This is the principle of false equivalency - treating propaganda, vapid opinions, and just plain falsities with the same weight as facts, in the aim of being "fair and balanced." Letting the CIA, NSA, others speak at conferences where they are there to spread their own propaganda and to then treat these presentations as valuable facts is intellectually dishonest at best.

There is a time when various people need to be shunned to give them a wake-up-call, and not allowing these jerks to take time at our conferences.

The CIA fucking spied on the fucking Congress and made up "evidence" to turn over to Eric Holder to prosecute congressional staffers. Because they didn't like the investigation into plainly illegal torture.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08...

These people need to be shunned and locked out, not catered to. Many need to be in jail at the very least.

--
BMO

Israel's policy has always been "Don't fuck with us or we will destroy you." I wonder what part of this Hamas et al don't understand.

And here's the teenager with no life experience whatsoever.

Do you have any idea how long it takes to rebuild just a power substation? Do you have any idea how few EEs, techs, riggers, and laborers we have to rebuild them en masse?

You don't. That much is plain.

backup generators

What fucking backup generators? They don't exist.

Call up National Grid. Ask them how many "backup generators" they have for a Carrington Event situation. The laughter should be loud.

--
BMO

The concept that "the population would correct itself" is a pretty fucking bad euphemism for widespread famine.

You don't know anything about modern agriculture that feeds 7+ billion people.

Crikes, you're dumb.

--
BMO

Really? This would be devastating? We can't live without electricity, electronics, water pumps?

Can you farm without electricity? Gasoline? Do you have all the pre-electricity farm equipment that would allow you to grow food without a tractor, power tools, etc? Does your well pump even work without electricity? I'll bet it doesn't. I'll bet you can't really live off the grid unless you're Amish or Mennonite. You simply don't have the pre-industrial technology to get along in such a world.

Many in cities and suburbs, after 3 or 4 weeks, would wind up going out into the country to forage if they could find gasoline to pump (and gas pumps work with electricity!), because the supermarkets would be empty and all the food in the refrigerators/freezers would have spoiled after only a few days.

To your "off the grid" house. Probably.

inb4 "I have an arsenal of arms to keep them away"

Your best defense and survival depends on your neighbors. Because one lone person with a stash of food and arms can be out-sieged by the outside world.

I would suggest watching "The Trigger Effect," Episode 1 of James Burke's "Connections" series. Anyone (sensible) who watches that and looks around at the technology that supports all of us will come away with the conclusion that if it seriously went away for a month, we'd be fucked. The shit would so seriously hit the fan that your incredulousness indicates you are either completely out of touch with society at large, deliberately myopic, or some teenager that hasn't lived life enough to have any kind of broad view. Good luck with that.

--
BMO

I'm nearsighted and have worn glasses on and off since I was about 10. I wore contacts through most of my 20s, but returned to glasses in my 30s.

Now that I'm in my 50s I'm in that stage where my near vision is starting to deteriorate and I'm slowly becoming far-sighted. The first real manifestation of this was when flying at night, when I was experiencing massive eyestrain reading charts in my lap, but could see outside the plane just fine. So I got progressives the last time I got new glasses, and I'm fine.

I don't wear glasses when I'm not driving or flying. I prefer a soft-focus world. :-)

Am I a candidate for laser eye surgery? According to the web sites, not really. I could get good distant correction, but would then need glasses for reading. Since I need glasses to drive and to fly anyway, I'm not sure this would buy me anything.

...laura

There's no shortage of people who are literally insane in politics.

Indeed. 1 out of 4 people has a diagnosable mental illness.

An estimated 26.2 percent of Americans ages 18 and older â" about one in four adults â" suffer from a diagnosable mental disorder in a given year. When applied to the 2004 U.S. Census residential population estimate for ages 18 and older, this figure translates to 57.7 million people.

--NIMH

Consider what happens if the "Caliphate" gets their hands on some samples.

You mean the theocrats that are always talking about bringing the US back to its "christian" roots?

spit

--
BMO

It's dumb to trust any technology 100 percent.

