Hmm... What sensing equipment does New Horizons have on it that can perform tests to find dark matter filaments? I guess they could go old-school and do the camera thing?
Without cheating and using a search engine, what do you think dark matter is? No, not what it theoretically is but what it is? Meh, I'll save some time.
Dark matter isn't really *anything* so much as it is *something* and that something is subject to debate. However, it is *something* that we can neither see nor measure. That's where the name comes from. We can see that something is having an effect and, as yet, that somethingremains unknown. But something that we can neither see nor measure is, truly - no doubt about it, causing these effects (known as gravitational lensing).
What that substance is, is very much an unknown. However, for now, that substance (or substances) are called dark matter and is an inclusive term for known and unknown theories. No matter what it turns out to be, it is still dark matter.
Make sense? It's a bit confusing, I guess, but not really if you can get someone to explain it to you well. There are a few competing theories as to what it is, specifically, but the effect is absolutely, certainly, repeatably proven to be there. That effect is caused by something. That something is dark matter. It's a generic term for wont of a better descriptor.
Sorry, I'm not the most articulate but that's a summary as well as I think I can describe it without getting into some maths that won't be supported by the markdown here. I'm not a physicist but I have a layman's background and an almost scholarly interest.
I think equivalent is fine. Unless you've a compelling theory or some information that changes some very basic physics then, by all means, the outcome appears to be equivalent (which is not to say the source is the same) to mass. I could be missing something as I am not an astrophysicist. I am, however, a mathematician and I've noticed some similarities between a theoretical physicist and a philosopher of mathematics, at least by name if not by effect.
That might be it! I was at "explore" when I got to the point of typing out a reply. I'd tried a bunch of words that began with E and a bunch that might be synonyms for explode but I didn't think of "exploit."
But exploited by whom? How? It's very iffy even then. Usually the GGP makes sense (I've seen 'em post before) but that one is beyond me. I tried thinking of what words might be automatically turned into that by a phone's keyboard. I probably spent a few minutes trying to figure it out before I gave up and just asked.
Assuming tense, "illegal to be exploited" doesn't make a lot of sense in that it's not very clear what the exploitation is or how that's defined.
I think it's about degree and it's more about that than anything else. There are shades of privacy and anonymity, they're not binary. So, we're reducing our level of privacy and to what end? What is the goal here and is it worth the change in the way things are now?
By my definition, that kind of fits the word ethics nicely. Ethics are situational and morals are absolute. There's nothing immoral about this but there may be something unethical here. There's some debate there but I tend to end up on the side of preservations of liberties.
A judge can take away your freedom but an IT staff member can take away your minesweeper!
Seriously though, sometimes shit happens - no matter who you are and how important you are. Even the President of the United States has been late to things. Shit happens. So long as it's not a habit then let's not get our knickers into a ruffle just yet. With the judge, they could have been out dealing with a crises, like domestic violence, where they needed to enact a variety of things in a very short time-frame and didn't have staff to cover that due to any one of a number of different reasons.
I've seen some Futurama episodes and one of them was something about why didn't they have 7001 hulls. You can only cover some many eventualities and, eventually, something is going to make something late. It's going to happen.
Or illegal to be explode like in Germany and Austria.
I am truly at a loss here. I think I'm pretty good at parsing typo and ESL text. I can even get the gist from machine translations. This one baffles me. Exploding cameras? I think those are probably illegal in more than Germany or Austria.
'Snot a problem. I've typically been a very poor writer even though I've needed to write a lot. I manage to be verbose while saying little and I can be inarticulate. So, lacking anything more constructive to do, I've spent quite a bit of time practicing and I even use Slashdot as an excuse to improve.
You might say that it started when someone posted a "troll" reply about my grammar. I thanked them and made an effort to improve. However, it really began back on IRC where I could neither type nor spell. Eventually, I wrote a spell check script and I was off to the races. Today, I type somewhere near 95 WPM and don't make many spelling errors.
The next logical step is to improve the tone and make it of value to the reader. I've always been able to write long and tedious things, I loved authoring essays while I was still in academia. I've been working on making those novellas more interesting and valuable to the reader for quite sometime. Sometimes it works and, well, other times it's a deadpan and misunderstood.
