ALL bubbles end badly as they are doomed to burst from day one.
Booms work on psychology of crowds until some unseen actor "flips the switch."
Sounds like sour grapes from somebody who didn't get out in time.
I agree it doesn't always work out well for the crowd, especially in the short term. But if it ends badly depends on where you are standing at the end. If it was ending badly for your unseen actor, he wouldn't flip the switch yet.
I remember the bubble. I remember the headhunter saying, a murder conviction maybe I still can't find you a tech job, but if it is only manslaughter, lets talk.
Hiring is recovering. The economy is doing well. Stocks are doing well. Nothing is overheated though, wages are fairly stagnant, and few companies are getting large investments without traditional business analysis.
I wish there would be a new bubble, I dream of a new bubble, but sadly, there is no bubble. You want money, you have to earn or scam it under normal market conditions, there is no funding for pipe-dreams, there is no overheated labor market pushing my rates up.
There isn't even a Y2K scam to dip in on. The next best bet is 2038 and the End of the Epoch. But so far a lot of jerks have already prepared the OSes for it, so the only profit center there might be the same COBOL systems that were last upgraded in `99. I'll make sure to keep my COBOL skills polished, but it seems like a longshot.
No, granting loans increases the money supply, but it doesn't go away when it is repaid. There is no mechanism for deflation built in, because it is not a useful effect.
If there is less money *changing hands* in the system it will sure seem like there is less money. And that only happens if people stop spending. Making bad investments doesn't cause money to change hands more slowly, it makes it flow faster! Until it crashes and they freak out. Then you just issue cheap loans to get people spending. Or even, just make new (bad) investments!
It doesn't matter if the investments are "good" or "bad," what matters is that money keeps changing hands. People at the top will sock some away, regardless of what their tax statement says. Even they don't care if their investments were "good" or "bad."
You only lost your 401k if you cashed it out while the market was in the dumps. If you'd have left it where it was, like you were supposed to do, then it would have increased in value.
You're also supposed to shift your stock investments out into money market or other low-risk devices about 8 years before you plan to retire, so that the timing of the market fluctuations doesn't leave you screwed.
You see the game being rigged because you drank the propaganda and believed that when the market goes down, 401k accounts some evaporate. But they don't.
If your primary security concern is a federal subpoena, and you're using unencrypted email (the main kind the subpoena would matter for) then you're hosed anyways. Using a Russian server guarantees that when the feds want your data, they can get it from existing government databases; potentially without bothering with that pesky subpoena paperwork.
It doesn't really seem like there is a use case. If you're happier with the service, great. More power to you. But it is basically impossible that you've increased your privacy, or reduced the availability of your messages to the US Government.
There is sure a lot of hate. And I can understand it to a certain extent; I've been running ad-blockers consistently since the 90s. I used to have doubleclick in my hosts file to reduce the filter load, too.
But google is the only ad company that doesn't sell your info. I hear a lot of people just shouting randomly that they are "evil," but without any real reasons. They discontinue services that I used to rely on, which is their right, and as a result I'm unlikely to adopt new services. But there is nothing evil about that, it is a straightforwards application of their own prerogatives.
All the other ad companies sell information about you. All of them. Google is the only one with the reach to even try to offer what they do, which is a system where the advertisers can target ads without any information about the targets. They are clearly way less evil than the other ad companies.
If you're going to host and run your own email, then obviously you can have more power over it. But using another corporate email provider will rarely protect any data, since you're already with the company that doesn't sell data about you. Just about everybody else does sell data, including companies that don't sell advertising. Even my mechanic leaked my phone number to some random company so they could send a TXT spam.
Just wave your hands shouting "evil" while you switch to companies that sell their data on you. That'll teach `em!
I agree their is room for low-margin electronics. In fact, I only use low margin stuff because I hate proprietary crap, and high margin always means you're paying for label, and labels only have value when they're proprietary. Aesthetics aside, Sony is perceived as being a stylish brand, so it was a good choice for you, and were probably making better use of the label than any actual aesthetics. And it isn't clear that "better" aesthetics increases margin outside of brand-association. I think in general it is assumed that spending more money improving the aesthetics will decrease the profit margin, everything else being equal. There is obviously a lot more subtlety to it, though.
