The big elephant in the room, is: why do you pussies get all slow-witted and complainy and say "it's hot" when it's only 105 degrees? Another elephant in the room, is why do those other people, get all scairdy when there's a mag 4 earthquake? And what's with the people who claim their cars get .. rust?! Are you really trying to tell me there's enough humidity in air to rust a car? And what's with those pansies who get all winded, at the thought of jogging at only 8000 feet? Just get some fucking red blood cells. What's the problem? And you don't even have the pop density to be able to afford 10 gigabit fiber to your house? WTF kind of third world are you living in? And don't get me started on those people live in that place where the native food is bland. And why are you complaining about the cost of groceries, anyway? If you need an ear of corn, just walk out into your back yard and pluck one. WTF, people! Next, you'll be telling me the view from your patio is only a few miles.

The elephant in the room, is that there's a bunch of people pretending that we're not all the same, that we don't all have the same experiences and resources and equipment. That's laughable. Everyone knows we all live in seacoastal mountain desert jungles, in rural highrises, where we all park our 3 cars and 3 bikes downstairs, driving the car on the 180 days of the year when it's snowy and below freezing, and biking through the farm fields to the subway station on the other 180 days when it's above 120F.

you couldn't really record the whole movie, and even if you could, it would be jittery and not great resolution.

Not to take the police state's side, but isn't that a technological limit du jour? I wouldn't expect anyone to necessarily be fully aware of any one product's capabilities and limitations, much less the 2012 model vs the 2014 model. (And even if I see Glass(TM) on your face, I don't know that stock hardware is what you're really wearing.) It's basically possible to build a tiny camera (or cameras) that capture in high resolution and maybe stabilize it some way, or correct in software later. I'm not saying it would be easy but you damn well know it'll be easier in 2024. So it's just a matter of where you are on the tech timeline, and I'm going to cut theater managers and FBI guys a little slack on keeping up with what's the latest and greatest, what's cheap enough to possibly be deployed in the in wild right now, knowing a potential perp's resources, etc. And that's especially true before they start talking to him.

We're talking about something that is basically possible, just to some currently inconvenient/expensive/quality-traded-off degree.

[serious part of post ends]

And quality is sometimes tradable without much regret. Sure, I don't want to see a degraded video quality movie where naked chicks, with swords and warhammers, fight mutant dinosaurs which have cyber-implanted machineguns built into their limbs. I want to see that in all its HD glory. But what about a boring movie where a crusty-but-benign grandmother and her estranged formerly-unforgiving daughter finally get to talk about their feelings, and neither one ever shows hers tits or even wears a particularly short skirt that shows a bit of leg (is that asking SO MUCH!?), and there's not a single CGI monster or spaceship of any kind, where most visually-impacting scene is a sunset over the ocean, of such beauty that the daughter finally realizes that eventually time runs out for everyone and we all only have one life, so you better get on good terms with your mother now while you can, regardless of whatever past transgressions or misunderstanding or .. oh, fuck, it's boring to even try to bullshit my way through this. The point is, some movies don't need "great resolution." You've got all that touching dialog.

"Mother, you never approved of William."

"Janice, did you ever stop to think what I gave up, in order to raise my family? But I didn't mind! I loved you all!"

"Why did dad have to die at such a young age? I sometimes wonder, would he be proud?"

"Honey, I didn't want to worry you, but the doctor says..."

And I swear, not once in this movie, will anyone say anything as moving as "I'll distract them by shaking my boobies, and you sneak up behind the Deinonychus and slit its fucking throat."

Even if the guy really did record the movie, simply recording a film that you already paid to see does not cause anyone any loss.

The cops aren't looking for losses; they're looking for violations of the law. If you want cops to be concerned with losses, then you need to start electing legislators who pass laws which are related to losses. Right now, you (America plural, not necessarily you specifically, IgnorantMotherFucker) tell Congress "right on!" when they do things like enact DMCA, rubberstamp FISA courts, etc.

You're getting the cop behavior that you requested at the voting booth.

We've had Bush and Obama lying through their teeth about things that actually matter, like reasons for going to war or the extent of spying on our own citizens

Ok, let's clear something up right now about impeachment, since a lot of people seem to not really understand anything about it.

Impeachment is something Congress does. It's not something America does whenever a president gets caught being evil. Impeachment isn't about fighting evil. It's about doing something that Congress (or a lot of people in Congress) doesn't approve of.

Congress approves of the war lies and domestic spying. Presidents Bushbama has Congress' nearly unanimous support on starting whatever wars that the campaign contributors ask for, for removing whatever limitations that those "wimps" placed upon government powers 220 years ago, and so on. You're never going to see Congress impeach a president for doing the things that Congress demands that president do. If they were to do that, the President has a perfect defense: "but.. but.. you told me to!" and the impeachment process would immediately grind to a halt.

On the other hand, when a president goes off and truly does something on his own, without Congress telling him to do it, then there's a risk. There's basically no credible conspiracy hypothesis that you can come up with, where a bunch of wealthy campaign contributors met with House and Senate members, and said "It would be in our financial interest, if the president were to use his dominant position at work, in order to get sex. So get to work on forcing him to get some BJs from interns."

