everyone that didnt like the movie was expecting some type of hollywood ending like all the machines dieing and Neo becoming a god or something
That's not true. I disliked like the movie for completely different reasons. In fact, I *liked* the ending -- the fact that Neo sacrifices himself to save not only Zion but the Matrix as well, was cool. And the fact that the Matrix goes on, with the Oracle and the Architect still having a little conflict, and Zion surviving... yes, it was a good ending.
The main reason I didn't like it was because the narrative was so scattershot. Here's a more detailed list, in no particular order of significance:
The Battle of Zion took up too much screen time. We go about 35 minutes without seeing Neo or Trinity. They're supposed to be the main characters, but we spend all this time with all these secondary characters (Zee, the Kid, Captain Mifune, Locke) going through all these war movie cliches. (My wife pointed out that we didn't really need to see the entire rocket launcher loading process four times.) It was like we were watching another movie.
They spend all this screen time, at least 5 minutes, dealing with Zee and her friend and how they go to all this effort to blow up the digger. Yay! Good work, guys! Except here comes another one, so basically all that effort (and Zee's friend getting killed) were basically for nothing. If they'd spent 20 seconds on it, and then been thwarted by the arrival of another digger, that would have been fine, because we wouldn't have basically wasted all this time.
The whole bit with the train station seemed kind of tenuous. Like, Ha ha ha! You're trapped here... FOREVER! Except that Trinity's just going to threaten the Merovingian a little bit, and he'll fold faster than a magazine, and you'll be out of here in ten minutes. (And the Merovingian goes on about the Oracle's eyes, and how important they are... and then nothing ever really happens with it. I guess Smith got her eyes, but we don't know what he saw (maybe he saw his victory over Neo -- but then I'm just guessing, because I figured he was cackling maniacally because, well, he's evil and has the ORACLE'S POWER MUAHAHAHA). Well, that was dramatically effective, only, not. The escaping programs (the Indian guy and his family) were interesting, sort of, except all the dialogue in his scenes just went ON and ON and didn't really accomplish much.
Smith absorbs the Oracle, and then after all the Smiths are blown up (and how exactly he blows them up? I guess he... uh... somehow sent some kind of mystical energy into the Matrix... or something?), hey! There's the Oracle, lying randomly on the ground. Two minutes later she's sitting pretty on a park bench. The hell? I mean, I can come up with plausible fanwanks to explain it, but they're built on nothing but conjecture, because the movie gives us NOTHING to build on. The Oracle's just... there, and hey, it's all hunky-dory. (I thought they handled it well why she looked different.)
How the hell did Neo get superpowers in the real world? They didn't even try to explain it. And he didn't even need them -- they served no purpose except as a mechanism for him to be able to "see" Bane/Smith and kill him, and then be able to "see" and defeat the random line of defenders of the machine city. Ultimately he didn't even use those powers to "win" -- he just did something inside the Matrix. They could have done better than simply giving him inexplicable superpowers to get him to where he can talk to the Machine (and for Christ's sake, the Machine's name was "Deus Ex Machina").
I like the fact that in the last two movies we got some answers to our questions, and that there was some resolution to the conflicts. (And the questions we got answers to were the non-philosophical ones, like, what the fuck is Smith's problem, who is the goddamn Oracle, who will win in the end, etc. I know you can't (and shouldn't) provide pat, compact answers to the philosophical questions.) I just didn't think they told the story very well.
Just because you don't lock your door, doesn't mean you don't prosecute the guy who breaks in and steals your TV. No, I'm not going to feel sorry for you that your TV got stolen -- but the thief still made the conscious decision to break the law.
Even slashdot offers a link after every book review: "Buy this book at [bookstore]." There are alternate means of revenue that do not require the exploitation of the user.
What do you mean by "exploiting" the user? Showing ads is some kind of horrible exploitation, but convincing them to buy a product (which is done in precisely one way: advertising) isn't?