The last "console" I owned was a Sega Genesis. Luckily, I sold it off to a guy from the local BBS right before the resale price crashed. I guess around `97.
XBox is a good example of a low-margin console, where it was sold at a loss because the game prices were inflated to make it up. The margin of the combined XBox console+games business is very high, though; much higher than any commodity consumer electronics. I'm not convinced it has tie-in potential that has either benefited MS, or will after not doing so for a decade.
Is there a use-case for tie-ins with desktops? I can't see it. Phones in general I can see it as an edge case, but nobody is going to choose a phone OS based on it. There isn't a useful enough feature demonstrated. It would need to be portable, an app that runs on different phones, not a driver connecting console sales with phone sales.
Sony has higher console tie-in potential than MS IMO, because of their media properties. It isn't as interesting as it sounds though; the clearer business decision is to NOT make a max play at the tie-ins, but what to see which movies are successful, and put the game development work in afterwards. Then they've lost any advantage. They'd have to be better at making predicable box-office hits than anybody is. And when you're doing it afterwards it doesn't matter.
My prediction is that Steam will wipe out the console game premium before anybody "solves" how to leverage their proprietary tie-ins. And then consoles will just be embedded PCs with low margins, and nobody will waste money researching tie-in scams. Luckily for Sony, they won't be wiped out because they won't have followed the advice in TFS.
Right, thank you for verifying what I said. It still seems you're regurgitating right-wing anti-Sagan-isms, because he doesn't say anything incorrect. Those were real risks, depending on the weather. And none of that contradicts what I said, so I'm not sure why you responded with it.
The funny part about it is that Carl Sagan... is actually an expert on the subject, with academic papers on nuclear winter effects that analyze known past events like volcanic eruptions. You're wrong on both counts: that he was outside his expertise, and that he was even wrong about something.
The one thing that remains unexplained though is: Why do you hate Carl Sagan? Was it the weed?
Right, but does the existence of a PC disguised as console and preloaded with Steam really say anything about Sony?
Sony is in the console industry, and the broader entertainment industry already, and they have a history in set-top boxes.
The railroad example only works in one direction; a company that ignores the larger market. It doesn't work to tell us about a company that already exists in the larger market, and other larger markets, and other large markets, and that sees many of these not being profitable.
The railroads lost out because they failed to even compete. Sony isn't in that situation, and the current restructuring plans don't implicate that situation. Sony is instead exiting from some areas it failed in, and moving around the rest so that the profit centers are in the corporate package together, and other parts are hidden away in owned subsidiaries. From a nerd perspective the whole thing can be summarized as, "some Sony divisions will be getting new names to make the bean-counters happy."
Steam being disruptive and having further disruptive potential is a totally different thing, and some brand of PC-fake-console is irrelevant to that, and doesn't drag Sony in.
One credulous enough to grant trust today, might renew that trust tomorrow.
If you think trust was lost because "NSA," then you might just be credulous enough to be convinced. Maybe not by me, but by a person commanding enough resources and enough parallel constructions that relate to your own life.
The only way not to be deceived by trust is not to trust. Trust lost is trust longing to be re-found.
Luckily for us, we were inside your ISP's server, and were able to provide you with corrected hashes from the official URLs, and various original sources. It wasn't that hard, we just dumped your traffic through special transparent proxies that scanned the response data for the original hashes, and replaced them.
True, you didn't built everything from source, but you were happy enough that everything traced back to "the" sources to make you feel secure. That's a lot more protection than anything from a commercial vendor, who probably just sold you formulaic encryption without any extra work to make you feel secure. Your data would have been more secure, if not actually secure, but you'd have felt it less, because really you have no way of knowing. So without somebody taking the extra time to make you feel secure, you naturally wouldn't feel it very much, if at all.
Ah, yes. We know that know nothing, so have learned everything. Wait, we know everything, so we learned nothing. Nonono. We learned everything, so we know nothing. Okay, okay, we know nothing, and... and... I keep getting stuck right there. We can't really know anything. Encryption relies on trust, and nothing can be trusted. There is no method of verification of anything.
