Also elementary school. It was on TV in the library, although they may have called it the Media Center at that point.
It certainly made a big impression on me, as it is one of the things I remember pretty clearly.
Still, while I knew it was pretty horrible, it didn't really cause me to become overly anxious or sad or anything. If someone had given me grief counseling for it, I'd probably have been sort of bored. I think I knew, even then, that space was not always safe and that when you strap people to a giant rocket, you have to do a lot to make sure it doesn't go really wrong. This was bad for their families and bad for the program, but unlike someone being blown up in a skyscraper who was just going to work, they had signed on for this.
Space is dangerous, even a little kid knows that. That's why I have always considered astronauts to be courageous, because I know there are some people who could never do that job, no matter how prestigious, because the reality of it is quite possibly a very bad end.
People who simply resist arrest aren't terrorists. They're just well armed criminals.
They may well have a politically motivated goal, but their activities aren't to attack random people with those weapons as part of their activity, they are directly opposing the government force that would remove them from the location in which they are maintaining their protest.
I want to be clear. I don't support these people. They're wrong, they need to put their damn weapons away, and they need to go to jail. But what they are not doing is holding hostages, or using atrocities against innocent and unsuspecting people to make their point. They're having an armed sit-in. The cops have a right to remove them, and a right to use deadly force on them because they are armed and resisting. But they aren't terrorists.
There have been domestic terrorists in the US. The Oklahoma City bombing, the abortion clinic killings, the mental midget who shot up that church in SC. They were using violence to make their political point and they aimed to do so. Those are terrorists. These people are just criminal trespassers who are merely using trespassing as their means to make a political point. The fact that they are armed is important, but it doesn't make them terrorists.
The bad rep of the AR is based on the M-16's penchant for jamming in Vietnam before a redesign fixed those problems. If you didn't keep an M-16 clean, it would fail to operate properly. Whereas in the same period, you'd have demonstrations of AK-47's that get buried, dug up, brushed off, knock the dirt out of it a little, and it would still fire.
The AK is not a particularly accurate or easy to control weapon, but it was made to work with much looser tolerances. If something wasn't tight or there was a little dirt in the machinery, it would still fire. This is a big deal in places where you'd be dragging through the mud all day, like most Third World war zones. Add that to having easy to manufacture stamped receivers, and you have a reliable, easy to produce weapon for export.
Assault rifles were designed when they realized that even the carbine versions of long rifles like the K-98k missed the point because while they were accurate out to a pretty long distance, they were heavy and cumbersome to operate, while most fighting took place at a much shorter range. The ability to lay down suppressive fire, while at the same time, having a reasonable amount of accuracy out to 200-300 yards, was more than good enough.
Actually, no, this isn't terrorism. They're not holding anyone hostage or actually trying to "terrify" anyone. Terrorists set out to kill people, usually people who are unarmed and unable to retaliate who are behind the "lines" of a conflict in order to inspire terror.
When AQ blew up the WTC, they were terrorists. When ISIS beheads non-combatants and aid workers, they are terrorists. When people walk into stadiums and open fire to create terror, they are terrorists.
These guys are armed tresspassers trying to make a point. There's laws for that. We don't call criminals who kill a cop who was killed while they were in the commission of a robbery "terrorists". We call them murderers and cop killers. But they're not terrorists, or that term has lost all useful meaning.
Actually, Syria has a lot of Russian and Soviet weaponry. So does Iraq.
Strictly speaking, we didn't cause ISIS, we entered the country in a war, and then left it before we should have, but ISIS was created and abetted by those who have funded it and given it support.
Certainly the occupation of Iraq and the Syrian Civil War have given ISIS an opportunity to prosper, but you needed people willing to be ISIS for that to happen. It doesn't just happen automatically when you invade a country or when you leave it. We could have left in complete disorder and there didn't have to be an ISIS at the end of it. Let's put blame where blame belongs. The US and Soviet/Russian governments provided opportunities for ISIS, but ISIS is nothing without sympathizers in those countries and in the greater Muslim world who support them.