Dude, I work for a fucking website for a living (one of the biggest on the Internet). I do get it, probably far better than you ever will. You're right, nobody owes you a living -- but if Otto's attitude is that he can do whatever the hell he wants when viewing my site, then I'm perfectly justified in taking the attitude that I can do whatever I fucking want, including blocking Otto from seeing my website.
If Otto's going to use my resources (bandwidth, server processing time) without compensating me for it (viewing the ads), then how am I not justified in preventing him from using my resources? Just because he doesn't like ads, I should make an exception for him?
So it's not okay to filter ads, but it is okay for you to lie to your upstream advertisers about the effectiveness of the ads because the impression is still technically counted? That's rich.
I never said one or the other was "okay," I merely said that if Otto's going to have the attitude that "It's my computer, fuck you if you don't like it that I block your ads," then it's equally justifiable for me as John Q. Webhost to say, "Okay, if you're gonna be such a jerk, then fuck you, too, I'll do everything in my power to make sure you can't see my site at all." I'm not saying that I, personally, would actually do this if I ran such a site; just that such behavior would be justifiable, when dealing with selfish jerks like Otto.
Furthermore, I'm only lying if I know for a fact that the ads are being downloaded but not rendered. As I'd have no way to know the exact magnitude of the phenomenon (certainly some percentage of my viewers would be doing that -- and the advertisers would be aware of that, too, and probably factor it into their prices), there wouldn't be anything I could do about it and ergo it wouldn't be my responsibility.
Remember, we didn't have any such restrictions when we went through this stage.
Yeah, but we weren't really up on the idea yet that our behavior could have long-term climatic consequences for the planet. Now we do know that we can affect things. (Whether or not our actions *are* having long-term consequences is another story.) Nonetheless, if we were certain that polluting was a bad idea, we shouldn't let others do it just to "be fair" since we got to do it. (We might want to let them do it for other reasons, as you pointed out -- getting them up to speed, industrially, for example.)
I've been wondering for a while why we haven't seen any really nasty virus epidemics -- I'm not talking massive DDOS, or spamfloods. I'm talking, a virus that infects a few million hosts over the course of a day or two, and then at a predetermined time, starts formatting the hard drive.
Given how fast some recent viruses seem to have spread, it certainly seems feasible. So why do these viruses always have fairly innocuous payloads? It would seem a relatively simple thing to write a virus like this -- not to mention release it anonymously and never tell anyone about it. Is it just that the people capable of doing this are all ethical enough not to? Or that the ones who aren't ethical enough, are dumb enough to get caught? Or that nobody, I mean nobody would want to see the havoc wrought by such a virus?
Why haven't we seen a virus like this yet? Is it because such a virus isn't possible, or just because no one's bothered yet?
I'm not going to do it and I don't give a damn about your business model depending on it.
Dude, it's in your own damn interests to view the ads (not look at them, simply let them load and ignore them). Why? Because that is what keeps the site "free" for you. When enough people who view a site have your attitude, the site becomes unable to support itself via ads, and has to find another way -- which means that you either end up paying cash directly (something that you don't seem likely to do, given your cheap-ass nature), or goes away entirely. Donations and merchandise are not always enough to support a site that can't charge for the primary content.
Considering your "tough shit" attitude, I'd be willing to help write an Apache module that detects IPs who view my pages but not my ads, and block those IPs for an hour or so. Don't like it if I don't want you to view my content without viewing my ads? Tough shit. (Yeah, maybe you set up Proxomitron to render the ads but not actually *display* them... which is fine by providers, because the ad impression is still counted. Unfortunately, most ad blockers don't do this.)
Um, he was saying that Revelation was an allegory about contemporary (2nd-century) politics. In other words, Revelation isn't even legitimately spiritual -- it's just a political diatribe that's had the names changed to protect the ignorant. He's not claiming that any of the specific events mentioned in Revelation (e.g. sun turning into sackcloth) actually happened.
Also, what is praying supposed to accomplish? Asking nonexistent entities to do things isn't a particularly effective way of getting those things done.
