the coffee maker (usually coffee girl) would make you any coffee drink you wanted, and has your preference memorized, usually for free as a company perk

I'm not sure a machine ever gets that good.

Minimum wages kill that possibility up here.

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

I grew up when phone numbers were public information. Everybody had a book where you could look up the phone number and address of anyone in the area. A few people were unlisted at their own request, but this was the exception.

Phone numbers and addresses were treated as public knowledge.

When cell phones first arrived, receiving calls cost money, so cell phone numbers were kept private. Now that the cost of incoming calls is much, much lower, there's little need to keep treating these things as private, especially with people replacing land lines with cell phones.

The problem lies not with facebook making this data available; the problem lies with everyone who pretends this is secret information to begin with. Some companies consider your phone number to be a unique identifier. Other (idiotic) companies treat it as an authenticator...something nobody else knows. Mix those two and BAD SHIT HAPPENS.

SSNs are treated the same way. Some places use them for identification and others use them as a freaking password. Frequently an individual bank or credit provider will be using a SSN as both a username and password simultaneously. THAT is the heart of the problem.

Would knowing the address for the White House help you steal Obama's identity. No, because everybody knows that is public knowledge. The problem is the people who think "wow, this guy knows his own address, so he obviously must be who he claims to be, because nobody else would know that"

There's no question that the US has an extremely ugly history when it comes to relations with Latin America. The Monroe Doctrine was grossly twisted into a license to establish hegemony over the Western hemisphere and join the emperor's club of Old Europe. Half of the current problems in Latin America stem from US meddling. I've lived outside the US long enough to have a realistic perspective. Culturally speaking, we certainly prostitute ourselves to the entire world. We're okay with that; you aren't.

In one breath, you call us a whore and complain that our prices are too high.

What makes no sense is that you, despite all your invective towards the US, will readily sacrifice your personal honor and integrity at the altar of US commercialism. It is, in many ways, a disease, this "keeping up with the Jones'" or "he who dies with the most toys wins". What you don't realize is that you have also been infected, and you are helping to spread it.

If you can't stand Sony's pricing, if you hate what the advertisers are pushing, if you loathe what it all represents, then walk away! Don't become a prostitute yourself. If you have to amuse yourself with a Balero, then do so. Your kids will respect you for it.

I should just NOT play games? Should I resort to a Balero (Cup-and-ball) only because that's the "noble" thing to do?

Only you can answer that question. I don't know what your honor is worth to you.

There is a cultural gap in play here. I do realize you actually feel personally insulted by Sony's pricing structure, but that doesn't translate here in the US. Business is business; it's not personal. Americans in general feel it's perfectly acceptable for sellers of non-monopolized, non-essential goods to charge whatever price they wish. The idea of one day being the seller of a highly-coveted product is central to the "American Dream"; it's part of our national psyche.

Personally, I think you demean yourself more by resorting to piracy as revenge. The noble response here would be to take your business elsewhere. Perhaps that's considered too passive or cowardly where you are from. Maybe your culture expects a more active response.

Either way, don't expect much sympathy on a US-centric forum. Americans just don't have that honor/revenge mindset about business.

So considering all this, will you tell me why sould I care about getting a $800 console (almost 2 months salary), pay $100 for a game, and be told by sony/MS "we don't allow your kind here, get the fuck out" on PSN/Live. For me, piracy is a form of boycotting sony, for treating me like a second-class citizen.

Keep all of that in mind before thinking people who pirate games are just "cheap".

You could always take your business elsewhere. MS and Nintendo do offer, in the grand scheme of things, a comparable product. Your rationalization of piracy as a just and noble revenge against perceived insults from a Japan/US-centric company is complete bullshit.

You are just being cheap.

Linux doesn't have fragmentation issues either, unless you're goin for the fud route.

The commercial Linux companies don't have a strong financial incentive to fragment the market. They rely on app developers to directly support their product, and if they stray too far from OSS principles, they lose the dev support. There is not enough money to be made locking in customers to overcome the losses on the development side.