This was discussed here earlier after a poll showing that people with low knowledge of the Internet don't trust it, implying by omission that those that have more trust the Internet more, which is far from the case. The people with the most knowledge know what the flaws are.

Blind trust in any kind of technology is dumb.

Blind distrust of anything is also just as dumb.

Distrust of TOR because it was a US Navy project is practicing a type of ad-hominem. I'd rather distrust it based on either reading the code or the opinions and arguments of people better able than me at reading its code.

I've said it before about other things - there are plenty of reasons to dislike something without having to invent them. I use this when discussing GMO, because the "frankenfood" argument is specious - the real problem is the IP angle, for example.

--
BMO

Carnegie Mellon is suppressing de-anonymising TOR discussion at Black Hat.

Talk on cracking Internet anonymity service Tor withdrawn from conference

By Joseph Menn

SAN FRANCISCO, July 21 Mon Jul 21, 2014 1:05pm EDT

        Technology

(Reuters) - A heavily anticipated talk on how to identify users of the Tor Internet privacy service has been withdrawn from the upcoming Black Hat security conference.

A Black Hat spokeswoman told Reuters that the talk had been canceled at the request of lawyers for Carnegie-Mellon University, where the speakers work as researchers. A CMU spokesman had no immediate comment. (Reporting by Joseph Menn; Editing by Chris Reese)

------

My guess is that someone wants the hole (if there is one) kept open a while longer or the suspicion that TOR is somehow ineffective alive. Let your mind run wild with speculation.

--
BMO

http://www.reuters.com/article...

"The population census has got him down as "dormanted". The Central Collective Storehouse computer has got him down as "deleted". [â¦] Information Retrieval has got him down as "inoperative". And thereâ(TM)s another one - security has got him down as "excised". Administration has got him down as "completed". ⦠Heâ(TM)s dead."

Brazil (1985)

this sounds great on paper,

No, it's not "on paper" and you seem to not know that Jack Conte (half of the duo Pomplamoose) is the CEO of Patreon. Patreon is the child of the experiences that Nataly Dawn and Jack Conte had with Youtube, and my posting of the interview on the BIRN and Nataly's closing of the other video was meant to be informative.

If you bothered to watch them. Which you didn't.

--
BMO

Way to misquote me. I never said that such shops were "only for hipsters".

What a disingenuous complaint.

>mention a whole list of things such as lomography
>claim you're not talking about hipsters.

Yeah, whatever, man.

--
BMO

Online shopping was going to kill brick and mortar entirely....

At least that was the story 15 years ago.

Brick and mortar retail is still there and taking up more real-estate than ever.

>indie bookstores are only for hipsters

Yeah, well, prejudicial bigotry gets you nowhere.

--
BMO

Bookstores aren't dying.

BIG bookstores are dying. The independent bookstores seem to be multiplying, after what seemed like iminent death at the hands of Borders, B&N and BAM.

Borders is gone. B&N is smaller, and BAM is simply disgusting and I won't go there ever again after going there once (it's a southern 'christian' company and it shows, especially in the whole two shelves of science books they had - I re-shelved Behe's "darwin's black box" in Fantasy). And when I was at BAM, I swear it was a whole lot of floor space for too few customers. Its days are numbered. Here in the Northeast, anyway.

But indie book shops where you get personal assistance and customer service? There's a renaissance.

Amazon isn't killing them. Amazon is killing the book-megastore.

--
BMO

Jack Conte and Nataly Dawn's experience with Youtube, and music publishers basically summed it up like this:

You can either go to a studio, sign a contract and /maybe/ make back your advance and /possibly/ hit the lottery and fill arenas

or

Cut out the middle-man and get more direct support and actually make a living. Nataly set up a Kickstarter for her first album and got 5x more than she expected.

Thus the motivation for Patreon.

Watch this interview:
Part 1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Part 2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Part 3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

And skip (if you want, the cover is pretty darn good) to the end of this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

--
BMO