NDA's are nice...but I've seen them ignored and nothing much could be done about it, unless your company is a BIG one with some powerful attorney's and deep pockets.
Maybe so, but what matters here is whether his boss believes in NDAs, not him.
If his boss believes an NDA will work, then it is the boss' problem, not his.
In any event, it should be part of the list of options provided.
Fair enough, but you would not believe how much of a cheapskate that even a rich executive in a big firm can be.
Not that I don't understand it. The best way to get rich is to spend as little money as possible to begin with.
Of course, that cheapskate tendency does create these situations (and a lot of heartburn for subordinates). They want cheap help, but they are also possessive of their secret sauce. The only solution is to provide options and let them pick the cheapest one. I also frequently suggest that you do good research, find the best price you can... and then pad your estimate to prepare for the inevitable request for you to knock more off the price of the cheapest option.
Stocks do still offer real value, you just aren't going to realize it unless you hold a good company for a fairly long amount of time.
Too many people are trying to day trade their way to instant fortunes. As the HFT shows, you can make a lot of money on the daily chaotic fluctuation of stock prices, but now you're in a race against the computers to do it.
However, unless one of those absurd bid-ups actually ends a company somehow, it is only a worry for people who are trying to run complex short term trading strategies. As a long term investor, you simply ride out the fluctuation over the long term. And if they bid up stocks or other instruments you've been holding for years, then you sell and take your profit and diversify with the money. And probably buy back in later when the stock has settled down again.
If you buy a good stock today, or a fund that tracks the S&P, in thirty years you will have made money even if there was a recession in the meantime. People who bought stocks in 1929, right before the crash and the Great Depression, still made good money decades down the road. At that point, it is just a matter of whether you could make ends meet during the recession and depression periods so that you don't have to sell out your holdings to get cash.
Of course, the problem with this is if the banks become vulnerable to the failure of complex or short term strategies. Then that does have a ripple effect down the road. Which frankly, is why the banking industry should have not been able to get away with their failures a few years ago.
To me, bailouts and regulation are two sides of the same coin. They both retard the financial industry by removing from it the feedback you get from failure. Spend years under regulation and when it is loosened even a little, so that your economy doesn't completely stagnate, you have people who have never learned the cost of failure and so they go nuts like a bunch of lottery winners who have no idea what to do with all their money.
Of course, if we're completely unable to avoid bailing out losers who fail, we may well need to regulate them into the future. However, there are costs to that path as well. That's why we ended up deregulating them to begin with.
If I were a Republican candidate, I'd probably suggest a plan by which we re-regulated and then *slowly* de-regulated back down over a decade or so. And absolutely zero bailouts for failures in the meantime. The goal would be to develop bankers/executives in positions of power who know how to self-regulate so we don't need to pay for a bureaucracy to try and do that for them.
I guess... but anyone who works in espionage will be watching people, not just observing places. And as this article mentions, its all down to who gives it away.
Certainly, a false flag could distract espionage resources for a certain amount of time, just like the fake invasion army in Britain did in WWII, but eventually the other side will find out the false site is a sham by penetrating the site's staff or the supporting agencies, or someone who is part of the *real* operation will give up the information about the real site independently. Time is not on the side of an operation like that and Area 51 was an issue for fifty years.
Israel *isn't* in control of US policy. There are simply a lot of people in the US government who are sympathetic to Israel and take its side. There is a difference, mostly because when push comes to shove, Israel isn't going to get its way if the US government gets a higher priority.
The fact is, Israel is more or less a modern democracy that plays by Western rules and has been continuously under attack by groups that were very easily labelled as terrorists. That plays pretty well to the US population.
Certainly, Israel has employs some very questionable tactics to maintain a Jewish state, but is generally admired for not allowing themselves to be pushed around by their neighbors. And their neighbors have certainly tried to push them around. You don't need to be a "captive" of the Israeli government to see their side of it.