1. The 9th Circuit Court produces more rulings (numerically) than any other circuit court;
2. Only a tiny fraction of the 9th's decisions are actually granted cert by the Supreme Court;
3. Of the cases granted cert (i.e. the ones that the Supreme Court actually reviews), a higher percentage are overturned (something like 75% for the 9th Circuit Court), compared to other courts (more like 60-65%, as I recall, but I don't have the actual statistics in front of me);
4. But ultimately, only something like 2% of the 9th Circuit Court's decisions are overturned. Meanwhile, the other circuit courts have overturn rates of something like 1.5-1.7%.
One common (bogus) debating tactic often used by those who disagree with the 9th's decisions is to quote #3 without mentioning the rest. They make it sound as if 75% of the 9th's decisions are overturned, when what they really mean is that 75% of the decisions that SCOTUS takes an interest in get overturned. But then, that makes sense (or at least that it's higher than 50%): If SCOTUS looks at a decision and agrees with it, it's not going to grant cert, it's simply going to remain silent and let the ruling stand. If it looks at a decision which is obviously wrong, or is at the very least questionable and confusing, then there's a decent chance it'll get overturned.
I don't know whether the 9th is a "laughingstock" in any meaningful sense, or whether you're simply extrapolating from having read other posts that claimed that the 9th court gets overturned "constantly.":)
Get that in your damn head. Every citizen (who cares) should have the right to get a deep insight into how his vote is eletronically processed. If you're not allowed to know how your vote is processed you have no democrazy.
I dunno... "democrazy" sounds like a proper label for a political system where citizens aren't allowed to have oversight over the voting process!
Firstly, do you think big business or government would ever let this technology get into the hands of Joe Average citizen?
One would hope that the researcher would be ethical and anonymously release the information onto the Internet. There's no controlling information once it's that widespread.
No more shipping, no more massive manufacturing.
Oh no! How will John Q. Factory Worker feed his family, when all the factories shut down? Wait, everyone will have nanoassemblers, they'll just dump a shovelful of dirt into it and have it make food. And clothes. And whatever else they need. So I wouldn't need to work, because I can simply *make* everything I want. (Within reason; nanoassemblers aren't particle accelerators, even theoretically, and I'm not gonna be making uranium and plutonium from carbon and oxygen, not without somebody noticing and it taking a long time.)
So, with that all said, you'd never have one of these in your home, and it's probably not for the reasons stated above. The government would be so scared that radicals of some kind would get their hands on this technology and use it to manufacture guns / explosives / etc.
So, yeah, I see this technolgy existing, I just don't ever see it in our hands. It'll be buried deeply in some manufacturing or recycling plant and it'll be licensed and heavily monitored.
Except once it exists, information about it will invariably leak -- and once someone knows it's possible, they'll eventually (independently) figure out how to make one. And once someone with the proper mindset makes one, then everyone will have one.
Also keep in mind that most terrorism/wars are ultimately over resource issues. Group A can't get the standard of living we want because Group B is oppressing them, or abusing their economic power, or whatever. Well, when Group A can make food, guns, clothes, and medical supplies without needing any resources from Group B, Group A's not going to be able to oppress them any more, are they?
Yeah, it's obviously all a lot more complex than this, but the fundamentals remain true.
I don't know who the Googlewatch guy is, but he's got a bizarre grudge against Google for no fathomable reason. Let's examine his list of "dangers":
1. Google's immortal cookie:
Google was the first search engine to use a cookie that expires in 2038. This was at a time when federal websites were prohibited from using persistent cookies altogether. Now it's years later, and immortal cookies are commonplace among search engines; Google set the standard because no one bothered to challenge them. This cookie places a unique ID number on your hard disk. Anytime you land on a Google page, you get a Google cookie if you don't already have one. If you have one, they read and record your unique ID number.
So delete the cookie, or turn off cookies if cookies bother you. Or use a browser that lets you easily block cookies on a per-domain basis. And what difference does it make how long the cookie lasts? Is one year better than 35 years? How about two years? Four? Ten? Where's the line? Why should there be a line?