The obvious implication is that encryption cannot protect us from over-arching conspiracy. You don't need to adjust your tin foil for that, either; however much conspiracy you believe in/worry about, then encryption can't protect you from that. So don't bother.
Encryption is probably only useful against relatively powerless individuals who want to steal your crumbs or find out who you're sleeping with. The more safety you think you need, the less able encryption will be to provide it. If you're a dishonest spouse and trying to hide that, it might be effective; unless you're willing to write a part in the conspiracy for your spouse, then not so much. Though getting busted and divorced might be the most expedient path to a healthy, self-consistent life. But encryption can never protect you from yourself.
And if you want to protect your data from The Wench, you'll need an automatic suicide implant with a strict watchdog timer. But nobody should ever let themselves become that embarrassed about what pr0n they watch.
The suddenness of the TC team's departure (having throughout TC's history promised never ever to have any backdoor) coupled with the U.S. gov (FBI)'s inability to crack a South American's business computer after a full year of trying, suggests that their departure was a consequence of U.S. government pressure.
I'm not saying it didn't happen, because nobody knows. But the connection to the US Government here is only as strong as the connection to the Chinese Government, the Russian Government, or the Martian Government. You're just waving your hands while being anti-American.
They can't force manufacturers to not install junkware on the computers they sell
See, I wouldn't have expected that sort of... oddity from your user number. I'm assuming you inherited your grandparent's account and weren't around for the 90s?
...our laptops are for consumers to buy crap online, and not for any kind of serious work....
Considering that Lenovo has a consumer line of laptops and a business line of laptops (the ThinkPad brand), there may be a shred of truth in what you say.
A shred I'll grant. But I think the Yoga line has been advertised mainly as a business accessory, as a phablet for light or portable business use.
They also present their "consumer" line as being good for "small business" on their website, so it is not so clear really.
Of course there will be appeals, and of course this is just another weird decision from Texas that will get reversed by the Appeals Court.
Not really sure why it hit slashdot before an appeal. This is routine nonsense a case has to go through when you're suing anybody with deep pockets. Justice will be delayed, but not denied; the wheels of Justice turn slowly, but they do turn.
So I did google it, and discovered you're probably a credulous right-winger, or at least you've possibly fallen victim to right-wing pontifications.
Compare what is accused in right-wing media:
Though Dr. Sagan is one of the most frequently cited experts on atmospheric issues by the media, his predictions are often wrong. For example, at the outset of the Persian Gulf War, Sagan warned that if Saddam Hussein delivered on his threat to set fire to Kuwait's oil wells, so much black soot would be sent into the stratosphere that sunlight would be blocked and a variation of the "nuclear winter" scenario would occur.
with what he actually said:
Cornell University astronomer Carl Sagan says Saddam Hussein's orders to torch Kuwaiti oil wells, if carried far enough, could unleash smoke clouds that would disrupt agriculture across South Asia and darken skies around the world.
"You need a very small lowering of the average temperatures of the Northern Hemisphere to have serious consequences for agriculture," Sagan said. ... Sagan and UCLA scientist Richard Turco have compared the potential for disaster with the 1815 explosion of the Tambora volcano in Indonesia. That event sent enough ash and debris into the sky to make 1816 the "year without summer" in the United States and caused crop failures in other parts of the world. ... Sagan later conceded in his book The Demon-Haunted World that his prediction did not turn out to be correct: "it was pitch black at noon and temperatures dropped 4–6 C over the Persian Gulf, but not much smoke reached stratospheric altitudes and Asia was spared."
And so it was all accurate. Depending on the exact conditions at the time, the smoke either will or won't be pushed higher in the atmosphere and disrupt agriculture. This isn't something he predicted would happen, that didn't happen. This is something that he predicted was a risk, that didn't happen. Had the weather patterns lifted the smoke to the elevations he discussed being a risk, the results he predicted (serious impact on agriculture in SE Asia for a year) would indeed have been likely.
Sagan did also co-author academic papers on nuclear winter, as in, following nuclear strike. That was mostly in the early 80s. Generally all the "right wing," "anti-Sagan" stuff tries to conflate that with his Kuwait concerns, often even to the point of mentioning his nuclear winter papers as a mid-sentence aside while discussing Kuwait, and without any clarification.
