Maybe educated society is getting tired of the Ad-Hominem.

We can dream.

He's self centered and likes to flirt with younger women. Oh no! Our faith in the very integrity of wikileaks must be revisited!

Meanwhile an enormous personality cult continues around an asshole who regularly destroyed the lives of people working for him (Steve Jobs).

If I were going to pick someone to have a beer with, I would pick Assange any day. I don't give a fuck if someone has personality flaws. That means he is the same as every other human alive. What I care about is their effect on the world around them. Assange has had such a net positive impact with wikileaks that no amount of aggressive flirting or being-a-dick-sometimes(tm) is going to burn it.

You know what I want to discuss? How much beta sucks.

I didn't rtfa becase....

beta sucks. Clueless MBAs in tech companies suck. Clueless marketing and sales drones in tech companies suck.

Get a clue.

Boycott /. from the 10th to the 17th

Saving money is great and all. Woopee. Wouldn't the real value in switching be to get away from a company that has been compromised by US intelligence services? It seems to me that having your entire government running software written by a company known to put backdoors into their software is negligent. If they are using office, a member of parliament makes an interesting powerpoint presentation and the US president knows about it 5 minutes later.

It actually does let you do stuff cheaper, faster, and safer. Cheaper because you don't have to pay money transfer fees. It is WAY faster than most forms of sending payment. It is also much safer insofar as a business cannot arbitrarily reverse the transfer.

Crypto currency is clearly better. The problem is that bitcoin is abstract. Most people don't realize that the money system they are using has no underlying foundation. Those pieces have paper are valuable because people agree they are, not because they are backed by any product or valuable ore. Bitcoin is no different in that respect. Only, it is very clearly abstract while people are able to lie to themselves (or just be ignorant) about the US dollar. People are uncomfortable with bartering using stuff they thing is "worthless" (not backed by anything). Bitcoin hasn't hit the threshold of adoption which most people require to believe something is safe.

This is entirely separate from all the other problems such as volatility, the 51% exploit, and etc.

My undergraduate degree is in philosophy, so it is difficult to accuse me of not appreciating knowledge for its own sake. I, however, did computer programming as a hobby because I knew I would need something to get by in the world. My post was mostly directed at the kids who live in a bubble their whole lives constantly being told they can be "whatever they want", even though their parents can't afford to pay their tuition in college. The result when such a kid pursues music and only music through undergrad and *shudder* even grad school? Someone with a lot of debt who is eventually going to feel like walls are closing in around them.

You would rather die pursuing music than instead pursuing a valuable skill while doing music as a hobby on the side? You would rather DIE than that? You can't have it all so you don't want anything? You're taking your ball and going home? The point is that they end up having to pursue the valuable skill anyway to survive. Few people chose death over math.

The United States doesn't have a two party system. I believe a voter can write whoever they like in to the ballot. US citizens have convinced themselves they need to be on a winning "side" in an election. So, rather than vote for the person they think would best serve the office, they vote for the "side" they would prefer to win. US citizens have basically been rolled by game theory. That is, they all think they are all accomplished game theorists but are in fact *terrible* at it. They hate their leaders, they have the power to change it without violence, and they refuse to vote for anyone else. This isn't new. It has been this way so long that current young adults have never experienced a sane voting environment.

It's actually kind of funny. Like a sad clown.

Let me preface this by saying I am totally on board the RIAA and record company hate train. I'm the guy pulling the whistle even. Choo Choo! They are greedy organizations who will ruthlessly do anything for profit.

That being said, I have become convinced over time that the artist-record company relationship is actually fair. Artists don't make the majority of the money that gets plunked down for their songs. But, you know, what? They aren't really doing much of the work either. Artists write and perform the song.This takes work, surely. Let's be generous and say each individual song takes a full person year to write and get good at. Record companies dump enormous resources into promoting it. This includes the work of hundreds (thousands?) of people resulting in the expenditure of many years of person effort. It seems to me like the record company is actually the one contributing more value. What happens to artists who try to succeed without record companies, or grants from universities? A tiny percentage of them earn enough to subsist. There is a reason for this.

To be frank, at the end of the day professional musicians who make a good living aren't really any better than many of the ones who are struggling. I've seen so many really talented musician friends go through school to finely hone their skills, only to find no one in the real world cares (ie they can't make money). The reason no one cares isn't because people don't value music. They do. That is why so much money goes into buying music. The problem is that reaching the threshold at which most people consider you "good" is attainable by a VAST portion of the population. Probably roughly the same percentage of the population who can be considered good at physically lifting things and then setting them down elsewhere. Good musicians are a dime a dozen.