Not at all, I use a robust GUI known as LXDE (complete with a dock that I made all by my lonesome - I'm not very talented) and everything. It's not in Synaptic either.
That is probably true and, for that, I'm grateful. I did actually have a relationship with a lady who nearly fits the description and *might* fit as I could just be deluding myself into thinking there was some empathy and something other than greed or self-interest inside.:/
And you are presuming to will away my right to privacy, at least through pseudo-anonymity and in bulk. Which of us is more wrong? You who wants safety or I who wants liberty? You can not have these autonomous vehicles without tracking, it simply will not work. Consider, if you will, traffic. Pure sensors convey no intent nor status. Then there's going to be off-loaded compute cycles for managing the grid. It will *not* work without this. Err... At least not for quite some time. Even if it could, it's still going to be used as an increase in monitoring.
You wish to preserve life. I wish to preserve liberty. IIRC, you're in Oz. I live way out in the bush. Think way outside Cann River, for example. Mandatory autonomous cars is going to impact me. My movements will then be tracked when, in reality, they aren't otherwise tracked at this moment, except some incidental notice of me by neighbors or friends. There are no cameras, there are no license plate readers. I like that. I chose that for a reason.
At any rate. I'll accept death or injury as a result of my liberties. I don't really understand why others wouldn't feel the same.
You're right straight retarded, aren't you? Here's a hint: It's usually really stupid to make absolutist statements. Here's the other hint: I don't recall the private enterprises ever getting close enough to *cause* such an absolutist thing but I do remember the governments threatening each other with nukes.
I understood exactly what he *said* and if he *meant* something else then he should be an adult and say that something else.
You're right, you're not getting any benefit. The US gets only a very tiny amount of oil from the Middle East. We get it from North and South America, mostly - actually by a huge margin. I don't recall the number but I think it's a single digit percentage of our oil comes from the Middle East the last time I looked.
Hmm... In 2012 NPR had it at about 12% but it's gone down since then as we've ramped up our production and Canada's sending us millions of barrels as they've ramped up too. http://www.npr.org/2012/04/11/...
So, yeah, we get pretty much Jack and Shit for oil from the Middle East. We're certainly not dependent on them. Those stats are a few years old. I believe we get more from Africa now than we get from the Middle East. China, on the other hand, is the major importer of oil from the Middle East. Conclude what you will from that but it's true that you're not getting any benefit directly. (We do get some petrochemicals and resultant products from China's oil consumption.)
The lyrics to Guns 'n Roses' song, Civil War, come to mind. This is long but relevant:
"What we've got here is failure to communicate. Some men you just can't reach... So, you get what we had here last week, which is the way he wants it! Well, he gets it! N' I don't like it any more than you men."
Look at your young men fighting Look at your women crying Look at your young men dying The way they've always done before
Look at the hate we're breeding Look at the fear we're feeding Look at the lives we're leading The way we've always done before
My hands are tied The billions shift from side to side And the wars go on with brainwashed pride For the love of God and our human rights And all these things are swept aside By bloody hands time can't deny And are washed away by your genocide And history hides the lies of our civil wars
It's actually worth reading the rest of the lyrics, they're not bad. I actually still enjoy the song today. I know, I know... It's GnR, you're not supposed to like them but I do.
I watched an hour-long, older, documentary not long ago. I think it might have been Horizon or Nova? Something about getting tech smaller. Anyhow, in that show they had a guy that made graphene using naught but scotch tape and a pencil. They even showed it to us under a microscope afterwards. (I watch too many documentaries, it might have been pre-made stuff that they showed.) It was kind of neat and you just keep using the tape to move it out over a larger and larger surface area until no more transfers.
Also, my brother's wife deals with an amalgam study (does grants and data compilation and travels a lot) with the mercury in the fillings thing. I'm not sure if it was mercury of if it was a different substance that she was working on and one that came after mercury but it had something to do with mercury, at any rate. I wonder if she's familiar with this? She might be, she's tasked with keeping up on this sort of thing. Well, that's my understanding. Meh...
So far, VMware is not loading (something about compiling something against the running kernel) and the bootup is a bit slow. Meh... It was time to give VMware more money anyhow. They get their near-yearly pound of flesh. I simply like their features enough to pay for it.