Obviously, both sides need to move away from the posturing and violence to make real progress.
Unfortunately, there is a lot of political profit for those in the region for keeping this battle going... on both sides. Once the Palestinians and Israelis can make real progress, certain segments of the Israeli population will find themselves without the state of siege that they have been using to justify their program of maintaining settlements. There are also some demographic issues were maintaining a Jewish majority state will be more difficult.
And the Arab and other Muslim governments are going to lose their unifying scapegoat which keeps their populations from fully realizing what kind of crappy governments that they've been tolerating.
That depends on what you consider "revealed to be real".
Area 51 and Groom Lake were pretty much known to be an aircraft test site for years. Yes, the government didn't admit it, but all the restricted airspace and patrols meant that there was *something* there.
Now what would have been a real reveal is if they'd actually found aliens or their equipment and had it in Area 51. Of course, that's could be a completely successful conspiracy, but more likely it's complete bunk, and either way, no one has any proof whatsoever of that.
Today, we don't pay attention to something without slick marketing unless we know a lot about it and the market it is in. In a way, many products are the same thing, and so it comes down to who gets the first look who sells the actual product to a customer.
It is smoke and mirrors, but its also absolutely necessary in this environment.
So, it is important to note that I don't hate advertisers for advertising or web sites for having advertisements. I tolerated ads with good grace for years. They had their place on the page and sometimes, I'd even be interested in what they were selling.
However, two things happened which made me start blocking ads.
First, and most importantly, they started interfering with my ability to actually consume the content I came to the site for.
I'd literally go to a site to look at something quickly, and I'd find the ad on top of the content, or separating the content up into small sections that are hard to scan, and finally, ad content that pretended to be actual content that I was there for. You go to some light but vaguely interesting entertainment multi-page, and you can't even find the real "Next Page" button. They actually attempt to get you to click on the ad when you had no intention of doing so to begin with via deception.
2. Ads are now actually dangerous and not just incredibly obnoxious.
Those are two very good reasons to block ads. I don't necessarily want to put the ad companies out of business, but they're running rampant. So, if AdBlock wants to make money off of them by controlling their access to the market, and as a side effect, forcing them to maintain some standards, I'm perfectly okay with it.
If I suspect that somehow AdBlock has become a real bad guy (as opposed to a "dirty profit-maker") in this, then I will turn off their app and find another one, or simply start NoScript-ing and otherwise controlling access from sites that I did not specifically request. For now, though, they are doing a decent job of making the web less obnoxious to me, and the ad companies can find the person to blame for their demise by looking in their mirrors.
You can turn off the AdBlock's "trusted Ads" feature if you want to. You can't turn off Mafia protection rackets.
Yes AdBlock is making money off of their ability to get people to adopt their software. However, the ad companies created that market because they finally pushed the envelope one too many times with their "content".
If AdBlock Plus or whoever ceases to protect me from shitty ad content, then its usefulness to me will be at an end and it won't be used. If it causes sites that rely on ad revenue to go out of business, well hopefully previous to that, they will have been given the ad companies an ultimatum about what sort of ads can displayed on their site.
The other thing about the AdBlock trusted ads list is that those ads are supposed to be ads that meet certain requirements to prevent them from becoming the dangerous nuisance that they were allowed to become. In theory, having this option, even if it makes AdBlock rich, may well save the ad business online by forcing standards on all of them so there is no more race to the bottom in terms of obnoxiousness and insecurity.
That's the theory, to be sure. In reality, few people really *want* to.
If the government tells you its going to take care of things, it requires not only some degree of courage to tell it to get lost, it also requires someone to come up with a better idea.
Let's face it. The government is looking like it is going to be our enforced charity and health care provider because no one can be bothered to even come up with an alternative plan. Just the thought of the government not being involved in health care or the financial industry or loads of other things scares the crap out of most people, and mostly because they don't see any way it could work without someone pointing a gun at you and forcing you to comply with some politician's plan.
