Yeah, and I was one of those people to whom one of those credit card numbers belonged. I got a deeply discounted membership to Stratfor for a year, but then didn't renew it because I didn't think their news service was worth $99 per annum. While I didn't get any false charges on my credit card, I was inconvenienced by the perpetrators of this hack because my bank cancelled my credit card, and required me to get a new one. I then had to contact to everyone who was automatically billing my charges to that credit card, and give them the new number. Inevitably, I missed a couple, and got some late charges. It wasn't a disaster, but it was certainly inconvenient.

What really angers me about incidents of this type is the tone of moral superiority taken by their perpetrators and certain members of the community who support them. Somehow, these faceless actors are ascribed the right to judge which people and which organizations are evil, and to mete out punishment accordingly. If they have such a right, then we will soon arrive at the stage where no one has any rights.

Your reasoning is a bit unclear. Let me try to help: We know who Jeremy Hammond is, so he is not anonymous. Because he is not anonymous, he could not possibly have perpetrated any crime attributed to the anonymous Anonymous.. Did I get that right?

It's certainly not the only motivator. I've left well-paid jobs because I felt that my work was pointless. I've also left jobs because I felt underpaid. Money is not the only motivator, but it's certainly a major consideration.

Heh. I was once handed a massive (and rather high quality) framing hammer as my "reward" for "helping to complete the project on time". I had no idea what project I was being rewarded for (and the person doing the rewarding didn't know either). Under the circumstances, the hammer couldn't be said to constitute much of an incentive (you've got to know which of your deeds are being rewarded, after all). But it was a damn fine hammer.

I was once asked to come up with ideas to reward tech writers for superior job performance. That one was easygift certificates to Amazon (back when it only sold books). That worked fairly well. I always tried to come up with motivators that I would want if I were to win one. Tools (of the hardware store variety) were never on the list.

"Acting as directed", huh? That's some sort of excuse? I prefer a direct bottom up approach (so to speak). All that is necessary to effect change is to make all these dumb jerks quit their jobs. You can't get to the policy-makers, and no political party is interested in changing Security Theater. But you can make a difference every time you go through the airport security checkpoint by letting them know just how you feel about them. We create change...one TSA grunt at a time.

I guess that makes you a grammar nazus.

I long ago realized that success in standardized tests does not come from giving the correct answers; you must deduce what the author of the test believed to be the correct answer. Usually, you can find an answer that corresponds to popular belief; that's the one you pick. If a question has no correct answers, or the choices presented contain several conceivably correct answers, you just have to figure out which answer would be obviously true to a guy with a degree in education or psychology. I always scored in the 99th percentile using this technique.

Amen, brother. I figured that my aversion to video "tutorials" or "reviews" or whatever was just cranky old me being out of touch with the rest of the world again, so I wasn't going to say anything. But yeah, I am very sick of people talking and mugging for the camera instead of just writing a couple of clear concise paragraphs. The written word is random access. I can quickly skim a few paragraphs to see if this is what I'm looking for, I can read a lot faster than some fool can talk, and I if I just need one particular piece of information I can find it much more quickly in a written document than a video. I reserve particular disgust for people who try to demonstrate complex procedures, but have no idea about lighting or camera angle, so that the critical stuff is always done either in murky darkness or hidden behind the guy's hand.

Videos suck time. You have to sit in front of the monitor and watch while some guy natters on about whatever the subject is. Even if the video truly contains important reference information, you can't just watch it once, then later quickly go back to the critical part that you forgot. You have to try to find the right place to start playing the video. Again. You can't search a video for key-words. You can't print a video for later reference, or print a page to give to a friend who has a similar problem, and needs just a bit of key information. You can just send him the link, and invite him to waste his time.

What I truly fear is that the trend to videos is just another sign of cultural degeneration: it is part of the decline of literacy, of regard for the written word, and of the analytical thought that is possible only by means of the written word. So I don't look for a reversal of this trend any time soon. It's just going to get worse, along with everything else.

I didn't know Chromium was open source. Maybe we are safe, as you say, and I can check this item off my paranoid worry list. I guess maybe the Google business model factors in the fact that most users aren't savvy enough to install an ad-blocker...or maybe most users don't hate ads as viscerally as we. Slashdot excluded? I keep seeing their offer to let me use Slashdot without ads, but it hardly seems necessary, as I never see any. Oh, wait...

Hmm. I just checked, and there is AdBlock (and AdBlock +) for Chrome. OK...not so bad, right? But what guarantee is there that these plugins will keep working after FireFox is dead and gone? Remember, we're blocking Google's revenue stream here, right?