I've known some pretty crappy people but nobody who didn't have shame, or at least a good game face, afterwards. I've known a few that mostly regretted getting caught.
You're probably right. Damn it. *sighs* I doubt they broke any criminal statutes that will land them in jail. Maybe a good contempt of court sentence will be an eventual finding but I'm not entirely sure if it could work - unless they've still pending litigation. I don't think I'm the most moral of people but I don't think I could live with myself if I'd done something along these lines. I really don't.
Sure, it may seem trivial to some but, from my understanding, they made scads of money getting people to settle out of court for absurd amounts of money. These weren't the wealthy that they scammed. These were people who didn't know or couldn't know how to defend themselves in a court of law. These were people without recourse by ignorance (and the law is complex) and by financial class.
How the hell do you come to terms with being that kind of prick? Oh, I know it's easy to rest your head on a pile of money and 1200 thread-count Egyptian cotton sheets. But, still... What did you do to acquire that wealth? Do you still have family and friends after you reached this low level? Are they a bunch of crazy fuckers too - and, perhaps, believe your side of the story?
Sadly, I now do nothing but invest. I don't even do short-term investing (the taxes are kind of high if I do that and I make more doing it my way) and I truly don't even know what I'm doing. Now, even if I did worse than what I'm doing, I have a financial manager who does slower growth, diversity, and stable investments on my behalf. I have a lawyer (two actually and a third on retainer) and an accountant who is a retired State IRS employee.
Why do I say that? Well, I now make more money than I've ever made in my life. When I sold my business, I did some pretty smart things - like shut the hell up and listen to people. But, I also spent like a drunken sailer for a while. It does't matter. I've accumulated every nickel of that back and then some. Yet, I donate silly amounts of money to Heifer International, Red Cross, EFF, and Habitat for Humanity - like stupid numbers at semi-regular intervals, depending on my mood and how few begging emails they've sent me. My alma mater gets a chunk, a local school has been adopted, a near-by private school has a trust for scholarships, and a acreage preserve (a land trust) gets decent donations - on a regular basis.
And yet, the number still goes up! Seriously. I mean, I don't do stupid things and I don't tend to buy myself a bunch of expensive things - I buy a BMW every two years. Yay? I give away a bunch, my ego isn't frail enough to give a ballpark sum but it's a decent number every single year. I don't even write it all off - I can't. I can't reduce my tax burden any further through donations to charitable organizations.
Why do I say that? Well, I don't want to buy a law that makes me profit. I want to buy a law that lets me do something so outlandish, so reprehensible, so deliciously ironic, that people can't help but wake up and see the problems with the system. If I felt I could donate $100,000 for the above example law, in my prior post, then I'd be on it like white on rice. (I'm not entirely white so I'll have to hope for a law rather than just recklessly try it.) Anyhow, I'd give ten times that for such a law. I'd not even bat an eye. It will take me less than 72 hours to get the funds together and transfered. If it wakes people up, I'm all for it.
I guess, in part, I was going for the whole "counter-the-hyperbole" thing. I can't *really* just "buy" a law like that. You know what I can do? Probably commit that crime, pay a fine, and maybe spend a night in jail and do a few hours of community service or donate to a charity for abused women or children. Yeah... Lemme see anyone else do that? (Oh, I'd have to get psychiatric care or at least checked out.) I bet that's all that would happen to me. I might make it to a jail cell but I bet it's not more than the holding tank and not longer than a few hours.
As near as I can tell, there's no dusty, smoke filled, walnut lined, dark room full of cabal members but I might not have enough to make it into that club. Of course, I'm also not completely white and I'm quite certainly not the guy they'd call *now* but I'd have expected some contact if they existed, at least at first. These days, I suspect they'd know better. I actually don't mind my taxes, for example, and I know damned well that I got lucky and didn't get here on my own. Sure, I worked hard and did things in a new way but it was mostly because the time was ripe and I was there with that particular skill set and the ability to take the risks.
Anyhow, I was mostly trying to counterbalance the hyperbole. I can't just *buy* any ol' law that I want. My example was intentionally absurd - there's no way in hell that's gonna make it through Congress. I'd not want a law that helped me make money. There are plenty of those laws already. Hell, the law's rather heavily skewed in my favor now. In my above example, I can do that and not even go to a real jail for any length of time. I suspect that, at most, I might end up in a psychiatric care facility for a month and that'd be a nice one and not one of the State-run facilities.