2. Google records everything they can:
For all searches they record the cookie ID, your Internet IP address, the time and date, your search terms, and your browser configuration. Increasingly, Google is customizing results based on your IP number. This is referred to in the industry as "IP delivery based on geolocation."
This sounds like an actual service to me. If I'm searching for stores that sell product X, why exactly would I want hits for stores that are in other states? Yes, there's always the privacy issue, but is there any evidence that Google is selling targeted information to spammers or doing anything nefarious with this information?
3. Google retains all data indefinitely:
Google has no data retention policies. There is evidence that they are able to easily access all the user information they collect and save.
User information? Google's never collected any *personal* information from me. Maybe they correlate all the searches that come from my home IPs, which won't do them much good if I ever move or get a new IP. (My work IP is a router that represents several hundred computers, so good luck on them tracking me through there). What data are they retaining that could be bad, exactly?
4. Google won't say why they need this data:
Inquiries to Google about their privacy policies are ignored. When the New York Times (2002-11-28) asked Sergey Brin about whether Google ever gets subpoenaed for this information, he had no comment.
Google probably should answer this one, assuming that this statement is accurate. Given the oddly-shaped axe that Googlewatch seems to be grinding, I wouldn't be surprised if this one was taken out of context.
5. Google hires spooks:
Matt Cutts, a key Google engineer, used to work for the National Security Agency. Google wants to hire more people with security clearances, so that they can peddle their corporate assets to the spooks in Washington.
And the problem with this is... what?
6. Google's toolbar is spyware:
With the advanced features enabled, Google's free toolbar for Explorer phones home with every page you surf, and yes, it reads your cookie too. Their privacy policy confesses this, but that's only because Alexa lost a class-action lawsuit when their toolbar did the same thing, and their privacy policy failed to explain this. Worse yet, Google's toolbar updates to new versions quietly, and without asking. This means that if you have the toolbar installed, Google essentially has complete access to your hard disk every time you connect to Google (which is many times a day). Most software vendors, and even Microsoft, ask if you'd like an updated version. But not Google. Any software that updates automatically presents a m
Because some of us don't use caffeine.:) Like someone else pointed out, independence is a strong aspect of hacker culture. Let's all show our independence by wearing a logo!
I hate to say this, but the Supreme Court some time ago interpreted the 10th Amendment to mean exactly what the federal government acts like it means. This link on FindLaw that explains it better (if a bit more verbosely). "Clear language" is not always so clear.
Drug abuse -- and yes I am focusing on abuse -- leads to a whole host of social and mental health problems.
That's mostly because drug use is so massively stigmatized in our society. It's difficult to get treatment for the problem. Admit that you use and you might end up in jail. People can't get the help they need. We don't teach people (especially kids) how to use mind-altering substances responsibly when they grow up, we just tell them not to do it and lie to them about the dangers. Then they find out we're lying, get pissed off, and break the law anyway. Heck, we don't even do a good job with the legal drugs -- alcohol, tobacco, nicotine, caffeine. What fucking idiot thinks that the best way to get people to be responsible about something is to withhold information about it from them?
Most of the "social problems" "caused" by drug use are actually caused by the legal system in place to punish those who use or possess drugs -- your kid borrows the car, and his friend has a joint? The car might get impounded permanently by the police (and there are laws that allow this, laws that violate due process and for some reason keep not getting thrown out as unconstitutional, but let's not go there now). And now you're out thousands of dollars for a new car, because of our retarded, backward drug laws. (And can someone explain to me why alcohol's legal and regulated but marijuana's illegal, considering that alcohol has more detrimental physical effects?)
He's not claiming that StarKist are the ones paying more than $0.77/can for the tuna. The point is that StarKist's trucks, for example, use public roads that StarKist does not pay for. They put out pollution that StarKist does not pay to have cleaned up. These are externalized costs, in that they are not paid for directly by the people who incur them. Yes, someone pays for it, but not StarKist.