I guess a better example would be any of Richard Feynman's forays outside his field. Right?
It might be in error to try too hard to make sense of his comment; it wasn't well considered at all.
If it was in fact useful during the Stone Age, then it is still useful; what law of physics guarantees our continued technology level? Might our species have need in the future of the traits that got us here? Is there a non-zero chance that the future will contain periodic Stone-Age-like eras? What if a comet destroys modern civilization? Is one less war really worth giving away proven adaptability?
Worse, there is no science behind the idea that reducing aggression at the species level would reduce suffering, improve life, or even that nuclear weapons are caused by aggression.
The obvious angle here is aggression towards one another, not aggression towards other species.
Because of the distribution of traits, there would always be sufficient edge cases where that aggression was towards one another. It is a mathematical certainty.
Your logic has a very large hole in it. Human traits are distributed according to a natural distribution, and mutations happen. Evolution happens. Convergent evolution happens. If there was no aggression today, perhaps tomorrow we would be ruled by those who re-evolved it.
Man's biggest failure may be failing to stand up to aggression, but get RID of aggression? Not going to happen, and not a good thing if it did. Leaders are aggressive.
Yeah, my instant thought was, "great, without aggression we'd all be slaves of the mutant who had it."
News Flash: The NSA isn't part of the US State Department. They are part of the US Department of Defense.
Generally those are departments are considered to be substantially at odds; one is in charge of diplomacy, the other is in charge of blowing things up. They have different wants and needs, and generally would not feel each others pain.
If you hate something but don't understand it, what do you really hate? Answer: You really hate yourself, because without understanding you must be hating a thing that exists only inside your own mind. Unfortunately, this is the future. And the past.
Because a programmer that replaces something... must not know how it works?
Uh.....
I know you wanted to spew some hate, but I don't think you really thought that one through. If my SysV init scripts needed "checking," and I had Mr Poettering in my employ, he would be a fine person to "check" them because he is a talented programmer who understands shell scripting.
BTW, it is SysV init, not sysVinit. It just means the style of init script that AT&T had in their System V UNIX from the 80s, which replaced the BSD style that was in use prior to that. (And that continues to be used by the major BSD distros today)
To make the current hate-spewing-fad even funnier in its ignorance, Slackware Linux doesn't even use SysV-style init, they use BSD-style. And Gentoo doesn't use either. You wouldn't know it from Slashdot comments though, where Slackware users who don't know shit about *nix init systems or shell scripts will happily defend their intention to "keep" using SysV init. roflcopter!
Slashdot Mirror
ALL bubbles end badly as they are doomed to burst from day one.
Booms work on psychology of crowds until some unseen actor "flips the switch."
Sounds like sour grapes from somebody who didn't get out in time.
I agree it doesn't always work out well for the crowd, especially in the short term. But if it ends badly depends on where you are standing at the end. If it was ending badly for your unseen actor, he wouldn't flip the switch yet.
I remember the bubble. I remember the headhunter saying, a murder conviction maybe I still can't find you a tech job, but if it is only manslaughter, lets talk.
Hiring is recovering. The economy is doing well. Stocks are doing well. Nothing is overheated though, wages are fairly stagnant, and few companies are getting large investments without traditional business analysis.
I wish there would be a new bubble, I dream of a new bubble, but sadly, there is no bubble. You want money, you have to earn or scam it under normal market conditions, there is no funding for pipe-dreams, there is no overheated labor market pushing my rates up.
There isn't even a Y2K scam to dip in on. The next best bet is 2038 and the End of the Epoch. But so far a lot of jerks have already prepared the OSes for it, so the only profit center there might be the same COBOL systems that were last upgraded in `99. I'll make sure to keep my COBOL skills polished, but it seems like a longshot.
No, granting loans increases the money supply, but it doesn't go away when it is repaid. There is no mechanism for deflation built in, because it is not a useful effect.
If there is less money *changing hands* in the system it will sure seem like there is less money. And that only happens if people stop spending. Making bad investments doesn't cause money to change hands more slowly, it makes it flow faster! Until it crashes and they freak out. Then you just issue cheap loans to get people spending. Or even, just make new (bad) investments!