Well, to be fair, you just have publicly shamed them. I'd suggest making a slightly better effort if you want a greater impact but, well, I noticed! So you've impacted one person. I can promise you - I'll never, ever, buy internet service from this company. I not only swear to it in public, I will further state that I'll incur a voluntary payment, to you, of $500 USD if I ever give this company so much as one red cent of my money willingly.
See? You're having an effect AND it's better than their shaming because I'd never see their list as I don't have and don't have a Facebook account so probably can't read it. I'm trying to think if I've ever been to Facebook in all of my life and I honestly can't think of a time.
So, you've one convert! Down with this vile ISP! May they rot in the FSM's catch basin! I hereby detest this company and heap scorn and shame upon them! I will never, ever, give them one farthing.
If it helps, I probably won't give any cable company any money, directly, ever.
I've got a Linux Mint (Cinnamon) spare laptop with me in my suitcase. Well, it was in my suitcase. I dug it out and it's booting and doing all the regular updates first (habit, I don't know as I need to). Then I'll reboot it, VNC into it, and run the update process through the terminal with dist-upgrade and all that. I'm going to shoot blind and not even back anything up on it - there's nothing on it but a few VMs.
I don't have a huge amount of time to play with it at the moment but, if you want, I can post back and let you know how it went. It should be trivial, just change the sources and update. Usually... Sometimes, not even that is needed with some distros. I do think Mint needs it though.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm... What sensing equipment does New Horizons have on it that can perform tests to find dark matter filaments? I guess they could go old-school and do the camera thing?
Anyhow, assuming you're serious:
http://www.space.com/16412-dar...
http://www.americaspace.com/?p...
This should be interesting...
Without cheating and using a search engine, what do you think dark matter is? No, not what it theoretically is but what it is? Meh, I'll save some time.
Dark matter isn't really *anything* so much as it is *something* and that something is subject to debate. However, it is *something* that we can neither see nor measure. That's where the name comes from. We can see that something is having an effect and, as yet, that somethingremains unknown. But something that we can neither see nor measure is, truly - no doubt about it, causing these effects (known as gravitational lensing).
What that substance is, is very much an unknown. However, for now, that substance (or substances) are called dark matter and is an inclusive term for known and unknown theories. No matter what it turns out to be, it is still dark matter.
Make sense? It's a bit confusing, I guess, but not really if you can get someone to explain it to you well. There are a few competing theories as to what it is, specifically, but the effect is absolutely, certainly, repeatably proven to be there. That effect is caused by something. That something is dark matter. It's a generic term for wont of a better descriptor.
Sorry, I'm not the most articulate but that's a summary as well as I think I can describe it without getting into some maths that won't be supported by the markdown here. I'm not a physicist but I have a layman's background and an almost scholarly interest.
I think equivalent is fine. Unless you've a compelling theory or some information that changes some very basic physics then, by all means, the outcome appears to be equivalent (which is not to say the source is the same) to mass. I could be missing something as I am not an astrophysicist. I am, however, a mathematician and I've noticed some similarities between a theoretical physicist and a philosopher of mathematics, at least by name if not by effect.
Yeah, but like so many other babies - it's probably surrounded by gas, namely methane. (Did not RTFA.)
That might be it! I was at "explore" when I got to the point of typing out a reply. I'd tried a bunch of words that began with E and a bunch that might be synonyms for explode but I didn't think of "exploit."
But exploited by whom? How? It's very iffy even then. Usually the GGP makes sense (I've seen 'em post before) but that one is beyond me. I tried thinking of what words might be automatically turned into that by a phone's keyboard. I probably spent a few minutes trying to figure it out before I gave up and just asked.
Assuming tense, "illegal to be exploited" doesn't make a lot of sense in that it's not very clear what the exploitation is or how that's defined.
I think it's about degree and it's more about that than anything else. There are shades of privacy and anonymity, they're not binary. So, we're reducing our level of privacy and to what end? What is the goal here and is it worth the change in the way things are now?