I responded to someone at Christmas who was okay with Sanders taking more tax money for health care to support other people. He'd done his homework and his household could accept the added cost. Of course, my question was, why didn't he spend that money already on a charity? Or give it to someone who needed it. Why is he waiting for Bernie Sanders to extract it from him?
I know that reason. Assuming his sincerity, the actual reason he's waiting is because it isn't a simple matter for people to do their homework and make their own decisions. Many people may not even have the time or the wit to do so. They want some leader to tell them that this is what must happen.
Don't believe for a second that it will be easy to overcome that sort of training. There are literally people out there who are better off with the government taking their money, than them actually donating it themselves, even though much of their tax money goes to the same charities after being run though the filter of paying for a government bureaucracy.
$600 per hour and 10 hour movie? Hell, I would be more than happy to take view the movie and sleep at the same time. Or clean the house.
Except you can't, because if he puts five seconds of a guy with full frontal nudity screaming racist and scatological tracts while holding a picture of Mother Teresa, the movie has to be rated differently, and you better have caught that part.
And I assure you, even on fast forward, looking for a needle in a haystack like that takes forever and is almost as mindnumbing. The only way to get through that sort of film is to watch parts of it with many breaks.
This would probably be an easy, albeit boring, watch for them. Some of the shit that comes out of Hollywood (and other places) can actually be horrifyingly bad. Paint Drying would be BAFTA-winning material in comparison.
I don't think voters are stupid. That's really not fair. The reason for their "stupidity" is that they're attempting to fight against an evolved bureaucracy and two party system. These things have had generations to figure out how to be insensitive to mere individual voters, why do you think any random group of voters has a chance?
We've come to see the government in the dual role of the bogeyman and our savior. We complain about it while voting to give it extra powers because we're trained to see the government or some law as the solution to every problem.
Actually, they probably want to get rid of it so they can free up disk space for the new stuff they want. They probably already have most of the useful information they wanted out of the old stuff.
There's probably less than 100,000 people that the US government gives enough of a crap about to keep material on them. The rest of us can be dealt with as needed without all this effort.
I have to agree with this. The Board of Directors is supposed to keep a check on the management and make sure they maintain the best interests of the corporation. If this guy can't do it in one job of responsibility, I don't see why he gets to do it in another job which is theoretically an even more responsible oversight role.
I don't know this guy from Adam, but if he did what they say he did, then he at least has some explaining to do. If he blames it all on "just following orders", then he's the type of person I wouldn't want in any position of power.
Of course, this is probably exactly why he *is* in a position of power now. He's decided to not fight the fights that exclude him from the top floor offices.
That said, I don't even get a non-binding vote on this, but if I did, I'd like to have him explain to me why this should not disqualify him.
Congress has shitty solutions, true. However, the real threat is ICANN board members and execs having to sit through Congressional hearings. I assure you, the threat of Congress is enough to keep people in line. People *hate* dealing with Congress.
Sometimes, the proposed answer to the problem is worse than the problem.
I do not want an activist ICANN, I want an organization that efficiently hands out IP blocks and manages registrars. Not a new bureaucracy dedicated to anti-spam, anti-malware, Please Think of the Children and all that other shite.
Why not? It hasn't done a particularly bad job of it so far.
So what if the NSA spies on people? So does every other intelligence agency. The problem with the NSA isn't "control of the internet", which the US has done a frankly superb job at (by staying out of the way), it is that many of the big Internet companies like Facebook are US-owned and based. "Control" over the Internet isn't going to change any of that unless these other countries want to use their newfound power to force everyone to play by their rules. And that *will* fuck up the Internet.
Slashdot Mirror
Also elementary school. It was on TV in the library, although they may have called it the Media Center at that point.
It certainly made a big impression on me, as it is one of the things I remember pretty clearly.
