Listen ... we don't care about your creationist drivel or your superstitions, we believe in reality around here.

Why don't look a the universe as it exists, and realize that if your god actually exists, he's a fuck of a lot more sophisticated and expansive than you drooling morons who need to believe the Earth is young.

The Earth is old. The solar system is old. The universe is massive, old beyond imagining, vast beyond comprehension, and utterly amazing beyond belief. You have elements in your body which could only come into existence in stars which have already died, before our own sun existed, before the Earth existed, and long long long before your damned 50,000 years.

The need to squish reality into matching the literal interpretation of your superstitions is your problem, because your wee-little evolved-from-monkey brain refuses to see the world as it is, and insist on some trite explanation whipped up in a way suitable to explain to bronze age people ... and borrowed from what you'd call heathens and pagans from well before that.

Any god which can create the vast and awesome universe we live in would be rolling his eyes at your need to deny physical reality to fit your fairy tales.

But the specific need to take the bible as a literal, and accurate representation of reality instead a means of explaining stuff to primitive people is pathetic.

You do god a disservice by treating him as being as as small and tiny as your world view. Because you're obsessed with denying reality, instead of seeing it.

There is no "science" in this denial of fossils, evolution or any of this ... this is nothing but use stupid tricks to deny reality to match your fables, instead of realizing your fables are metaphor.

Any god who wanted people to do that would have to be a moron. And if he doesn't like it, he can take it up with me himself.

But stop pretending to use science to defend creationism. Because that's just sophistry to support your own delusional take on reality.

And yet any time someone suggestes stronger regulation the entire IT community comes out up in arms and shouts "free market".

No, the CEOs say that. The rich greedy bastard maximizing executive compensation say that.

The "entire" IT community sure as hell doesn't say that. Many many people have figured out the free market is a fucking fairy tale.

The IT community is not defined by the rich assholes who get heard more often. And I'm sorry, but listening to rich assholes is the fucking problem -- because what they're telling us a self-serving lie.

There is no damned free market.

How is it still legal for these companies to advertise and sell a whole product but only deliver part of it?

Because they have all the power, can simply change the fucking terms of service as they see fit, and have the fucking politicians in their pockets to ensure they can get away with it.

Honestly, are you expecting a fair situation in which the consumer actually gets input on this shit?

You might as well ask a Ferengi for favorable financing terms. If he gives them to you, they're not favorable.

Why do we keep acting like we're surprised by any of this crap? Unless people start changing laws to shift the balance away from corporations, this is all you'll ever get.

You provide a link to something which has a banner for free-market.com.

As there is no fucking such thing as a free market, never has been, and never can be .. I simply don't care.

The fucking free market is a lie, which was my point.

None of which is relevant to cost.

Or, more accurately, none of which is relevant to how much the manufacturers will charge.

See, in theory, over time the cost of a good goes down. In practice, companies keep adding doo-dads and wanting to amortize their development costs, so the amount they charge goes up even when the economies make it cheaper to make.

There isn't a CEO on the planet who would allow the costs to go down over time, because it's bad for business.

So as long as we worship the stock market and quarterly revenues so we can calculate executive bonuses ... the cost of no consumer good will ever go down, because the people selling it will actively just find new ways to justify raising the price.

Corporate greed and the unsustainable economics of the market is the reality, not the belief in economics that prices go down over time.

Uninstall Flash and get on with your life.

This solves all instances.

It depends on *how* you listen ... if you're singing along and dancing, well, it's probably not helping you any.

But, like most people, if you have it on in the background and it's masking other stuff and/or you're using it to keep you focused, it's probably helping, just like you said.

I was always a code with headphones kind of guy, and to this day there's a lot of tasks I'd rather be doing with some music to give me an added push.

But in this case, if your phone is beeping to tell you something shiny has happened, then I have seen a LOT of people who will not be able to ignore that for even a few seconds. For some people, the moment the phone makes a sound they're grabbing for it. It's almost Pavlovian, and pretty much means you'll get derailed almost instantly.

In fact, when I see most people with cell phones it's almost like "squirrel!" and then they're completely derailed to find out what happened. I can totally see that happening in the middle of studying derailing you from taking stuff in.

No matter HPs motivation for this ... the shitty and sorry state of security of consumer electronics is pretty well documented. Hell, we see stories here at least weekly about it.

I assume pretty much every device which wants to connect to the internet is full of absolutely gaping security holes, because companies don't care, and consumers want easy.

My default position is these smartwatches are full of security holes. And smart TVs. And the internet of things.

Because every damned vendor seems to either do a shit job of security, or they don't do it at all.

Dude... here's five dollars. Go buy yourself a sense of humor.

Dude ... this is Slashdot ... if you don't expect someone to correct that, joke or not, you're pretty clueless.

News for Nerds, the pedantry comes for free.

Ummm ... yes, SETI does look for EM radiation.

But EM radiation pretty much travels at the speed of light.

As there is zero EM radiation emitted by humans which will have traveled 1000 light years, no matter how sensitive your sensor is, it simply cannot measure signals which haven't traveled that far.

So when we just now discover something which is 1000 light years away, what we are seeing is 1000 year old light, and conversely, what they can see/hear from us is also 1000 years delayed.

Around 1000 years after humans started producing EM radiation this planet might start receiving the earliest radio signals. But humans have not been transmitting EM radiation for anywhere near 1000 years.

There is NO amount of sensitivity of a detector which can have received EM radiation 1000 light years away from us, because we haven't been creating it for that long. That would involve time travel.

You know, because physics.

Except, of course, at 1000 light years away ... there are no EM radiations from us which would have reached there.

Sorry to burst your bubble.

Ha ha ha .. boy are you naive.

See the DMCA was written in such a way as to shield the people filing the requests. When they wrote the law (and, yes, it was corporate lobbyists who wrote it) they gave themselves a get out of jail free card ... so while they are effectively making a sworn statement, all they have to do is say they genuinely believed it was infringing and all is forgiven.

The DMCA is badly written because it was designed to let corporations do anything they want without consequences.

Talking about adding a voluntary system whereby they are held to some level of accountability? Not gonna happen.

Because the people who were on the corporate payroll to pass the laws in the first place only care about what the corporations have told them to do.

Welcome to a world in which governments are basically working to advance corporate interests above all else.

Crap like this is kind of the inevitable outcome of that, and the copyright lobby have bought themselves the keys to the kingdom.

Technically, while it, er, originated in your pants ... it actually 'happened' on the telephone network.

Unless you call the phone in your other pocket, and then you can assume that all parties will keep it private.

But pocket dialing the wife while schtupping the mistress? Not so private.

Are all your pockets in the back? Or are you too unimaginative to realize that not all pockets are over your butt?

In which case I'd guess your familiarity with pants is very limited.

It could be "junk" dialed.

This is what happens when you let industry write your damned laws.

The DMCA was written in such a way as to basically leave a wide trail for companies to totally abuse and misuse it. Because this was the law they bought and paid for to ensure they could do anything they wanted without penalty.

All of these issues were pointed out at the time, and the law got passed anyway, because these days the lawmakers are all beholden to industry and don't give a damn how badly the law has been written.

But nobody at all should be surprised at this crap. Because it is pretty much by design -- they can do almost anything they want with no real accountability. All they have to do is claim incompetence and they're magically forgiven.

It's a broken, lop-sided law which gave the copyright lobby the ability to threaten and intimidate as they see fit.

But don't think for a minute this was by accident. The DMCA is one of the most industry friendly laws in existence, and completely failed to hold them to any standard of accountability.

This is what happens when your legal system becomes co-opted to favor corporate interests above all else.