Nah, it's never been more easy to shill than today.

In the old days, publishing was something reserved for those that had anything to say, well, at least for the most part. Publishers didn't just print any kind of crap for it easily tarnishes your reputation if you do. And soon people who not have some reputation and hence reach high volumes because other people want to read what they have to say (read: those that you WANT to publish) don't want to publish their serious and scientifically sound facts with you if your house is known to print stories about how ancient alien astronauts built the Pyramids.

Today, editors are hard pressed to publish. Publish or perish. Even reputable houses resort to printing pretty much anything that doesn't immediately cause a "c'mooooooon" reaction in people who don't send money to their televangelists. Plus the internet that made it possible for every idiot to present his "findings" in ways that look serious and sensible on the outside.

Now add that people have learned to take anything and everything printed in a "scientific" book by an "expert" as gospel without even bothering to try to question it and it becomes immediately obvious why you can shill today way easier than you could ever before. Need "proof" for your harebrained idea? Google will help you find an "expert" that agrees with you.

of the hackney coach drivers who insist that they should have the monopoly and their business must not be impeded by a change in technology.

Dear Verizon board: Fuck you and fuck your firstborns.

because after all, it's not like they can be taken utilized without a legal key

Who you trying to convince, there?

Win7 had such a flawed, easily circumvented activation system that many suspected MS did it deliberately just to get market share on a new OS post-Vista.

You can literally keep using Win7, fully functional, forever without a crack (note that the tool mentioned in my subject line doesn't "crack" or install anything, it just automates a few steps you can run, from the command line purely by hand, on a stock Win7 box).

Minimize the amount of work necessary to complete your work. (emphasis mine).

Some of us aspire to a bit more than shuffling tasks from our in-box to our out-box. Some of us want to produce functional, resilient, maintainable code. Some of us want to actually understand how it works, not just trust that it works. Some of us want to write code, not the compiled equivalent of shell scripts that do nothing themselves but pass inputs and outputs between different external blobs.


I'm paid to build. I don't get paid to pat myself on the back.

I get paid to meet an SLA, not just to say "well it compiled, didn't it?" and throw my hands in the air with vague complaints about bugs in library X. If I build some fragile piece of shit out of a dozen other fragile pieces of shit all held together by spit and string, I haven't done my job, no matter how quickly I did it.

Yes, "not invented here" counts as its own problem; it surprises me to hear that its opposite can count as a problem, though, because why does any organization with that culture employ programmers in the first place?

Leon puts his hand in freezing liquid without a problem.

Pris puts her hand in boiling water without a problem.

You can argue whether they are "robots" based upon YOUR definition of "robot". But those are not human hands.

If you watch the original with the understanding that Deckard is a replicant then the unicorn origami and the ending have specific, complex, implications.

Now if the sequel shows Deckard as a human then they piss off everyone who prefers those implications. So, in effect, the sequel ruins the story for some people.

If the sequel shows Deckard as an aged replicant ... robots get old? So replicant Deckard is either killed or kills or runs away again at the end. ALREADY BEEN DONE IN THE FIRST MOVIE!

It's a machine before the TCP/IP and Internet times.

And?

I remember the joy of using machines back then, and that convinced me of the awesomeness of Linux... Flat memory? Every device (with suitable physical capabilities) can act as storage, or network or an input method? Awesome!


The "right" answer here, pull the drive. The second choice, install Linux to a FAT partition and tell it to use either SLIP or PLIP to talk to the outside world, then just transfer the files via RSync. Simple as that.

By definition. When you look at our current corporate culture, you know it has to be. For a simple reason: Companies bidding for jobs. And more often than not, the cheapest offer gets the deal.

Who is the cheapest? Usually the one that cut the most corners and underestimated his cost (i.e. time) to deliver the most.

If you penalize me for going over time and budget, my next estimate is 30 eons and 200 trillion USD.

Watch me come in well inside the budget.

In this case, please inform me what the fuck that useless manager is here for? If I have to do his job, he's essentially a waste of precious oxygen.

The added bonus is that you can very easily add the relevant information to your spam filter. Provided, of course, that you use a different pseudonym for different occasions.

Ok, how do we keep governments and industry out of it AND still provide funding for it?

But this one is one of the "gee, really, you don't say?" kind.

OF COURSE everyone wants to be the only one who has access to something. Monopolies are something really awesome, and only cool if they are, well, monopolies.

Data is worthless if everyone has it, only if you have the exclusive ability to use it it becomes valuable. In our world, the value of something is determined by its scarcity. Data is now something that can, by its very nature, be reproduced with near zero cost in infinite amounts. It only becomes a commodity if you control when, how and most of all if that data may be reproduced.

Truly rich, tossing out personal attacks about "moral bankruptcy" in a discussion about privacy rights as they relate to celebrity scandals and porn.

You win. I just can't compete at that level of rhetorical rigor.

Funny, all three of your examples are consensual activities. Posting nudes without permission of the model? Isn't.

Biiig difference between banning links to "revenge porn" and banning all links to porn without the explicit permission of the model.

Sure, it sounds nice and progressive and kum-ba-ya-bullshitty to say that even "real" porn models have a right to control the distribution of their images. In practice, you need a bigger stick than Reddit has to force that genie back in the lamp. Hell, you need a bigger stick than world governments have - See how long it takes you to find all the dirt on Max Mosley despite France ordering the internet to forget about him.

As a result, we end up with "fake havens", echo-chambers where everyone can pat themselves on the back about how much of a difference they've made, essentially by doing nothing more than ignoring the rest of the world. "Good job, guys! We sure showed them! Hey, where'd everybody go?"