Still, while I knew it was pretty horrible, it didn't really cause me to become overly anxious or sad or anything. If someone had given me grief counseling for it, I'd probably have been sort of bored. I think I knew, even then, that space was not always safe and that when you strap people to a giant rocket, you have to do a lot to make sure it doesn't go really wrong. This was bad for their families and bad for the program, but unlike someone being blown up in a skyscraper who was just going to work, they had signed on for this.
Space is dangerous, even a little kid knows that. That's why I have always considered astronauts to be courageous, because I know there are some people who could never do that job, no matter how prestigious, because the reality of it is quite possibly a very bad end.
Criminals resisting arrest.
People who simply resist arrest aren't terrorists. They're just well armed criminals.
They may well have a politically motivated goal, but their activities aren't to attack random people with those weapons as part of their activity, they are directly opposing the government force that would remove them from the location in which they are maintaining their protest.
I want to be clear. I don't support these people. They're wrong, they need to put their damn weapons away, and they need to go to jail. But what they are not doing is holding hostages, or using atrocities against innocent and unsuspecting people to make their point. They're having an armed sit-in. The cops have a right to remove them, and a right to use deadly force on them because they are armed and resisting. But they aren't terrorists.
There have been domestic terrorists in the US. The Oklahoma City bombing, the abortion clinic killings, the mental midget who shot up that church in SC. They were using violence to make their political point and they aimed to do so. Those are terrorists. These people are just criminal trespassers who are merely using trespassing as their means to make a political point. The fact that they are armed is important, but it doesn't make them terrorists.
It's a bad metaphor, which is why I called it out. Terrorists would have hostages, yes, but these people have none.
Every political crime, even if it is with a gun, isn't terrorism. I don't really think anyone feels particularly terrorized by their actions.
The bad rep of the AR is based on the M-16's penchant for jamming in Vietnam before a redesign fixed those problems. If you didn't keep an M-16 clean, it would fail to operate properly. Whereas in the same period, you'd have demonstrations of AK-47's that get buried, dug up, brushed off, knock the dirt out of it a little, and it would still fire.
The AK is not a particularly accurate or easy to control weapon, but it was made to work with much looser tolerances. If something wasn't tight or there was a little dirt in the machinery, it would still fire. This is a big deal in places where you'd be dragging through the mud all day, like most Third World war zones. Add that to having easy to manufacture stamped receivers, and you have a reliable, easy to produce weapon for export.
Assault rifles were designed when they realized that even the carbine versions of long rifles like the K-98k missed the point because while they were accurate out to a pretty long distance, they were heavy and cumbersome to operate, while most fighting took place at a much shorter range. The ability to lay down suppressive fire, while at the same time, having a reasonable amount of accuracy out to 200-300 yards, was more than good enough.
Who are the hostages in this situation?
Actually, no, this isn't terrorism. They're not holding anyone hostage or actually trying to "terrify" anyone. Terrorists set out to kill people, usually people who are unarmed and unable to retaliate who are behind the "lines" of a conflict in order to inspire terror.
When AQ blew up the WTC, they were terrorists. When ISIS beheads non-combatants and aid workers, they are terrorists. When people walk into stadiums and open fire to create terror, they are terrorists.
These guys are armed tresspassers trying to make a point. There's laws for that. We don't call criminals who kill a cop who was killed while they were in the commission of a robbery "terrorists". We call them murderers and cop killers. But they're not terrorists, or that term has lost all useful meaning.
Actually, Syria has a lot of Russian and Soviet weaponry. So does Iraq.
Strictly speaking, we didn't cause ISIS, we entered the country in a war, and then left it before we should have, but ISIS was created and abetted by those who have funded it and given it support.
Certainly the occupation of Iraq and the Syrian Civil War have given ISIS an opportunity to prosper, but you needed people willing to be ISIS for that to happen. It doesn't just happen automatically when you invade a country or when you leave it. We could have left in complete disorder and there didn't have to be an ISIS at the end of it. Let's put blame where blame belongs. The US and Soviet/Russian governments provided opportunities for ISIS, but ISIS is nothing without sympathizers in those countries and in the greater Muslim world who support them.