It doesn't matter if the investments are "good" or "bad," what matters is that money keeps changing hands. People at the top will sock some away, regardless of what their tax statement says. Even they don't care if their investments were "good" or "bad."
You only lost your 401k if you cashed it out while the market was in the dumps. If you'd have left it where it was, like you were supposed to do, then it would have increased in value.
You're also supposed to shift your stock investments out into money market or other low-risk devices about 8 years before you plan to retire, so that the timing of the market fluctuations doesn't leave you screwed.
You see the game being rigged because you drank the propaganda and believed that when the market goes down, 401k accounts some evaporate. But they don't.
If your primary security concern is a federal subpoena, and you're using unencrypted email (the main kind the subpoena would matter for) then you're hosed anyways. Using a Russian server guarantees that when the feds want your data, they can get it from existing government databases; potentially without bothering with that pesky subpoena paperwork.
It doesn't really seem like there is a use case. If you're happier with the service, great. More power to you. But it is basically impossible that you've increased your privacy, or reduced the availability of your messages to the US Government.
There is sure a lot of hate. And I can understand it to a certain extent; I've been running ad-blockers consistently since the 90s. I used to have doubleclick in my hosts file to reduce the filter load, too.
But google is the only ad company that doesn't sell your info. I hear a lot of people just shouting randomly that they are "evil," but without any real reasons. They discontinue services that I used to rely on, which is their right, and as a result I'm unlikely to adopt new services. But there is nothing evil about that, it is a straightforwards application of their own prerogatives.
All the other ad companies sell information about you. All of them. Google is the only one with the reach to even try to offer what they do, which is a system where the advertisers can target ads without any information about the targets. They are clearly way less evil than the other ad companies.
If you're going to host and run your own email, then obviously you can have more power over it. But using another corporate email provider will rarely protect any data, since you're already with the company that doesn't sell data about you. Just about everybody else does sell data, including companies that don't sell advertising. Even my mechanic leaked my phone number to some random company so they could send a TXT spam.
Just wave your hands shouting "evil" while you switch to companies that sell their data on you. That'll teach `em!
I agree their is room for low-margin electronics. In fact, I only use low margin stuff because I hate proprietary crap, and high margin always means you're paying for label, and labels only have value when they're proprietary. Aesthetics aside, Sony is perceived as being a stylish brand, so it was a good choice for you, and were probably making better use of the label than any actual aesthetics. And it isn't clear that "better" aesthetics increases margin outside of brand-association. I think in general it is assumed that spending more money improving the aesthetics will decrease the profit margin, everything else being equal. There is obviously a lot more subtlety to it, though.
The last "console" I owned was a Sega Genesis. Luckily, I sold it off to a guy from the local BBS right before the resale price crashed. I guess around `97.
XBox is a good example of a low-margin console, where it was sold at a loss because the game prices were inflated to make it up. The margin of the combined XBox console+games business is very high, though; much higher than any commodity consumer electronics. I'm not convinced it has tie-in potential that has either benefited MS, or will after not doing so for a decade.
Is there a use-case for tie-ins with desktops? I can't see it. Phones in general I can see it as an edge case, but nobody is going to choose a phone OS based on it. There isn't a useful enough feature demonstrated. It would need to be portable, an app that runs on different phones, not a driver connecting console sales with phone sales.
Sony has higher console tie-in potential than MS IMO, because of their media properties. It isn't as interesting as it sounds though; the clearer business decision is to NOT make a max play at the tie-ins, but what to see which movies are successful, and put the game development work in afterwards. Then they've lost any advantage. They'd have to be better at making predicable box-office hits than anybody is. And when you're doing it afterwards it doesn't matter.
My prediction is that Steam will wipe out the console game premium before anybody "solves" how to leverage their proprietary tie-ins. And then consoles will just be embedded PCs with low margins, and nobody will waste money researching tie-in scams. Luckily for Sony, they won't be wiped out because they won't have followed the advice in TFS.
Right, thank you for verifying what I said. It still seems you're regurgitating right-wing anti-Sagan-isms, because he doesn't say anything incorrect. Those were real risks, depending on the weather. And none of that contradicts what I said, so I'm not sure why you responded with it.