The point is that StarKist can sell cans of tuna for $0.77 each, but the rest of us are shouldering some of the burden that lets them only charge $0.77 per can.
Here's a simpler example. Imagine there were no environmental regulations. You run a factory that spews pollution into the air. Prevailing winds carry the polution a couple hundred miles downwind, to a nearby city. None of your employees live in that city. So all your costs involve paying for your materials, your employees, and your distributors. Meanwhile, health care costs in the polluted city rise by some amount because of the pollution you contribute. That pollution is an externalized cost: someone is paying for it, but not the entity (person or company) who is producing it.
The original point is that U.S. companies externalize a lot of their costs to other countries. (Whether this is specifically true in certain situations is another company, but externalization of costs is a very real thing in economics.)
It amazes me how many geeks reach for the social engineering solution instead of the ingenious, creative technical response that is the hallmark of geekdom.
SUVs still take up too much space, are a danger to smaller vehicles, and even at 100 MPG would STILL be less efficient than smaller vehicles (which would also make use of the 100 MPG technologies). Technological coolness is not the only criterion for judging a solution's worth to society.
Slashdot Mirror
The main reason I didn't like it was because the narrative was so scattershot. Here's a more detailed list, in no particular order of significance:
- The Battle of Zion took up too much screen time. We go about 35 minutes without seeing Neo or Trinity. They're supposed to be the main characters, but we spend all this time with all these secondary characters (Zee, the Kid, Captain Mifune, Locke) going through all these war movie cliches. (My wife pointed out that we didn't really need to see the entire rocket launcher loading process four times.) It was like we were watching another movie.
- They spend all this screen time, at least 5 minutes, dealing with Zee and her friend and how they go to all this effort to blow up the digger. Yay! Good work, guys! Except here comes another one, so basically all that effort (and Zee's friend getting killed) were basically for nothing. If they'd spent 20 seconds on it, and then been thwarted by the arrival of another digger, that would have been fine, because we wouldn't have basically wasted all this time.
- The whole bit with the train station seemed kind of tenuous. Like, Ha ha ha! You're trapped here... FOREVER! Except that Trinity's just going to threaten the Merovingian a little bit, and he'll fold faster than a magazine, and you'll be out of here in ten minutes. (And the Merovingian goes on about the Oracle's eyes, and how important they are... and then nothing ever really happens with it. I guess Smith got her eyes, but we don't know what he saw (maybe he saw his victory over Neo -- but then I'm just guessing, because I figured he was cackling maniacally because, well, he's evil and has the ORACLE'S POWER MUAHAHAHA). Well, that was dramatically effective, only, not. The escaping programs (the Indian guy and his family) were interesting, sort of, except all the dialogue in his scenes just went ON and ON and didn't really accomplish much.
- Smith absorbs the Oracle, and then after all the Smiths are blown up (and how exactly he blows them up? I guess he... uh... somehow sent some kind of mystical energy into the Matrix... or something?), hey! There's the Oracle, lying randomly on the ground. Two minutes later she's sitting pretty on a park bench. The hell? I mean, I can come up with plausible fanwanks to explain it, but they're built on nothing but conjecture, because the movie gives us NOTHING to build on. The Oracle's just... there, and hey, it's all hunky-dory. (I thought they handled it well why she looked different.)
- How the hell did Neo get superpowers in the real world? They didn't even try to explain it. And he didn't even need them -- they served no purpose except as a mechanism for him to be able to "see" Bane/Smith and kill him, and then be able to "see" and defeat the random line of defenders of the machine city. Ultimately he didn't even use those powers to "win" -- he just did something inside the Matrix. They could have done better than simply giving him inexplicable superpowers to get him to where he can talk to the Machine (and for Christ's sake, the Machine's name was "Deus Ex Machina").