Hey...sometimes you just gotta work on site.
NDA's are nice...but I've seen them ignored and nothing much could be done about it, unless your company is a BIG one with some powerful attorney's and deep pockets.
Maybe so, but what matters here is whether his boss believes in NDAs, not him.
If his boss believes an NDA will work, then it is the boss' problem, not his.
In any event, it should be part of the list of options provided.
Fair enough, but you would not believe how much of a cheapskate that even a rich executive in a big firm can be.
Not that I don't understand it. The best way to get rich is to spend as little money as possible to begin with.
Of course, that cheapskate tendency does create these situations (and a lot of heartburn for subordinates). They want cheap help, but they are also possessive of their secret sauce. The only solution is to provide options and let them pick the cheapest one. I also frequently suggest that you do good research, find the best price you can... and then pad your estimate to prepare for the inevitable request for you to knock more off the price of the cheapest option.
Stocks do still offer real value, you just aren't going to realize it unless you hold a good company for a fairly long amount of time.
Too many people are trying to day trade their way to instant fortunes. As the HFT shows, you can make a lot of money on the daily chaotic fluctuation of stock prices, but now you're in a race against the computers to do it.
However, unless one of those absurd bid-ups actually ends a company somehow, it is only a worry for people who are trying to run complex short term trading strategies. As a long term investor, you simply ride out the fluctuation over the long term. And if they bid up stocks or other instruments you've been holding for years, then you sell and take your profit and diversify with the money. And probably buy back in later when the stock has settled down again.
If you buy a good stock today, or a fund that tracks the S&P, in thirty years you will have made money even if there was a recession in the meantime. People who bought stocks in 1929, right before the crash and the Great Depression, still made good money decades down the road. At that point, it is just a matter of whether you could make ends meet during the recession and depression periods so that you don't have to sell out your holdings to get cash.
Of course, the problem with this is if the banks become vulnerable to the failure of complex or short term strategies. Then that does have a ripple effect down the road. Which frankly, is why the banking industry should have not been able to get away with their failures a few years ago.
To me, bailouts and regulation are two sides of the same coin. They both retard the financial industry by removing from it the feedback you get from failure. Spend years under regulation and when it is loosened even a little, so that your economy doesn't completely stagnate, you have people who have never learned the cost of failure and so they go nuts like a bunch of lottery winners who have no idea what to do with all their money.
Of course, if we're completely unable to avoid bailing out losers who fail, we may well need to regulate them into the future. However, there are costs to that path as well. That's why we ended up deregulating them to begin with.
If I were a Republican candidate, I'd probably suggest a plan by which we re-regulated and then *slowly* de-regulated back down over a decade or so. And absolutely zero bailouts for failures in the meantime. The goal would be to develop bankers/executives in positions of power who know how to self-regulate so we don't need to pay for a bureaucracy to try and do that for them.
I guess... but anyone who works in espionage will be watching people, not just observing places. And as this article mentions, its all down to who gives it away.
Certainly, a false flag could distract espionage resources for a certain amount of time, just like the fake invasion army in Britain did in WWII, but eventually the other side will find out the false site is a sham by penetrating the site's staff or the supporting agencies, or someone who is part of the *real* operation will give up the information about the real site independently. Time is not on the side of an operation like that and Area 51 was an issue for fifty years.
Israel *isn't* in control of US policy. There are simply a lot of people in the US government who are sympathetic to Israel and take its side. There is a difference, mostly because when push comes to shove, Israel isn't going to get its way if the US government gets a higher priority.
The fact is, Israel is more or less a modern democracy that plays by Western rules and has been continuously under attack by groups that were very easily labelled as terrorists. That plays pretty well to the US population.