The funny part about it is that Carl Sagan... is actually an expert on the subject, with academic papers on nuclear winter effects that analyze known past events like volcanic eruptions. You're wrong on both counts: that he was outside his expertise, and that he was even wrong about something.
The one thing that remains unexplained though is: Why do you hate Carl Sagan? Was it the weed?
Right, but does the existence of a PC disguised as console and preloaded with Steam really say anything about Sony?
Sony is in the console industry, and the broader entertainment industry already, and they have a history in set-top boxes.
The railroad example only works in one direction; a company that ignores the larger market. It doesn't work to tell us about a company that already exists in the larger market, and other larger markets, and other large markets, and that sees many of these not being profitable.
The railroads lost out because they failed to even compete. Sony isn't in that situation, and the current restructuring plans don't implicate that situation. Sony is instead exiting from some areas it failed in, and moving around the rest so that the profit centers are in the corporate package together, and other parts are hidden away in owned subsidiaries. From a nerd perspective the whole thing can be summarized as, "some Sony divisions will be getting new names to make the bean-counters happy."
Steam being disruptive and having further disruptive potential is a totally different thing, and some brand of PC-fake-console is irrelevant to that, and doesn't drag Sony in.
Once trust is granted, all is lost.
One credulous enough to grant trust today, might renew that trust tomorrow.
If you think trust was lost because "NSA," then you might just be credulous enough to be convinced. Maybe not by me, but by a person commanding enough resources and enough parallel constructions that relate to your own life.
The only way not to be deceived by trust is not to trust. Trust lost is trust longing to be re-found.
Luckily for us, we were inside your ISP's server, and were able to provide you with corrected hashes from the official URLs, and various original sources. It wasn't that hard, we just dumped your traffic through special transparent proxies that scanned the response data for the original hashes, and replaced them.
True, you didn't built everything from source, but you were happy enough that everything traced back to "the" sources to make you feel secure. That's a lot more protection than anything from a commercial vendor, who probably just sold you formulaic encryption without any extra work to make you feel secure. Your data would have been more secure, if not actually secure, but you'd have felt it less, because really you have no way of knowing. So without somebody taking the extra time to make you feel secure, you naturally wouldn't feel it very much, if at all.
DISCLAIMER: FICTION fnord
Ah, yes. We know that know nothing, so have learned everything. Wait, we know everything, so we learned nothing. Nonono. We learned everything, so we know nothing. Okay, okay, we know nothing, and... and... I keep getting stuck right there. We can't really know anything. Encryption relies on trust, and nothing can be trusted. There is no method of verification of anything.
The obvious implication is that encryption cannot protect us from over-arching conspiracy. You don't need to adjust your tin foil for that, either; however much conspiracy you believe in/worry about, then encryption can't protect you from that. So don't bother.
Encryption is probably only useful against relatively powerless individuals who want to steal your crumbs or find out who you're sleeping with. The more safety you think you need, the less able encryption will be to provide it. If you're a dishonest spouse and trying to hide that, it might be effective; unless you're willing to write a part in the conspiracy for your spouse, then not so much. Though getting busted and divorced might be the most expedient path to a healthy, self-consistent life. But encryption can never protect you from yourself.
And if you want to protect your data from The Wench, you'll need an automatic suicide implant with a strict watchdog timer. But nobody should ever let themselves become that embarrassed about what pr0n they watch.
The suddenness of the TC team's departure (having throughout TC's history promised never ever to have any backdoor) coupled with the U.S. gov (FBI)'s inability to crack a South American's business computer after a full year of trying, suggests that their departure was a consequence of U.S. government pressure.
I'm not saying it didn't happen, because nobody knows. But the connection to the US Government here is only as strong as the connection to the Chinese Government, the Russian Government, or the Martian Government. You're just waving your hands while being anti-American.
They can't force manufacturers to not install junkware on the computers they sell
See, I wouldn't have expected that sort of... oddity from your user number. I'm assuming you inherited your grandparent's account and weren't around for the 90s?
...our laptops are for consumers to buy crap online, and not for any kind of serious work....
Considering that Lenovo has a consumer line of laptops and a business line of laptops (the ThinkPad brand), there may be a shred of truth in what you say.