I like the fact that in the last two movies we got some answers to our questions, and that there was some resolution to the conflicts. (And the questions we got answers to were the non-philosophical ones, like, what the fuck is Smith's problem, who is the goddamn Oracle, who will win in the end, etc. I know you can't (and shouldn't) provide pat, compact answers to the philosophical questions.) I just didn't think they told the story very well.Well, I don't know if webcomics count, but what about Boa Yvette?!
Just because you don't lock your door, doesn't mean you don't prosecute the guy who breaks in and steals your TV. No, I'm not going to feel sorry for you that your TV got stolen -- but the thief still made the conscious decision to break the law.
Dude, I work for a fucking website for a living (one of the biggest on the Internet). I do get it, probably far better than you ever will. You're right, nobody owes you a living -- but if Otto's attitude is that he can do whatever the hell he wants when viewing my site, then I'm perfectly justified in taking the attitude that I can do whatever I fucking want, including blocking Otto from seeing my website.
If Otto's going to use my resources (bandwidth, server processing time) without compensating me for it (viewing the ads), then how am I not justified in preventing him from using my resources? Just because he doesn't like ads, I should make an exception for him?
Furthermore, I'm only lying if I know for a fact that the ads are being downloaded but not rendered. As I'd have no way to know the exact magnitude of the phenomenon (certainly some percentage of my viewers would be doing that -- and the advertisers would be aware of that, too, and probably factor it into their prices), there wouldn't be anything I could do about it and ergo it wouldn't be my responsibility.
The point of such arguments is to embarrass the opponent. "What? You still believe in Santa Claus? *snerk*"
I've been wondering for a while why we haven't seen any really nasty virus epidemics -- I'm not talking massive DDOS, or spamfloods. I'm talking, a virus that infects a few million hosts over the course of a day or two, and then at a predetermined time, starts formatting the hard drive.
Given how fast some recent viruses seem to have spread, it certainly seems feasible. So why do these viruses always have fairly innocuous payloads? It would seem a relatively simple thing to write a virus like this -- not to mention release it anonymously and never tell anyone about it. Is it just that the people capable of doing this are all ethical enough not to? Or that the ones who aren't ethical enough, are dumb enough to get caught? Or that nobody, I mean nobody would want to see the havoc wrought by such a virus?
Why haven't we seen a virus like this yet? Is it because such a virus isn't possible, or just because no one's bothered yet?
Considering your "tough shit" attitude, I'd be willing to help write an Apache module that detects IPs who view my pages but not my ads, and block those IPs for an hour or so. Don't like it if I don't want you to view my content without viewing my ads? Tough shit. (Yeah, maybe you set up Proxomitron to render the ads but not actually *display* them... which is fine by providers, because the ad impression is still counted. Unfortunately, most ad blockers don't do this.)
Um, he was saying that Revelation was an allegory about contemporary (2nd-century) politics. In other words, Revelation isn't even legitimately spiritual -- it's just a political diatribe that's had the names changed to protect the ignorant. He's not claiming that any of the specific events mentioned in Revelation (e.g. sun turning into sackcloth) actually happened.
Also, what is praying supposed to accomplish? Asking nonexistent entities to do things isn't a particularly effective way of getting those things done.
Try again, bucko: AT&T's reply to the FCC's announcement.
That's a drastic oversimplification of reality.
:)
1. The 9th Circuit Court produces more rulings (numerically) than any other circuit court;
2. Only a tiny fraction of the 9th's decisions are actually granted cert by the Supreme Court;
3. Of the cases granted cert (i.e. the ones that the Supreme Court actually reviews), a higher percentage are overturned (something like 75% for the 9th Circuit Court), compared to other courts (more like 60-65%, as I recall, but I don't have the actual statistics in front of me);
4. But ultimately, only something like 2% of the 9th Circuit Court's decisions are overturned. Meanwhile, the other circuit courts have overturn rates of something like 1.5-1.7%.