By my definition, that kind of fits the word ethics nicely. Ethics are situational and morals are absolute. There's nothing immoral about this but there may be something unethical here. There's some debate there but I tend to end up on the side of preservations of liberties.
So, I'm not the AC but I did just decide to test this:
http://i.imgur.com/fM16Oat.png
The subject is included in the preview - see the above linked image. Pardon the colors, that's just Stylish talking. I prefer a darker screen.
So, on a techie site you are admitting you thought someone would not, in fact, check to see if it did preview the subject line? Talk about flaming...
ACLU preemptively nipped this one in the bud. No LPR devices for cops in Maine. Portland was going to get some. We said no.
A judge can take away your freedom but an IT staff member can take away your minesweeper!
Seriously though, sometimes shit happens - no matter who you are and how important you are. Even the President of the United States has been late to things. Shit happens. So long as it's not a habit then let's not get our knickers into a ruffle just yet. With the judge, they could have been out dealing with a crises, like domestic violence, where they needed to enact a variety of things in a very short time-frame and didn't have staff to cover that due to any one of a number of different reasons.
I've seen some Futurama episodes and one of them was something about why didn't they have 7001 hulls. You can only cover some many eventualities and, eventually, something is going to make something late. It's going to happen.
Or illegal to be explode like in Germany and Austria.
I am truly at a loss here. I think I'm pretty good at parsing typo and ESL text. I can even get the gist from machine translations. This one baffles me. Exploding cameras? I think those are probably illegal in more than Germany or Austria.
'Snot a problem. I've typically been a very poor writer even though I've needed to write a lot. I manage to be verbose while saying little and I can be inarticulate. So, lacking anything more constructive to do, I've spent quite a bit of time practicing and I even use Slashdot as an excuse to improve.
You might say that it started when someone posted a "troll" reply about my grammar. I thanked them and made an effort to improve. However, it really began back on IRC where I could neither type nor spell. Eventually, I wrote a spell check script and I was off to the races. Today, I type somewhere near 95 WPM and don't make many spelling errors.
The next logical step is to improve the tone and make it of value to the reader. I've always been able to write long and tedious things, I loved authoring essays while I was still in academia. I've been working on making those novellas more interesting and valuable to the reader for quite sometime. Sometimes it works and, well, other times it's a deadpan and misunderstood.
Not at all, I use a robust GUI known as LXDE (complete with a dock that I made all by my lonesome - I'm not very talented) and everything. It's not in Synaptic either.
That is probably true and, for that, I'm grateful. I did actually have a relationship with a lady who nearly fits the description and *might* fit as I could just be deluding myself into thinking there was some empathy and something other than greed or self-interest inside. :/
And you are presuming to will away my right to privacy, at least through pseudo-anonymity and in bulk. Which of us is more wrong? You who wants safety or I who wants liberty? You can not have these autonomous vehicles without tracking, it simply will not work. Consider, if you will, traffic. Pure sensors convey no intent nor status. Then there's going to be off-loaded compute cycles for managing the grid. It will *not* work without this. Err... At least not for quite some time. Even if it could, it's still going to be used as an increase in monitoring.
You wish to preserve life. I wish to preserve liberty. IIRC, you're in Oz. I live way out in the bush. Think way outside Cann River, for example. Mandatory autonomous cars is going to impact me. My movements will then be tracked when, in reality, they aren't otherwise tracked at this moment, except some incidental notice of me by neighbors or friends. There are no cameras, there are no license plate readers. I like that. I chose that for a reason.
At any rate. I'll accept death or injury as a result of my liberties. I don't really understand why others wouldn't feel the same.
You're right straight retarded, aren't you? Here's a hint: It's usually really stupid to make absolutist statements. Here's the other hint: I don't recall the private enterprises ever getting close enough to *cause* such an absolutist thing but I do remember the governments threatening each other with nukes.
I understood exactly what he *said* and if he *meant* something else then he should be an adult and say that something else.
You're right, you're not getting any benefit. The US gets only a very tiny amount of oil from the Middle East. We get it from North and South America, mostly - actually by a huge margin. I don't recall the number but I think it's a single digit percentage of our oil comes from the Middle East the last time I looked.
Hmm... In 2012 NPR had it at about 12% but it's gone down since then as we've ramped up our production and Canada's sending us millions of barrels as they've ramped up too.
http://www.npr.org/2012/04/11/...
