filled with old versions of their hardware.
I agree that we should be calling a spade a spade, but we need to understand the true underlying reason for some Muslims to become terrorists or sympathizers.
In the "motherland", they are becoming radicalized because of politics and ethnic issues. Their governments suck, and they have a shitty standard of living. They may even be a minority (Sunnis in Iraq) that are clinging to power, or are afraid of the backlash from the majority.
In the West, these are people who feel alien to the Western culture. But ultimately, this tends to be an ethnic, language, and economic issue more than a religious issue. Their religion is a defining feature, but in much the same way that being black is a defining feature, whether you like it or not. They feel like they don't belong in the West, and so they attach themselves to people of their religion elsewhere so they can feel solidarity in a struggle.
It is important to note, however, that the Western converts aren't looking to fight for Islam, per se. They're looking for something to belong to, and radical Islamic groups are eating that right up.
I do think that a Christian, who is actually practicing Christianity, and probably a Muslim, actually practicing Islam, might well consider themselves to be justified in not accepting "blame" for these terrorists. As long as they condemn these attacks and don't suggest the superiority of their "freedom fighters/martyrs", they certainly can consider themselves blameless. They do need to come out against these sorts of atrocities, however. I know Christianity requires you to not stand by and stay silent, and I am fairly certain that Islam has similar things to say.
But if believers do come out against terrorism in all it's forms, and do not provide any shelter, either philosophically or physically, I think they should not have to take the blame, simply because some guys wearing a "Jesus" or "Mohammad" jersey are blowing shit up.
Ultimately, this isn't a religious, but a political battle. It's just couched in religious terms. The only real link the IRA has to Catholicism is that Catholicism is a defining feature of the ethnic group that the IRA actually represented. The Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland basically punished the Irish for not assimilating into the Anglo-Irish culture and religion, but the religion was actually more of a political ball than anything else.
Today, the same thing is happening. Islam has certain tenants that can be used to justify this sort of terrorism, but ultimately, this isn't about Islam or Christianity. It's about the perceived Western dominance over their lives, and the corrupt regimes that are in their home countries. They're using Islam to generate sympathy globally, but this is all about political and ethnic goals. The new "Caliph" will use their extremely strict interpretation of Islam as a means of control, but even the existence of a Caliph himself isn't really grounded in the original teachings of Muhammad. It came about when he died and they had an empire to run which was unified by a single religion and its leader.
You will solve the "religious" problem when you solve the political and ethnic problem. Most of these religions are very easily used to justify non-violence as much as violence. I agree that Islam has a more militaristic bent due to its prophet building an empire, as opposed to someone like Christ who let himself be crucified, but even a religion like Christianity was easily perverted by political aims into a Crusading religion. I just think at that point, the religion is more like a team name than an actual statement of beliefs of the people involved.
Although the idea of buying a cheaper, tested fighter is not a terrible one, buying it from Russia is probably not the greatest idea, even if we license produce it in the USA. Russia is still an antagonist state at the moment.
Additionally, if they can iron the kinks out of the F-35, it will actually be a decent fighter and bring something to the table. Unfortunately, it was supposed to be the "cheaper" alternative to the F-22, which it utterly failed at being.
Even if they *did* use encryption, the NSA, DST, DGSE, or whoever was supposed to be watching would have had to have known to decrypt the specific communications to stop that attack. I suppose they could have gotten lucky with a dragnet approach, but the reality is that there is zero guarantee that they could have intercepted this attack, even if they had exactly what they wanted.
I saw no indication that they knew this attack was planned through other channels like HUMINT. I don't know why they think being able to decrypt random cell phone comms would have ensured that they stopped this attack.
Not for long. The first land developer who realizes that the land is cheap just because of pointless fear will redevelop it on the cheap, probably even begging for some money out of the government to "help" them.
We nuked the shit out of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They're not ghost towns today, they're cities with significant populations. You'd need an output like Chernobyl to really cause area denial like this, and this isn't even close to the sort of material you'd need for that effect.
In the event you didn't see his constant ads, APK's activities were a commercial activity on this site, which an ad supported, non-government operated site has every right to block. The fact that he was incredibly annoying and abusive about dealing with criticism is just icing on the cake.
Get back to me when they start dealing with people who aren't billboards for a commercial product whose only other activity is trolling people who provide criticisms of said product.
Possibly 0, because it was patched before it was publicized.
However, there are those out there who are able to independently discover and make use of these bugs before the rest of us. Whether they did or not will probably not be known until the appropriate information is declassified.
I don't know why they compared cattail pollen to "honeybee pollen". Pollen is produced by a variety of plants and collected by bees. Other than the collection method, it doesn't matter in the slightest that it was collected via bees, so you have a whole group of pollen types.
And then cattail pollen is a specific species of plant pollen. It's not serviced by honeybees, but it's odd to compare it to a whole bag of pollen types.
It's like comparing the performance of the Corvette C7 Z06 to "all light trucks".
Tor is useful when you need it and really have no better choice, but its not going to be a mass solution. There's too many things you have to get right for it to work the way it is intended and not expose you to discovery.
And yes, it is slow. Painfully slow.
Another thing I consider when I look at encrypted or otherwise more purposely "secure" transmission methods is that if you're using them, you're now in a group of people that is passing more "interesting" traffic. Observers may or may not be able to read what you are saying, but they're a whole lot more interested in whatever it is you are saying, if you show that you're taking more than the usual precautions with it.