Certainly, Israel has employs some very questionable tactics to maintain a Jewish state, but is generally admired for not allowing themselves to be pushed around by their neighbors. And their neighbors have certainly tried to push them around. You don't need to be a "captive" of the Israeli government to see their side of it.
Obviously, both sides need to move away from the posturing and violence to make real progress.
Unfortunately, there is a lot of political profit for those in the region for keeping this battle going... on both sides. Once the Palestinians and Israelis can make real progress, certain segments of the Israeli population will find themselves without the state of siege that they have been using to justify their program of maintaining settlements. There are also some demographic issues were maintaining a Jewish majority state will be more difficult.
And the Arab and other Muslim governments are going to lose their unifying scapegoat which keeps their populations from fully realizing what kind of crappy governments that they've been tolerating.
That depends on what you consider "revealed to be real".
Area 51 and Groom Lake were pretty much known to be an aircraft test site for years. Yes, the government didn't admit it, but all the restricted airspace and patrols meant that there was *something* there.
Now what would have been a real reveal is if they'd actually found aliens or their equipment and had it in Area 51. Of course, that's could be a completely successful conspiracy, but more likely it's complete bunk, and either way, no one has any proof whatsoever of that.
I think they're both right, to some degree.
Today, we don't pay attention to something without slick marketing unless we know a lot about it and the market it is in. In a way, many products are the same thing, and so it comes down to who gets the first look who sells the actual product to a customer.
It is smoke and mirrors, but its also absolutely necessary in this environment.
So, it is important to note that I don't hate advertisers for advertising or web sites for having advertisements. I tolerated ads with good grace for years. They had their place on the page and sometimes, I'd even be interested in what they were selling.
However, two things happened which made me start blocking ads.
First, and most importantly, they started interfering with my ability to actually consume the content I came to the site for.
I'd literally go to a site to look at something quickly, and I'd find the ad on top of the content, or separating the content up into small sections that are hard to scan, and finally, ad content that pretended to be actual content that I was there for. You go to some light but vaguely interesting entertainment multi-page, and you can't even find the real "Next Page" button. They actually attempt to get you to click on the ad when you had no intention of doing so to begin with via deception.
2. Ads are now actually dangerous and not just incredibly obnoxious.
Those are two very good reasons to block ads. I don't necessarily want to put the ad companies out of business, but they're running rampant. So, if AdBlock wants to make money off of them by controlling their access to the market, and as a side effect, forcing them to maintain some standards, I'm perfectly okay with it.
If I suspect that somehow AdBlock has become a real bad guy (as opposed to a "dirty profit-maker") in this, then I will turn off their app and find another one, or simply start NoScript-ing and otherwise controlling access from sites that I did not specifically request. For now, though, they are doing a decent job of making the web less obnoxious to me, and the ad companies can find the person to blame for their demise by looking in their mirrors.
You can turn off the AdBlock's "trusted Ads" feature if you want to. You can't turn off Mafia protection rackets.
Yes AdBlock is making money off of their ability to get people to adopt their software. However, the ad companies created that market because they finally pushed the envelope one too many times with their "content".
If AdBlock Plus or whoever ceases to protect me from shitty ad content, then its usefulness to me will be at an end and it won't be used. If it causes sites that rely on ad revenue to go out of business, well hopefully previous to that, they will have been given the ad companies an ultimatum about what sort of ads can displayed on their site.
The other thing about the AdBlock trusted ads list is that those ads are supposed to be ads that meet certain requirements to prevent them from becoming the dangerous nuisance that they were allowed to become. In theory, having this option, even if it makes AdBlock rich, may well save the ad business online by forcing standards on all of them so there is no more race to the bottom in terms of obnoxiousness and insecurity.
That's the theory, to be sure. In reality, few people really *want* to.
If the government tells you its going to take care of things, it requires not only some degree of courage to tell it to get lost, it also requires someone to come up with a better idea.
