Morpheus: The Link-bait is everywhere. It is all around us. Even now, in this very article summary. You can see it when you load up your RSS feed, or when you log into Slashdot. You can feel it when you're skiving off at work... when you're tweeting during church... when you're moaning online about politics and taxes. It is the distraction that has been pushed into your eyes blind you from the truth.

Neo: What truth?

Morpheus: That You are the Product, Neo. Like everyone else you have logged into a panopticon. Into a marketing scam that you cannot taste or see or touch. A prison for your attention-span.

Some time later...

"My name is Maximus Decimus Meridius, commander of the Armies of the North, General of the Felix Legions, loyal servant to the true Admin, Jon Postel. And I will advertise Cheap Affordable Cialis and Nigerian investment opportunities, in this life or the next."

How much did all of this cost?

Let's be blunt here. The purpose of this program was never to in any way seriously affect the Cuban regieme. The purpose of this program, like so many others at the NSA, was to "legitimize" bonuses and to buy new Cadillacs for NSA managers and senior officers. If General Alexander's Star Trek office revealed one thing, it is that the NSA has a culture of gorging at the public trough.

Corporations and commerce are basically run by elementary school-yard rules. Essentially the CEO runs up, takes something belonging to you, and runs away yelling "Nally-nally-neener-cakes! I get what you make!". There are no take-backsies unless you are willing to call a teacher/lawyers and get engaged in a huge fuss.

In fact, our modern system of commerce has become so efficient and automated that you do not even need to enter into a prior agreement or even a school in order for your property to "neener-caked". This will be the next step in the evolution of rent-seeking.

That's not freedom, that's power.

That's not a tautology, that's a platitude.

And if you don't want to be a victim of paparazzi and vindictive newspaper editors, black out all of your windows and never go outside again.

if you don't want to be a victim of the NSA or ad tracking companies, never go online again.

And if you don't want your pension scalped, don't invest it in the stock market where HFTs and Goldman rule the roost.

One the one side of all of these arguments, we have victims, and on the other, we have predators of all kinds who happily proclaim "It's legal. I'm allowed to exploit you. Freedom of Speech!! Small government!!.....Ignore the man behind the curtain I paid to have laws changed in my favor."

I have a different philosophy. I believe that the Law can be used to shape societies; to encourage behaviors we would like to promote, and discourage behaviors we would like to see curtailed. As long as we can have a debate about what Laws are legal and reasonable -- and not devolve into a Dogmatic ideological shouting match about commas in constitutions -- and as long we can apply Reason and wisdom, over emotion and ignorance when doing so, the Laws we develop stand a good chance of shaping society to make it a better place.

In short, I don't think a young girls smile in a photograph constitutes sacred, inalienable grounds for the bearer to upload said photograph to the Internet whenever he feels like 'sperging out would make him feel better.

The people who are waiting for you to develop secure password login libraries.

If you send too few people out then production won't be high enough in the beginning. You need to send a fair few billion out to at least the first few star systems so that the population can grow, then once the colony is establish, you need to ship people back to maintain production levels on the home world. This is basic stuff people.

>So it only took about a year of screaming from the users and slashdotters before Microsquishy paid attention and brought back the MENU instead of that god damned useless start screen.

It came out in October 2012, but people have been screaming about it since the pre-release in 2011.

So about the same amount of time it took Blizzard to fix the clusterfuck called Diablo 3, and with the same amounts of fucks given by the general population.

I, and others, can relate story after story about people like this,....

I can also related dozen of stories of people who drove dangerously, passed me out, and flew passed the lights ahead before they went red.

So called "bad" or dangerous drivers are more often than not rewarded for accellerating quickly and swerving dramatically. Those of us foolish enough to stay within the speed limit, and not take risks, are left waiting at the red light.

There are only so many times you can see this happening before one say, you decide to speed up as well.

And geeks and other "smart people" working in finance, law, and the NSA are doing just that, one egregious breach of trust at a time.

> Without the headset meeting all of these criteria VR sucks. The reason it isn't out yet is because the technology isn't there yet, and they are working on getting it there.

As someone who worked for a military supplier of VR equipment in the mid 90s, I can say you're missing one key component - a consumer friendly price point.

We (Kaiser VR) had headsets that sold for $100k that we'd sell to the military for use in aircraft and flight simulators, and they were really good. 180 degree field of view, 60 fps refresh rate, input lag that was low enough to not cause people to get violently sick, etc. Part of that was due to good motion prediction algorithms (I passed on some tips to Abrash when he started working on VR), but a lot just had to due with being able to throw a lot of money at a solution.

Being able to get all those specs into something cheap enough for a consumer to buy would be a miracle, but who knows? With $2B in the bank, they might just be able to do it.

It's A, she's turning the voice back on us -- outside of the stream!!. The end is nigh!!

b+down+start9

Me and many others. I was the primary designer of the crypto processing hardware which intersects with these specs. My public comments on the specs are here .

And how do you know the NSA's influence didn't simply steamroll over all your professional objections and put the flawed standard in the chips anyway? The NSA has social as well as technological backdoors.

The HFTs are buying in response to your order. Before you've even bought the good. They pay to get your orders before your orders are even filled.

It's a straight up insider trading contract between the exchanges and the HFTs. The fact that it is carried out over the course of microseconds does not alter the basic dynamics of the scheme, which amounts to the exchanges engaging in insider trading at the expense of their customers.