Yeah, Firefox seems to have been taken over by idiots—or maybe they're really working for Google. The problem with using other browsers is that I haven't figured out how to get add-ons for those other browsers that will prevent me from having ads flashed in my face constantly. Strange, huh? To me, having animated ads all over the place when I'm browsing = watching TV. It's just that bad—and just that useless to me. I can't read text when images are flashing next to it.

Have people forgotten that the whole point of Firefox was its freedom from corporate interests? And that Microsoft is not the only corporation we should want to be free of? Do people think that Google launched Chrome with any other intention than to kill off Firefox, which allows us to ignore Google's major source of revenue...targeted obnoxious animated ads?

Indeed! As a long-time science fiction reader, I have been puzzled (for an equally long time) about what really happens when a person is exposed to the vacuum of space sans a protective suit. It's a standard plot development that the evil space pirates either threaten to cycle their hapless victims out the air lock, or some horrible misunderstanding leads to a minor character accidentally spacing himself—perhaps as the deserved consequence of failing to heed prominent written instructions. ( DO NOT TURN THIS WHEEL UNLESS WEARING APPROVED SPACE SUIT! ) To properly evaluate the dangers, should we ever be offered the opportunity of a space cruise—and the concomittant risk of abduction by space pirates or signs written in an unknown language—it is imperative that we know: exactly what happens if you get spaced? What are the odds of living through it? Would you want to live through it?

Regrettably, Science fiction writers are no help at all in answering these questions—they just can't agree on a standard scenario. Some authors seem to think you can hold your breath and maybe survive long enough to jump to a nearby spaceship (presumably crewed by non-pirates), while others have the hapless victims explode, or have blood spectacularly boiling out of all their bodily orifices while their eyeballs freeze solid. Some of the more prissy authors just have their red-shirts asphyxiate. It is especially scandalous that, after spending so many billions of dollars on our (non-fictional) space program, we have no hard data that could settle the question. Something must be done!

Well no, I'm not volunteering, of course. If I die, I won't learn anything.

Nope, Thomas Covenant hasn't been forgotten—no matter how hard I try.

I read all but the most recent one, and kept asking myself why I didn't stop. This author has the ability to suck you into reading books about characters that you hate. It's a rare talent, luckily.

Incidentally, the GP didn't get modded down; he posted as Anonymous Coward. How apt.

This pentalogy (quintology?) by Sherwood Smith and Dave Trowbridge is something I'm re-reading at the moment. It came out in the nineties, and it's even better than I remember. It's a great story that contains a lot of well-worn space opera tropes, some of which I would have sworn could never work until I saw them work in this book. We've got a lazy good-for-nothing (but is he?) royal heir who suddenly winds up next in the line of succession due to a well-orchestrated series of assassinations, we've got space pirates, weird sex (among space pirates), telepathic aliens who can cook people's brains and make them explode out their eyes (eeeew!), aliens who are single-personality triplets and communicate with humanity only on the basis of old Three Stooges TV shows, an Evil Ruthless Conqueror, an Evil Ruthless Conqueror's Son (but is he really thoroughly evil?), we've got oodles of plots and counterplots. This list may be boring, but the books are not! The major characters all have depth, and some of them are not quite evil, while others are not quite good.

These books are pure fun, but they seem to have been pretty much ignored when they came out, and certainly aren't talked about much today. Unlike many books written over a decade ago, they have aged very well. The authors took care to draw the background in such a way that you seldom come across jarring references to what is today outmoded technology. The Exordium books are out of print, but can still be had at online used bookseller sites. The five volumes are:

1. The Phoenix in Flight
2. Ruler of Naught
3. A Prison Unsought
4. The Rifter's Covenant
5. The Thrones of Kronos

Sherwood Smith has written some other novels, some of which I liked and some of which I hated. Trowbridge does not seem to have ever written anything else. One can only hope that the two collaborate again some day! Meanwhile, get these five books and enjoy!

I'm not sure what you mean by "semantically null". I suspect perhaps you are asserting that these words are meaningless. Maybe you think that these words are meaningless because one can view George Washington as a traitor or a patriot, depending on one's opinion on the matter. Today, some people say Obama is a traitor; others disagree. However, if "patriot" and "traitor" were meaningless, one could neither hold nor discuss such views. One could not even have what you call a "POV" on the matter.

You can't simply declare words "null" as your whim takes you, unless you want to stop talking or thinking altogether.