A shred I'll grant. But I think the Yoga line has been advertised mainly as a business accessory, as a phablet for light or portable business use.
They also present their "consumer" line as being good for "small business" on their website, so it is not so clear really.
Yeah, I'm with you, I'm with you...
BTW, who else makes a laptop with a nipple mouse these days? Are we stuck on recycled Dells for eternity?
Of course there will be appeals, and of course this is just another weird decision from Texas that will get reversed by the Appeals Court.
Not really sure why it hit slashdot before an appeal. This is routine nonsense a case has to go through when you're suing anybody with deep pockets. Justice will be delayed, but not denied; the wheels of Justice turn slowly, but they do turn.
So I did google it, and discovered you're probably a credulous right-winger, or at least you've possibly fallen victim to right-wing pontifications.
Compare what is accused in right-wing media:
with what he actually said:
And so it was all accurate. Depending on the exact conditions at the time, the smoke either will or won't be pushed higher in the atmosphere and disrupt agriculture. This isn't something he predicted would happen, that didn't happen. This is something that he predicted was a risk, that didn't happen. Had the weather patterns lifted the smoke to the elevations he discussed being a risk, the results he predicted (serious impact on agriculture in SE Asia for a year) would indeed have been likely.
Sagan did also co-author academic papers on nuclear winter, as in, following nuclear strike. That was mostly in the early 80s. Generally all the "right wing," "anti-Sagan" stuff tries to conflate that with his Kuwait concerns, often even to the point of mentioning his nuclear winter papers as a mid-sentence aside while discussing Kuwait, and without any clarification.
I guess a better example would be any of Richard Feynman's forays outside his field. Right?
It might be in error to try too hard to make sense of his comment; it wasn't well considered at all.
If it was in fact useful during the Stone Age, then it is still useful; what law of physics guarantees our continued technology level? Might our species have need in the future of the traits that got us here? Is there a non-zero chance that the future will contain periodic Stone-Age-like eras? What if a comet destroys modern civilization? Is one less war really worth giving away proven adaptability?
Worse, there is no science behind the idea that reducing aggression at the species level would reduce suffering, improve life, or even that nuclear weapons are caused by aggression.
The obvious angle here is aggression towards one another, not aggression towards other species.
Because of the distribution of traits, there would always be sufficient edge cases where that aggression was towards one another. It is a mathematical certainty.
Your logic has a very large hole in it. Human traits are distributed according to a natural distribution, and mutations happen. Evolution happens. Convergent evolution happens. If there was no aggression today, perhaps tomorrow we would be ruled by those who re-evolved it.
Man's biggest failure may be failing to stand up to aggression, but get RID of aggression? Not going to happen, and not a good thing if it did. Leaders are aggressive.
Yeah, my instant thought was, "great, without aggression we'd all be slaves of the mutant who had it."
I had a ROFLCOPTERBBQ and it wasn't just words. The burns are real, bro, the burns are real.
News Flash: The NSA isn't part of the US State Department. They are part of the US Department of Defense.
Generally those are departments are considered to be substantially at odds; one is in charge of diplomacy, the other is in charge of blowing things up. They have different wants and needs, and generally would not feel each others pain.
If you hate something but don't understand it, what do you really hate? Answer: You really hate yourself, because without understanding you must be hating a thing that exists only inside your own mind. Unfortunately, this is the future. And the past.
Because a programmer that replaces something... must not know how it works?
Uh.....
I know you wanted to spew some hate, but I don't think you really thought that one through. If my SysV init scripts needed "checking," and I had Mr Poettering in my employ, he would be a fine person to "check" them because he is a talented programmer who understands shell scripting.
BTW, it is SysV init, not sysVinit. It just means the style of init script that AT&T had in their System V UNIX from the 80s, which replaced the BSD style that was in use prior to that. (And that continues to be used by the major BSD distros today)
To make the current hate-spewing-fad even funnier in its ignorance, Slackware Linux doesn't even use SysV-style init, they use BSD-style. And Gentoo doesn't use either. You wouldn't know it from Slashdot comments though, where Slackware users who don't know shit about *nix init systems or shell scripts will happily defend their intention to "keep" using SysV init. roflcopter!