Let's face it. The government is looking like it is going to be our enforced charity and health care provider because no one can be bothered to even come up with an alternative plan. Just the thought of the government not being involved in health care or the financial industry or loads of other things scares the crap out of most people, and mostly because they don't see any way it could work without someone pointing a gun at you and forcing you to comply with some politician's plan.
I responded to someone at Christmas who was okay with Sanders taking more tax money for health care to support other people. He'd done his homework and his household could accept the added cost. Of course, my question was, why didn't he spend that money already on a charity? Or give it to someone who needed it. Why is he waiting for Bernie Sanders to extract it from him?
I know that reason. Assuming his sincerity, the actual reason he's waiting is because it isn't a simple matter for people to do their homework and make their own decisions. Many people may not even have the time or the wit to do so. They want some leader to tell them that this is what must happen.
Don't believe for a second that it will be easy to overcome that sort of training. There are literally people out there who are better off with the government taking their money, than them actually donating it themselves, even though much of their tax money goes to the same charities after being run though the filter of paying for a government bureaucracy.
$600 per hour and 10 hour movie? Hell, I would be more than happy to take view the movie and sleep at the same time. Or clean the house.
Except you can't, because if he puts five seconds of a guy with full frontal nudity screaming racist and scatological tracts while holding a picture of Mother Teresa, the movie has to be rated differently, and you better have caught that part.
And I assure you, even on fast forward, looking for a needle in a haystack like that takes forever and is almost as mindnumbing. The only way to get through that sort of film is to watch parts of it with many breaks.
This would probably be an easy, albeit boring, watch for them. Some of the shit that comes out of Hollywood (and other places) can actually be horrifyingly bad. Paint Drying would be BAFTA-winning material in comparison.
What if the paint is really... PLANTS!
I don't think voters are stupid. That's really not fair. The reason for their "stupidity" is that they're attempting to fight against an evolved bureaucracy and two party system. These things have had generations to figure out how to be insensitive to mere individual voters, why do you think any random group of voters has a chance?
We've come to see the government in the dual role of the bogeyman and our savior. We complain about it while voting to give it extra powers because we're trained to see the government or some law as the solution to every problem.
Actually, they probably want to get rid of it so they can free up disk space for the new stuff they want. They probably already have most of the useful information they wanted out of the old stuff.
There's probably less than 100,000 people that the US government gives enough of a crap about to keep material on them. The rest of us can be dealt with as needed without all this effort.
I have to agree with this. The Board of Directors is supposed to keep a check on the management and make sure they maintain the best interests of the corporation. If this guy can't do it in one job of responsibility, I don't see why he gets to do it in another job which is theoretically an even more responsible oversight role.
I don't know this guy from Adam, but if he did what they say he did, then he at least has some explaining to do. If he blames it all on "just following orders", then he's the type of person I wouldn't want in any position of power.
Of course, this is probably exactly why he *is* in a position of power now. He's decided to not fight the fights that exclude him from the top floor offices.
That said, I don't even get a non-binding vote on this, but if I did, I'd like to have him explain to me why this should not disqualify him.
Congress has shitty solutions, true. However, the real threat is ICANN board members and execs having to sit through Congressional hearings. I assure you, the threat of Congress is enough to keep people in line. People *hate* dealing with Congress.
Sometimes, the proposed answer to the problem is worse than the problem.
I do not want an activist ICANN, I want an organization that efficiently hands out IP blocks and manages registrars. Not a new bureaucracy dedicated to anti-spam, anti-malware, Please Think of the Children and all that other shite.
Why not? It hasn't done a particularly bad job of it so far.
So what if the NSA spies on people? So does every other intelligence agency. The problem with the NSA isn't "control of the internet", which the US has done a frankly superb job at (by staying out of the way), it is that many of the big Internet companies like Facebook are US-owned and based. "Control" over the Internet isn't going to change any of that unless these other countries want to use their newfound power to force everyone to play by their rules. And that *will* fuck up the Internet.