So, yeah, we get pretty much Jack and Shit for oil from the Middle East. We're certainly not dependent on them. Those stats are a few years old. I believe we get more from Africa now than we get from the Middle East. China, on the other hand, is the major importer of oil from the Middle East. Conclude what you will from that but it's true that you're not getting any benefit directly. (We do get some petrochemicals and resultant products from China's oil consumption.)
The lyrics to Guns 'n Roses' song, Civil War, come to mind. This is long but relevant:
"What we've got here is failure to communicate.
Some men you just can't reach...
So, you get what we had here last week, which is the way he wants it!
Well, he gets it!
N' I don't like it any more than you men."
Look at your young men fighting
Look at your women crying
Look at your young men dying
The way they've always done before
Look at the hate we're breeding
Look at the fear we're feeding
Look at the lives we're leading
The way we've always done before
My hands are tied
The billions shift from side to side
And the wars go on with brainwashed pride
For the love of God and our human rights
And all these things are swept aside
By bloody hands time can't deny
And are washed away by your genocide
And history hides the lies of our civil wars
Read the Rest
It's actually worth reading the rest of the lyrics, they're not bad. I actually still enjoy the song today. I know, I know... It's GnR, you're not supposed to like them but I do.
I watched an hour-long, older, documentary not long ago. I think it might have been Horizon or Nova? Something about getting tech smaller. Anyhow, in that show they had a guy that made graphene using naught but scotch tape and a pencil. They even showed it to us under a microscope afterwards. (I watch too many documentaries, it might have been pre-made stuff that they showed.) It was kind of neat and you just keep using the tape to move it out over a larger and larger surface area until no more transfers.
Also, my brother's wife deals with an amalgam study (does grants and data compilation and travels a lot) with the mercury in the fillings thing. I'm not sure if it was mercury of if it was a different substance that she was working on and one that came after mercury but it had something to do with mercury, at any rate. I wonder if she's familiar with this? She might be, she's tasked with keeping up on this sort of thing. Well, that's my understanding. Meh...
So far, VMware is not loading (something about compiling something against the running kernel) and the bootup is a bit slow. Meh... It was time to give VMware more money anyhow. They get their near-yearly pound of flesh. I simply like their features enough to pay for it.
I've known some pretty crappy people but nobody who didn't have shame, or at least a good game face, afterwards. I've known a few that mostly regretted getting caught.
You're probably right. Damn it. *sighs* I doubt they broke any criminal statutes that will land them in jail. Maybe a good contempt of court sentence will be an eventual finding but I'm not entirely sure if it could work - unless they've still pending litigation. I don't think I'm the most moral of people but I don't think I could live with myself if I'd done something along these lines. I really don't.
Sure, it may seem trivial to some but, from my understanding, they made scads of money getting people to settle out of court for absurd amounts of money. These weren't the wealthy that they scammed. These were people who didn't know or couldn't know how to defend themselves in a court of law. These were people without recourse by ignorance (and the law is complex) and by financial class.
How the hell do you come to terms with being that kind of prick? Oh, I know it's easy to rest your head on a pile of money and 1200 thread-count Egyptian cotton sheets. But, still... What did you do to acquire that wealth? Do you still have family and friends after you reached this low level? Are they a bunch of crazy fuckers too - and, perhaps, believe your side of the story?
but when I look at what they've been doing with Edge and Chakra, I'm impressed.
$ sudo apt-get install edge
[sudo] password for kgiii:
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
E: Unable to locate package edge
kgiii@kgiii-desktop:~$
Nope. Not impressed. ;-)
Sadly, I now do nothing but invest. I don't even do short-term investing (the taxes are kind of high if I do that and I make more doing it my way) and I truly don't even know what I'm doing. Now, even if I did worse than what I'm doing, I have a financial manager who does slower growth, diversity, and stable investments on my behalf. I have a lawyer (two actually and a third on retainer) and an accountant who is a retired State IRS employee.