It also means that even if they can't see you, there are specific Tor .onion sites which are only a small subset of the Internet, and those sites can become infected with malware that talks back to the investigators, as it has been seen in the past. In that way, a Tor user may be more likely to get caught in the dragnet and investigated. And it doesn't have to be something like a Silk Road type of site either, although you're certainly a target if you look at one of those kind of sites.
So, when I hear of people trying to take this sort of thing mainstream, I can totally see why you'd want to do that. It makes it less likely that you're a higher priority surveillance target just for using it.
Unfortunately, most people have to have a good reason to be inconvenienced in this manner during normal transmission of data because they just want to send a message or look at a site and don't care who knows where they browse. We'll need something a lot more user friendly (and more secure) than Tor for that sort of adoption.
I have both knowledge and experience with the product, unfortunately.
I'm not entirely certain how you go from Point A to Point B with me having no experience with it. Why would I hate it if I had never used it?
No, my experience using it is very, very real. Which leads me to ask if *you* have ever used it, because if you have ever used Notes for mail, you know it isn't the difference between merely an editor. Everything in the mail client was a hassle from adding recipients to actually sending the mail.
It occurs to me that I should point out, if you were an administrator, you may have felt differently about it, because it may have been decent to operate the server and I heard you could do some interesting things with applications with it. In this case, I was an end user of it and didn't care about anything other than sending emails with it. And that was a complete failure.
It taught me the valuable lesson that just because it may be easy to make applications out of, and relatively okay to administer, a piece of software is nothing if people hate using it for their work.
Mind you, we went from the admittedly limited, but relatively effortless use of a normal IMAP server and Netscape client for email to the intolerably bad Notes client. I was not a great lover of the old Thunderbird/Netscape stuff, but it didn't get in your way at just about every step. And there was no way to reconfigure it to make it easier.
Steve Jobs was as much a result of his life experiences as he was his genes. Jobs learned a lot while out of Apple and was taught a hard lesson. It is entirely possible that Jobs himself would have run Apple into the ground if he hadn't been fired the first time.
In any case, I do think that designer babies will become possible, and people will do it. Why? Because if it is possible, it will be done. Maybe not today, but tomorrow. We're very good at overcoming our own qualms about things in the name of progress. We like to pretend that there is a line somewhere that no one will cross. The reality is that the only line we won't cross is one that won't make a profit. And I assure you, designer babies will be very profitable.
They may even become almost required. After all, wouldn't it be "child abuse" if you leave genes in your child that could expose them to genetic disease of any kind? How could you even consider allowing that to happen?
Nothing is really stopping us from building a ship that goes an appreciable fraction of light speed other than applying the necessary resources to do so. It would cost trillions to do it, of course, but it is not outside of the capabilities of humanity at this point. The major problems are supplies, protection from radiation and particle impacts, and the big one, fuel. All of those could be brute forced, however, with the suitable expenditure of money and resources.
The reality is that we'd have to change our priorities too much to do so at this level of technological advancement because the cost would be literally astronomical.
In the end, no one is actually suggesting that we even try this at the moment because we really have nowhere to go that is worth the effort. It is unlikely that the closest stars to the solar system have Earth-like planets, and we have not refined our search techniques to be able to find habitable planets elsewhere yet.
While there is a lot of empty space out there, I wouldn't overestimate the effect of distance. The solutions aren't going to be as simple as "make a faster spaceship", but the problems aren't intractable.
I think the real problem is that parents should be addressing what is in porn with their kids, but a lot of porn out on the Internet, has completely out-ranged the comfort zone of many parents. And quite possibly the experience level of most parents.
I think there should be a rating system for those sites where there is a standard that parents and filters can understand easily. And I think that system should probably distinguish certain types of porn from others, instead of calling them all some form of 'X' or 'Forbidden' category.
In any event, we can't simply have the Internet and call people who want some sort of control to be overzealous conservatives. Back in the day, it used to be that everyone had to go to a particular part of town or a particular store to pick up that material up. It was easy to not have to have filters and such, and while kids still got their hands on porn, it wasn't everywhere. Now... it's completely different, and I don't think it is reactionary to point out that perhaps things have started moving a lot more quickly on that front, and that the effect of that is not uniformly positive.
The problem is that the choices you get are usually between someone bad, and someone worse.
It's not like there's this candidate out there who refuses to take money from charities and other special interest groups for their campaign.
Or rather, there might be one, but I've not heard of them. And that may be the point.
You used "Lotus Notes" and "friggin awesome" in the same sentence. Are you trying to cause Skynet's brain to melt down through a logic bomb?
Notes may well have been secure, but it was probably the worst mail client that I have ever used, and that includes using 'mail' from the command line. It was horrific, absolutely horrific. It is one of the few software products that I considered leaving a job for when they employed it. Their usage of that product quite literally convinced me that the company hated the people who worked for it.
If they succeeded at anything, it must have been because the million monkeys that they used to write it actually managed to compose a line or two of Shakespeare while throwing around their feces in whatever cage they were working in.
It's not that no one wanted to "pay" for Notes, it's that no one wanted to pay to use something that they wouldn't even use if they were paid to use it.
Exchange and Outlook is not exactly virtuoso software, but you can actually use it to do your work with and not want to simultaneously kill yourself and everyone else in the general vicinity while you (are trying to) use it. If that combo doesn't do security well, it's probably because no one really cares enough about it. Outlook's sin was always in trying to make your life easier on you whether you wanted it or not. That sort of modus operandi is why it has been horribly insecure at times, but people actually used it. It erred on the side of letting you do things with it. I'm just glad I've never had to be an Exchange admin. I hear that can be shitty.