Phone companies do have a strong incentive to fragment the Android market. Their business model relies on making it as difficult as possible to switch providers and to provide incentives for unnecessary hardware upgrades by artificially restricting software upgrades to newer models. They don't care about openness. They don't have to. They are the phone company.

it's open-source and therefore, backdoors can't be hidden in the code

You really, really, REALLY need to read this:

http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/ken/trust.html

As the motor, the tank, the fuel, the cooling etc doesn't have to be lifted with the orbiter, actually the energy is not at all comparable.

Actually, you do need to lift a tank, fuel, and a motor. It's impossible to fire a object into orbit from the ground without a delta-v later.

It's basic orbital mechanics. Unless the bullet is traveling fast enough to escape Earth's gravity well, the bullet's trajectory will return back to it's starting point. Any bullet fired from earth will be on a trajectory that intersects the Earth.

The best description of hell I ever heard was also from a Vatican worker.

Paraphrasing a bit:

> ''Hell, by definition, is just a place where God does not exist. To a Christian, that is the worst place imaginable. We speak of fire and brimstone and eternal physical torture, but that's only the best analogy we have to describe it. It's just a place without the presence of God. People have their entire life to form a relationship with God; if they don't, they go to Hell. When I say, "you are going to Hell", it means you will be without God forever because once you are dead, you can't change anything. As a non-Christian, this is meaningless to you, but thinking about it makes me sad.''

The discussion continued to whether he believed all this stuff was real. Again, paraphrasing...

> ''What is real? Pain, love, remorse, joy, anger...all of these are things we can identify and predict, but not explain. They are all in your head; they have no physical manifestation to inspect. We could argue that they aren't "real", but they certainly exist. "Real" is semantics. God, and by extension, Hell, both exist. That doesn't mean I can convince you they are real.''

Frankly, it was a pretty interesting discussion.

Government regulation was the only way to combat this.

Yeah, but this is a case of BAD regulation. Yes, it solves a problem that many people want solved, but it does so in the wrong way.

The better solution is that all commercials be broadcast with sidechannel metadata that identifies the type of content and the sender. Any content that is subject to truth-in-advertising free speech restrictions should be properly tagged so we know it is an advertisement. This would also let us loosen the free-speech restrictions that are in place.

This method lets the consumers DECIDE how they want to deal with commercials. Previously, the broadcasters had the choice. Now nobody does.

The terrorists have won.

Why should they get the credit? It's our idiocy and our tax money that brought us to this state.

Saying "The terrorists have won", is shirking responsibility. This is our fault. We did this.

But let me give you a hint. Trains? Didn't you watch old cartoons as a kid? When we want to derail them, we don't need to be on them, and if we are, we have wasted some kamikaze brothers who could have better employed elsewhere.

The problem with trains being soft targets is that they take specific paths at predetermined times. Because it's too expensive to guard the millions of miles of railway track from terrorists, I propose, for security's sake, we randomize the train departure times and destinations and implement random delays and schedule changes en route.

The Metropolitan Transit Authority of Boston and New England Amtrak have had these security measures for years and, as one can infer from the lack of terrorist incidents, they have clearly presented a most difficult target. Note that when the 9/11 attackers left Boston, they chose to fly rather than take the train.

some person's private information is NOT the resource of the site that stores it. a person's private information belongs to that person alone. there can be no other argument to that.

Facebook doesn't operate on wishes and thin air. Their server farms are paid for with the understanding that they will use and exploit the information you give them to make money. It's not "your private information" after that point...you sold it to pay Facebook for the service they provide to you.

President Merkin Muffley: General Turgidson, I find this very difficult to understand. I was under the impression that I was the only one in authority to order the use of nuclear weapons.

General "Buck" Turgidson: That's right, sir, you are the only person authorized to do so. And although I, uh, hate to judge before all the facts are in, it's beginning to look like, uh, General Ripper exceeded his authority.