One common (bogus) debating tactic often used by those who disagree with the 9th's decisions is to quote #3 without mentioning the rest. They make it sound as if 75% of the 9th's decisions are overturned, when what they really mean is that 75% of the decisions that SCOTUS takes an interest in get overturned. But then, that makes sense (or at least that it's higher than 50%): If SCOTUS looks at a decision and agrees with it, it's not going to grant cert, it's simply going to remain silent and let the ruling stand. If it looks at a decision which is obviously wrong, or is at the very least questionable and confusing, then there's a decent chance it'll get overturned.
I don't know whether the 9th is a "laughingstock" in any meaningful sense, or whether you're simply extrapolating from having read other posts that claimed that the 9th court gets overturned "constantly."
If you've been following the progress of Duke Nukem Forever, you might come to the conclusion that there still aren't any Duke Nukem games!
Also keep in mind that most terrorism/wars are ultimately over resource issues. Group A can't get the standard of living we want because Group B is oppressing them, or abusing their economic power, or whatever. Well, when Group A can make food, guns, clothes, and medical supplies without needing any resources from Group B, Group A's not going to be able to oppress them any more, are they?
Yeah, it's obviously all a lot more complex than this, but the fundamentals remain true.
So delete the cookie, or turn off cookies if cookies bother you. Or use a browser that lets you easily block cookies on a per-domain basis. And what difference does it make how long the cookie lasts? Is one year better than 35 years? How about two years? Four? Ten? Where's the line? Why should there be a line?
This sounds like an actual service to me. If I'm searching for stores that sell product X, why exactly would I want hits for stores that are in other states? Yes, there's always the privacy issue, but is there any evidence that Google is selling targeted information to spammers or doing anything nefarious with this information?
User information? Google's never collected any *personal* information from me. Maybe they correlate all the searches that come from my home IPs, which won't do them much good if I ever move or get a new IP. (My work IP is a router that represents several hundred computers, so good luck on them tracking me through there). What data are they retaining that could be bad, exactly?
Google probably should answer this one, assuming that this statement is accurate. Given the oddly-shaped axe that Googlewatch seems to be grinding, I wouldn't be surprised if this one was taken out of context.
And the problem with this is... what?
Because some of us don't use caffeine. :) Like someone else pointed out, independence is a strong aspect of hacker culture. Let's all show our independence by wearing a logo!
I hate to say this, but the Supreme Court some time ago interpreted the 10th Amendment to mean exactly what the federal government acts like it means. This link on FindLaw that explains it better (if a bit more verbosely). "Clear language" is not always so clear.
Most of the "social problems" "caused" by drug use are actually caused by the legal system in place to punish those who use or possess drugs -- your kid borrows the car, and his friend has a joint? The car might get impounded permanently by the police (and there are laws that allow this, laws that violate due process and for some reason keep not getting thrown out as unconstitutional, but let's not go there now). And now you're out thousands of dollars for a new car, because of our retarded, backward drug laws. (And can someone explain to me why alcohol's legal and regulated but marijuana's illegal, considering that alcohol has more detrimental physical effects?)
Pay attention. This is for PDAs, not desktops.
He's not claiming that StarKist are the ones paying more than $0.77/can for the tuna. The point is that StarKist's trucks, for example, use public roads that StarKist does not pay for. They put out pollution that StarKist does not pay to have cleaned up. These are externalized costs, in that they are not paid for directly by the people who incur them. Yes, someone pays for it, but not StarKist.
The point is that StarKist can sell cans of tuna for $0.77 each, but the rest of us are shouldering some of the burden that lets them only charge $0.77 per can.
Here's a simpler example. Imagine there were no environmental regulations. You run a factory that spews pollution into the air. Prevailing winds carry the polution a couple hundred miles downwind, to a nearby city. None of your employees live in that city. So all your costs involve paying for your materials, your employees, and your distributors. Meanwhile, health care costs in the polluted city rise by some amount because of the pollution you contribute. That pollution is an externalized cost: someone is paying for it, but not the entity (person or company) who is producing it.
The original point is that U.S. companies externalize a lot of their costs to other countries. (Whether this is specifically true in certain situations is another company, but externalization of costs is a very real thing in economics.)