Why do I say that? Well, I now make more money than I've ever made in my life. When I sold my business, I did some pretty smart things - like shut the hell up and listen to people. But, I also spent like a drunken sailer for a while. It does't matter. I've accumulated every nickel of that back and then some. Yet, I donate silly amounts of money to Heifer International, Red Cross, EFF, and Habitat for Humanity - like stupid numbers at semi-regular intervals, depending on my mood and how few begging emails they've sent me. My alma mater gets a chunk, a local school has been adopted, a near-by private school has a trust for scholarships, and a acreage preserve (a land trust) gets decent donations - on a regular basis.
And yet, the number still goes up! Seriously. I mean, I don't do stupid things and I don't tend to buy myself a bunch of expensive things - I buy a BMW every two years. Yay? I give away a bunch, my ego isn't frail enough to give a ballpark sum but it's a decent number every single year. I don't even write it all off - I can't. I can't reduce my tax burden any further through donations to charitable organizations.
Why do I say that? Well, I don't want to buy a law that makes me profit. I want to buy a law that lets me do something so outlandish, so reprehensible, so deliciously ironic, that people can't help but wake up and see the problems with the system. If I felt I could donate $100,000 for the above example law, in my prior post, then I'd be on it like white on rice. (I'm not entirely white so I'll have to hope for a law rather than just recklessly try it.) Anyhow, I'd give ten times that for such a law. I'd not even bat an eye. It will take me less than 72 hours to get the funds together and transfered. If it wakes people up, I'm all for it.
I guess, in part, I was going for the whole "counter-the-hyperbole" thing. I can't *really* just "buy" a law like that. You know what I can do? Probably commit that crime, pay a fine, and maybe spend a night in jail and do a few hours of community service or donate to a charity for abused women or children. Yeah... Lemme see anyone else do that? (Oh, I'd have to get psychiatric care or at least checked out.) I bet that's all that would happen to me. I might make it to a jail cell but I bet it's not more than the holding tank and not longer than a few hours.
As near as I can tell, there's no dusty, smoke filled, walnut lined, dark room full of cabal members but I might not have enough to make it into that club. Of course, I'm also not completely white and I'm quite certainly not the guy they'd call *now* but I'd have expected some contact if they existed, at least at first. These days, I suspect they'd know better. I actually don't mind my taxes, for example, and I know damned well that I got lucky and didn't get here on my own. Sure, I worked hard and did things in a new way but it was mostly because the time was ripe and I was there with that particular skill set and the ability to take the risks.
Anyhow, I was mostly trying to counterbalance the hyperbole. I can't just *buy* any ol' law that I want. My example was intentionally absurd - there's no way in hell that's gonna make it through Congress. I'd not want a law that helped me make money. There are plenty of those laws already. Hell, the law's rather heavily skewed in my favor now. In my above example, I can do that and not even go to a real jail for any length of time. I suspect that, at most, I might end up in a psychiatric care facility for a month and that'd be a nice one and not one of the State-run facilities.
However, shou
Well, to be fair, you just have publicly shamed them. I'd suggest making a slightly better effort if you want a greater impact but, well, I noticed! So you've impacted one person. I can promise you - I'll never, ever, buy internet service from this company. I not only swear to it in public, I will further state that I'll incur a voluntary payment, to you, of $500 USD if I ever give this company so much as one red cent of my money willingly.
See? You're having an effect AND it's better than their shaming because I'd never see their list as I don't have and don't have a Facebook account so probably can't read it. I'm trying to think if I've ever been to Facebook in all of my life and I honestly can't think of a time.
So, you've one convert! Down with this vile ISP! May they rot in the FSM's catch basin! I hereby detest this company and heap scorn and shame upon them! I will never, ever, give them one farthing.
If it helps, I probably won't give any cable company any money, directly, ever.
I believe he's postulating that the onus of payment should either be on the viewer or the advertiser, but certainly not both.
I've got a Linux Mint (Cinnamon) spare laptop with me in my suitcase. Well, it was in my suitcase. I dug it out and it's booting and doing all the regular updates first (habit, I don't know as I need to). Then I'll reboot it, VNC into it, and run the update process through the terminal with dist-upgrade and all that. I'm going to shoot blind and not even back anything up on it - there's nothing on it but a few VMs.
I don't have a huge amount of time to play with it at the moment but, if you want, I can post back and let you know how it went. It should be trivial, just change the sources and update. Usually... Sometimes, not even that is needed with some distros. I do think Mint needs it though.