When you talk about BJs being benign and war being horrible, that is irrelevant with respect to the matter of impeachment. Congress wants wars and spying. Congress doesn't give a flying fuck about some other things, though, such as promoting sexual harassment. And while presidents can pursue their own agendas without Congress, if those agendas just happen to be illegal (as is the case with sexual harassment) then they risk impeachment.

Want pro-war and pro-spying Presidents to risk impeachment when they get caught doing those things? Then start voting for anti-war and anti-police-state Congress! What's your vote right now, 1% maybe? How often do candidates with those positions, even get in the top two in their races, much less win? You have to work on that, before you can dream of impeaching Presidents for starting wars or pursuing a police state.

And even then, yes, the impeachment is only going to proceed if a whole lot of people Congress happens to dislike the President. That's what happened to Clinton.

Now, Republicans happen to claim that they don't like Obama. But they have raging hardons for spending more of the GPD on war and increasing the amount of power concentrated in Washington DC at the expense of states and citizens liberty. Republicans are some of Obama's biggest supporters, especially on the issues that seem to be pissing you off. So just who are you hoping will impeach him? Ron Paul isn't in the House anymore.

Maybe it's a game. They're exploring all the ways that the Republicrats are trying to characterize the NSA spying as legal and justifiable, and getting rid of them, to see how stupid they can make politicians sound.

If it's only 49% likely US citizens are having their 4th amendment rights violated (and then 49% gets rounded down to 0: legal) then let's try for 100%, and see if that also gets rounded down to legal.

In fact, a lot of jobs at which people work very hard are not paid well at all, and therefore tend to incur lower taxes

Yeah, but look at one of those jobs, for example. Let's say that person is working 8 hours per day. They pay a certain amount of tax. Now compare that to cases where their hours are cut to 4 hours per day, or expanded to 12 hours per day. Even without progressive tax tables (imagine a flat tax rate), notice how the taxes go up or down. Then imagine the real world, where there are progressive tax rates. Notice how the taxes go up or down even more extremely, as person works harder or less hard.

Hardness is definitely one of the multiplicative factors in the tax. I think you're just pointing out that there are other factors too, such as jobs' pay rates per hour (where I make more sitting on my ass as a desk, than some guy pouring hot asphalt in the summer). Take nearly any job, no matter how hard or easy) and double or half the amount of work, and you'll see a strong correlation with how much tax we take away from that person.

One thing that has really stood out for me in the last 5 or 6 years is just how conservative their readers tend to skew.

Once thing that has stood out for me, is how many people confuse conservatives with Republican(TM)s. Fox News is Republican(TM), not conservative.

Conservative: "Central government should be relatively small and weak compared to what we have right now, with as many powers and responsibilities born by the individual states as is reasonably expedient."

Republicans: "Every single scientist is a liar, and they and everyone who listen to them, are going to go to Hell, as spake the One True God. Oh, and also, what that conservative guy said. Except when he said to end the federal drug war, or when he said that we need to protect and first and third through tenth amendments. Fuck that, though I do happen to agree with him on the second amendment, so at least that conservative guy isn't all bad.."

See the difference?

Bruce Schneier can easily arrange to get a lot of upvotes for story submissions about him.

Is that a fact? I checked the database and I didn't see that one.

Wow, a reasoned argument. Ok.

Would you favor a repeal of the 4th amendment? Does the 4th do a bad thing, limiting the government's desired powers (and wasting a lot of the courts' time) unnecessarily?

What a coincidence! The people who think it's a good idea, think it's legal. And the people who think it's a bad idea, think it's illegal.

Where are the people saying "It's awesome we're doing this stuff, but unfortuantely, we need to pass an amendment to legalize it," and the "This is undesirable and contrary to the country's interests, but the constitution clearly does grant the government this power," people?

When I see people split along the lines they're splitting on, I think everyone is full of shit.

Yeah, ok: even me. ;-) But that doesn't undermine my point!

The original MacOS had it right - there was no command line at all, at any level. .. [GUI] was an effective way to do the job.

No, that UI paradigm was seen at incomplete and not-enough, long before Jobs came back in the late 1990s. That's why they needed AppleScript: to make it usable, for those situations where people don't have time to manually sort through and click on thousands of things. To turn hours of error-prone human tedium into seconds.

GUI will never be the only UI. GUIs are too slow and cumbersome, too manual and labor-intensive, for situations where you have lots of things you have to do.

Or to look at it another way, no OS comes with everything that everyone needs, out of the box. Some people need additional apps, and those apps are written using programming languages. Those apps are not written by some programmer clicking on things in Finder, because there are zillions of very useful things that you can dream up, which Finder has no way to express. There's a reason we're talking to each other in words right now, rather than futilely trying to draw pictures.

What GUIs excel at, is giving people a way to do things that are already well-understood and have a plan already made for them. (And which don't involve any sort of hideous quantities of objects.) And having "a plan for everything anyone might ever want to do" is something that can only happen after we've all turned into zombies; until then, we'll all be too creative.

Complete PS2 collection? You better have a 1TB drive.

OMG, that could cost me .. *shudder* .. sixty dollars! That's almost as much as a whole new game, and an entire ten percent of the cost of a newest-generation console!

the sheriff of Nottingham is going to come after you for some US dollars.

Please go correct the wikipedia entry. Some arsehole has typed in the wrong country name!