But, really, there has to be a degree of cognitive dissonance between the hope you'll do well and be super rich ... and the actual reality that, it's a tough slog, you might not get there, and you might have to trade away some equity to someone else to get there ... in which case your payout might not be as big as you hoped.

The difference between con-man and entrepreneur can be a thin line.

I've known a few people who fancied themselves the latter, but had worked themselves into such a feverish pitch trying to get there ended up as the former.

Sometimes people convince themselves things really are going to work out OK, even when completely unfounded. The human brain doesn't always like lying to itself.

You can't stop people from communicating with each other sub rosa. You can make it awful tough for them if they use a cipher (SSL). A cipher is pretty obvious, and you can use force to compel them to give up the key if they don't destroy it first. And you can immediately see if the key works. So they don't use a cipher. They use a code. "The oranges are falling from the tree in Grant Park". That could mean "attack against Fort Sumter the third week of August". Or it could mean "The pigs discovered cell number 377". Or it could equally well mean "I left three joints of marijuana for you at the agreed place". Want to know what it means? The target can tell you it's not written down anywhere, and he's not telling you. Hell, street slang is a code that is not written down.

Or they can just go into the woods and whisper to each other. They can send runners. Carrier pigeons.

I'll try to make it easy for you. Socialism demands big government, and big government always progresses naturally to bigger and finally to biggest. Simple as that.

No, obviously socialism is not the ONLY source of (or route to) big brotherism. But it is one important source/route. The question is, no matter what ism you choose, can you keep it focused, controlled, and harnessed. For example, the US Constitution was a strong attempt at doing so, but nine criminal, off the rails and off the wall swelled heads in black robes are effortlessly and without the slightest counteraction defeating it.

In the end, whether you have a formal Constitution (US) or not (Britain), if the general population is not sufficiently committed to keep the government under control, it will always evolve into a tyranny.

Finally comes the time nothing short of a revolution will fix it, and you have to hope enough patriots are left to step up.

If they can stay up for 80 hours, they should be able to do a "round-the-world" flight too.

It's going to take several days to fly from Japan to Hawaii. In the process he's beaten the record for longest solo flight ever.

P.S. Are you 12?

Are you asshole? Or do you just play one on the internet?

It's a single person aircraft, travelling at an average speed of 50 to 100 km/h (31 to 62 mph).

Yes, it's not a continuous flight. But it will, nonetheless, be the first time a solar powered aircraft will do it, and every leg is pretty much an epic task.

It's still circumnavigation.

So, boo hoo, you disagree with the terminology. Nobody else gives a damn.

I don't care about a plane making a series of relatively short flights under optimal conditions (daylight), and I don't see why anyone else does either.

Well, that doesn't seem to be what is happening:

Solar Impulse 2 took off from Nagoya, Japan on Sunday for its audacious five-day flight across the Pacific Ocean to Hawaii with Swiss pilot and Solar Impulse co-founder Andre Borschberg at the helm. It has since stayed in the air for three days and nights without using a single drop of fuel, grabbing the distance and duration records, 5,663 km (3,518 mi) and 80 hours respectively, in the process.

This isn't some jet engine which does this in a few hours.

You can whine all you want, but the records are real.

They're for solar aviation, which means it's a lot harder and a lot slower.

Call us back when you've done better.

Well, should that happen, then all the people who have been demanding their 2nd amendment rights be recognized will know what to do.

Yup, if we showed you the level of abuse we'll be doing you'd get scared off and not use our service, and our IPO could be in jeopardy.

For now they're trying to pretend they won't start acting like assholes as soon as they can.

Can't tell you how many times a day I hear or say "The 9".

You mean the Nazgul??

I always thought IBM was evil, but I never expected that.

I have no idea if it was the government or not.

I'm just no longer willing to dismiss out of hand that it was, and no longer wiling to accept the dismissal of the government being involved as crackpot.

As I said, stuff which used to be tinfoil-hat-crazy is now pretty much a daily reality.

Do I think they're beyond sowing some fear to be allowed to declare it under their control? Not even a little.

In fact, given everything else we know has actually happened, it's disturbingly plausible.

You simply can't be paranoid enough these days, because reality keeps trumping fantasy. And what used to sounds ridiculous is now pretty much established as fact.

Honestly, things which 10 years ago would have been the domain of crackpots is now 100% fact.

These days it seems like no matter how paranoid you are, what is really happening is even crazier.

When law enforcement commits perjury in the form of parallel construction, when they withhold knowledge of their surveillance technology, when they lie about what they're doing without a warrant, when they lie about how many times a technology has led to an arrest .. honestly, it's hard to not assume shady dealings by a three letter agency.

You can't make up stuff anymore which is as crazy as reality.

And given that these guys have cut into everybody else's telecomms ... why wouldn't they be doing it here?

It really is hard to dismiss "crackpot" these days, because the reality is shit like that is actually happening.

Technical skills... You mean like how half of the bubbles say fluffy BS like "leadership", "strategy", "demand generation" and "spanish" (yes, the chart includes "spanish" as a node, over near ITIL)? Yeah, sure, "technical" - If you work in HR, maybe.

"Applicant must recognize a computer, and not attempt to eat the mouse. 2-4 years experience stuffing envelopes preferred, because we don't understand metered trifolds. Ideal candidate can tell Brioni from Armani by smell alone".

No kidding... Did anyone else keep getting a popup on mouseover that said something like "Men's Dockers, $22"?

Aside from the fucking annoying factor, it didn't even link anywhere or tell you where to buy them. Way to fail even at shilling, DiceDot!

Looked for two dots: C and SQL.

C has a nice big dot, but connects to only a handful of extremely broad-scoped nodes.

SQL, OTOH, has a tiny dot, and connects to just about everything on the chart.

Horseshit.

When the tray icon appears, there is no dismiss. There is no "piss off and go away".

There "upgrade now" and "reserve your copy". There is no description of WTF not reserving my copy does, there is no dismiss. There is "I am going to sit here reminding you to upgrade to Windows 10 until you do".

The average user is going to read that and think "Oh, I guess I have to do this". It took me 20 minutes to identify the source and figure out what I had to remove.

When that crap is presented to you, there is NO indication it is optional, that you can cancel it, that you can choose not to do it .. in effect it presents itself with two choices "now or later".

And it means Microsoft is acting like they own the machine, and it's up to them to decide when to make changes to it.

They're doing more than advertising it.

In Windows 8.1 they pushed out an update which put an icon in the task tray which said "upgrade to Windows 10, now or later?"

They're not pushing it as optional. They're installing stuff which is going to do it to you, and isn't giving you a way to decline. You end up needing to uninstall an update (KB 3035538).

I'm sure they'll do it again.

Microsoft seems to have decided they own the computers, and the networks they're attached to. Which is completely bullshit.

And, don't forget, once they have all those juicy passwords they can pass 'em off to law enforcement.

Microsoft have always been assholes, but this takes the cake.

Basically Windows Phone and Windows 10 are gaping security holes, and Outlook.com is now acting as malware.