I appreciate the reasons for the war on piracy, but TPB was more than a pirate nexus: it was a great place to links to downloads via bittorrent that everyone could get to.

The internet needs to return to its wild west days of open file storage. True, lots of people are going to pirate, but that's technologically inevitable. The anti-piracy people are destroying necessary stuff along with what they fear.

Pleasing the unwashed masses is not my task. Yes, that means you, with the mod points.

This is great. The Crowd has the greatest pretense of all human things, and turning up your nose at it debunks its assumption of moral superiority.

We make stuff to sell it to ourselves, then sell advertising based on that, pretending somehow this is all anything but Monopoly money based on our oil and military power.

That's nothing, democracy built a society of drones.

Oh! You mean the robot planes. Sorry, my bad.

The game is to find a unique angle to approach your research that's essentially clickbait, then produce some results, and figure out some way you can claim victory and go home.

If you're just doing this to get on to the next stage, it makes sense to plagiarize and get it out of the way. You can get to the nice fat yearly income that way without having to know much of anything.

Do we have a quality of scientists problem because science is such an esteemed (and often well-paid, in private practice at least) career that people who should not be scientists are trying to be scientists?

...humanity can advance again. Just a thought.

Google is desperately searching for new products because they know what the rest of us are beginning to figure out: internet advertising is a paper tiger.

In theory, it leads to targeted ads reaching more people than ever before. In actuality, it advertises by demographic in the same way television does, and mostly repeats products you have shown interest in before whether you bought them or not.

Further, most of the sites showing advertising on their content are putting so many ads on the page that the effectiveness of any particular ad is radically diminished.

When this "dot-com bubble" (3.0) goes down, it's going to take the US economy with it, and through them, the world.

"I'm sorry, I can't find anything for monogamy. Perhaps you'd like to research transsexual group anal sex orgies instead?"

Public shaming is how we destroy people, not encourage good behavior.

If you want to end DUI, end alcohol culture. That requires fixing social problems and giving people something to live for.

Of course, doing that will require more systematic and structural efforts.

The Antares rocket's engines are based on old soviet designs from the '60s.

We're just kicking around the same old ideas, trying to make them better. No real new direction. But my fridge can post to Twitter.

It is a political term, and nothing more.

Generally it is used for those who resist the idea that the third world must be imported into the first world, reducing the first world population to a third world hybrid, thus destroying culture, heritage and values and making it more tractable by the twin parasites of government and industry.

See here:

http://slashdot.org/submission...