I would have my doubts that this were the real explanation. Maybe for a few people here and there, but most techies that I know wouldn't mind things being much easier. I think it's more of a stubbornness and resistance to change, maybe with a little bit of laziness in the realm of "I don't want to have to relearn things." And as you say, "I've developed some ways to make my life easier, and I don't want to re-develop them all."

Of course, there's also the possibility that some of the new ways of doing things are actually not as good as the old. That can happen too. All of these things can happen, but I don't know many IT people who actually go looking for ways to create job security. For most of us, the "laziness" overcomes that, and we're overloaded enough with other work that we're just looking to make things as easy as possible.

I said that druggies were harmful to themselves. The entire intent of getting high is to escape reality, so why are you even arguing the fact that I acknowledge that those who get high are escaping reality?

The Objective universe does exist, even when your brain is too addled to notice. Plenty of people have met their ends while high because of that.

Better than somebody who continually uses illicit substances to specifically blur the line.

"What miniscule fraction write screeds and take up arms"

Approximately 10%. But that's not the reason I say Islam is a fake. The reason I say Islam is a fake is because as a theology, it can be used to justify everything from Sufi to ISIS and everything in between. There is no coherent morality to Islam, because Allah himself, as portrayed in the Koran, is not a faithful God, is not coherent from verse to verse.

A similar problem can be found in the Old Testament, and has inspired an awful lot of fundamentalism and atheism in Christianity and Judaism, perhaps the extreme example that can be found in our time, and a close cousin to the violence of ISIS, is Zionism in Israel.

"Catholicism has the bloody destruction and enslavement of the Americas on it's conquistador hands."

Yes.

"Islam - past and present - has nothing to shade that, by way of comparison."

Have you paid attention to what has been happening in Africa in the last 150 years?

"The "muslims" that you see and read about with violent conversion and conquest? They are created, inflated and supplied by the various trans-national agencies and alliances in Global para-politics."

They've been in existence far longer- the Sunni/Shi'a split happened within a generation of the death of the Prophet.

Maybe just that they want an audience...?

So you're saying, "You can't claim that there's no value in watching the video unless you've seen it." On the face of it, it seems reasonable. But then, if I were to claim that there's no value in watching it, then why would I have watched it? If I had chosen to watch it of my own accord, then it would actually undercut my argument that there's not value in watching it. Obviously I would have thought that there was *some* value, or I wouldn't have watched it.

It's a little like saying, "I'm against gun control, but don't even argue with me unless you own a gun. If you don't own a gun, then you don't understand guns, and so you should just stay out of the conversation." It kind of almost sounds sensible until you think about it.

I think, rather, that it falls on you, as someone who has seen it, to explain what value I would get from watching it. Other than a sadistic juvenile rubberneckinig enjoyment from seeing something awful, what would I get out of watching it?

You know, I've thought about why this is the case, and here are a couple of thoughts that I had:

1) With all we've found out about big businesses cooperating with the NSA, I wouldn't be too surprised if the NSA had, in some ways, actively discouraged security and encryption.

2) I think part of the problem is coming up with, agreeing on, and an implementing a set of standards. We don't do standards anymore. Everyone has little walled gardens. We're not going to come up with better email standards, for example, because the days of everyone wanting to agree on protocols like SMTP and POP3 and IMAP are over. Now Google wants to have its own email standards and protocols, Microsoft wants to have its own, and Facebook wants to have its own. You aren't going to get those companies together into a room, working towards a better solution that they can all use. Even if you had a better protocol all worked out, they wouldn't use it. It's a combination of "not invented here" syndrome and "I want to control the patents and the infrastructure" and finally, "I don't even want people to be able to communicate with people on my service unless they also sign up for my service."

3) People prefer to do nothing than to undertake change. Fixing things takes effort, and your attempts to fix things might not go according to plan. As long as nobody important to yelling at them to get things fixed, a lot of people would rather sit back and watch things fall apart.

In being able to tell fantasy from reality, quite possibly.

As in, ordinary "Neurotypical" people are not capable of it.

He wasn't. He was just a Catholic Boy, a foolish young man who thought that Islam was a peaceful religion. He was trying to tell the story of the street both times he was captured.

Islam is a fake.

Somebody who read Stranger in a Strange Land while stoned?

It is the incubator for deciding where we WANT to spend eternity. The only question is where we want to go.

Which is why I despair of America. Last Presidential election, between Hudge and Grudge, 98% of the voting public voted for the lesser evil. And thus still voted for evil.

This was not entirely unexpected, given the nature of the data (floating inventory moving through a factory and a warehouse- sometimes it returns to the same location in three dimensional space, but is unique in four dimensions). But it sure would have been nice if they could have given me a scan sequence number as well; a date time field is nice for reporting but should NEVER be part of a logical primary key.

Good people not only permit it, good people vote for it. They want this to come to pass.