I know the musicians out there are going to crucify me for this. You'll all point out it is possible to discern the difference between the violinist who makes 10 mil and the one who can't get a job. I'm sure you can. The point is that most of society can't, and doesn't care to. This is why most of you make nothing and have to pursue other careers. I wish you would all wake up to it before dumping a decade or more into it. Unless of course you are wealthy enough to pursue it whether it brings you income or not.

Music and the arts are for everyone, as a hobby, because any human can be good at them to some degree. The skills it takes to do them are part of what it is to be human. They have been pursued professionally by the rich, or friends of the rich, historically. This is because the rich can afford to spend 20 years getting good to maybe get paid well at the end. If you are a middle or lower class person trying to pursue music you are being irresponsible. You are more than likely wasting your time, except for the rare people who value the honing of skills higher than standard of living.

The law should be that it is illegal to commit crimes with guns. Perpetrators should then be prosecuted for committing crimes. The idea that we must curtail freedom until all possible risk is removed from the world is one we need to abandon.

A man is dead. Yes. That sucks. Life can suck. We should create a society of people who can handle responsibility and understand there are consequences to their actions. In a land of free people you will end up with murder, and theft, and a bunch of other bad stuff because that is part of human nature. In land of people who are not free, or freedoms are being curtailed, you will still have those things. You will also then have problems which stem from the government (modern day USA, Britain, cold-war Russia, etc.). The only thing you gain is the illusion that by making a bunch of stuff illegal you have somehow made the world safer.

I think this is a big part of it. US citizens are basically complete idiots (including myself) compared to other countries I would want to vacation in. I was "really smart" in elementary school, high school, and college. When I traveled to Europe, met foreign exchange students, or engaged with family friends who were from other countries, I was consistently impressed by their casual grasp of mathematics, history, and philosophy. And these are just the subjects you run into on a day to day basis! My "raw intellect" (my biology) is usually more than a match for who I meet, but the breadth and depth of my intellectual development didn't come close to competing with my foreign friends until I was well passed grad school with plenty of time to do catch-up after leaving the US school system.

The USA mostly doesn't care about its children. It doesn't even know what it *means* to care about children. The country burns resources other countries protect for their progeny. It gives education a token budget (compared to war, or law enforcement, or you name it) and the budget it does get is squandered by educators who are clueless about education.

There is a lot of bad in the USA. It has been in a tailspin since the 80s, and it was in decline before that. Our clear shift to a police state is the most obvious evidence of that, though it is the tip of the iceberg. There is always hope... but we are at the level of hope Gandalf had for Frodo getting to Mount Doom. When I think of what it would realistically take to get the USA into shape, I am struck by a profound sense of dread.

He is not qualified to propose significant advancements to evolutionary biology, biology, philosophy, metaphysics, history, or name a discipline. He is, however, qualified to make the argument that where life/replicators succeed... evolution occurs. You were also probably qualified to make this argument when you were around 14. The topic is grade school level science. Just about any layperson in our society should be capable of making and defending this argument.

Enjoy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_rendition

Apple is *proud* of its totalitarian business model, which is politely referred to as a "walled garden". Live in our little apple world where no one is free! No freedom means safety! You don't have to worry about bad words, or nipples, or someone pointing out that Jesus probably got laid all the time! We have complete control and domination over everything which operates in our ecosystem!

The apple philosophy is perfectly consistent with that of the NSA, the security state, and fascism in general. Add on some friendly govt subsidies and freedom to continue abusing the hell out of the american tax system...

No one on earth trusts a word you say. Every single person remotely connected to human civilization has heard about what you've done. You have violated your own country's highest laws, violated the laws of countries around the world, and have spent enough money doing so that the USA could have supplied free healthcare to a sizable portion of its population.

Why would you ever speak to the media under circumstances like this? You know no one is going to take you seriously. You know no one is going to believe anything you say, no matter what you say. You cannot even really supply evidence at this point because you have violated trust at so deep a level, and gone to such extremes to do it, that no one will believe the evidence is real. All you accomplish by speaking is to further antognoize and enflame nearly the entire population of your country (and the world?). Is there anyone with half a brain working at this organization to do PR strategy?

The only reason I am not leaving the country in terror over the NSA is that they appear staggeringly incompetent at everything they do. Perhaps this is their strategy...?