I was talking to some smalltime hosters and they were bitching about how much spamhaus was hurting them by blocking ip's they had rented out to these high paying east europeans... basically it was one long sales pitch FOR spamhaus because as a non-spammer and hosting with reputable companies, spamhaus is for me a savior and provides zero hassle.

It is basically like listening as a non-smoker to smokers bitch about how all the anti-smoking laws are making their lives miserable. Wheee! So the laws do work after all! Yahoo! Come on smoker, make my day, tell me how you have to stand outside in the bitter cold and rain, give me a reason to smile. Because I remember the days when every office had gray-blue air.

And I remember the days when your mailbox was overflowing with spam and it still continues, try to find a forum or such where there aren't constant attempts with "I made money working from home". Spamhaus wrecked your hosting business? Cry me a fucking river smokey. Outside in the rain with you.

REMEMBER THIS when you see someone bitch that Spamhaus blacklisted their ip (range). It has ZERO effect on non-spammers. Spamhauses blocklists are ONLY used for email. If I go with a hosting party that was blocked and put a web server on a blacklisted IP. IT HAS NO EFFECT. My webserver will be fully accessible to anyone!

NOBODY but mass mailers are affected by spamhaus lists. Want to host with a disreputable hosting company AND send a small amount of emails to users? Send your "legit" emails as most reputable parties do, through 3rd party mail services. The ONLY reason to send mail from server hosted at a disreputable hosting party is because you are a filthy spammer or a very cheap ass bastard.

And no doubt some asswipe will come with his needs to force everyone to waste their bandwidth on HIS essential marketing message and I say to him, OUTSIDE IN THE RAIN YOU CANCER STICK BURNER.

By the way, were are all the kiddies who claimed the bunker hosting meant the guy was untouchable because he could life for years inside it? Wake up kiddies, people like that do not want to spend all their life holed up in a bunker. Spammer 0, The world 1

The placebo effect is essentially about faith, if you BELIEVE the sugar pill works, it sometimes does.

Religion is ultimately for people who are a bit silly, anyone with a working brain, who questions, who wants to know what the pills contains and how it works... well.. they are going to know sugrose is at most going to help a diabetic patient during an attack but not going to stop say the pain of kidney stones.

Not that people can't still have "faith" even if they know that morphine is the only cure for that, my doctor gave me some high dosis pills to take if the pain became to much with a list of warnings about how I really shouldn't take them if I could stand the pain. It was a nice trick, just by having them I was able to stand the pain for longer and having them in my hand for the moments in between low dosage regular non-addictive pain medicine having worn out and the new pill not yet working fully... well it gave me the strength to continue. BUT it was a faith bases on science, the faith that I could STOP the pain at any moment with the morphine pill made me able to endure it 5 more minutes, 10 more minutes.

I can see the same working for people who have faith in a beard in the sky as long you don't question why an omnipotent god can't just take the kidney stones away. Don't forget, ignorance is bliss. If you can just accept that there is an answer to it all and that it doesn't have to make any sense at all to you because you are not meant to understand gods plan... well... that isn't it logical you would be a more content person then someone who wants to know how a person who talks to a good god can rape kids and not be considered an ally of satan instead?

Don't question, be happy. It is simple. The slave who doesn't rebel isn't whipped and has everything taken care off. No worries and probably selected to breed to create new docile slaves.

Alternatively, question things, want the world to be just and make sense and you are in for a lot of anguish and mental torture. Just imagine what I, a person who does not believe that in a democracy there is room for royalty is going through right now in The Netherlands. Why, like Terry Pratchett wrote, does humanity come with foldable knees. Why is everyone kowtowing to a rather fat useless lardass who couldn't find a german war-criminal to marry so he went to brazil to get the daughter of one? There is nothing remarkable about the guy but most of Holland is falling all over themselves to worship him. WHY?

I can quite see how a person who doesn't question such things would be happier.

Just less of a human being.

You are absolutely 100% correct and this is a common tactic by those who seek to oppress, not to shut you up perso but just to silence you long enough for attention to drift away. You can see an excellent example by weasel company Shell who around the Brent Spar debacle diverted attention away from Greenpeace claim there was till oil aboard the to be sunk platform by claiming that there was less oil on board then Greenpeace claimed, bought reporters like Witteman immidiatly fell for it. Quite by accident (caused by lucrative public speaking contracts) forgetting that Shell had claimed there was NO oil left on board. No oil mean zero liters but the bought press then went into attack mode on Greenpeace because Greenpeace couldn't exactly measure how many thousands of liters were left on board. By the time more accurate measurements had been taken, attention had drifted.

BUT judgments such as this make it harder to pull the same thing again next time. No it won't fix things in the past but it might fix the future.

Oh and this bit did reach the news, so wikileaks is in the news again. And everyone now has proof that Visa, Mastercard and Paypal acted against the law. That means something to. Not much but the longest journey starts with a single step, and a LOT of steps after that. Nothing worth fighting for was every won easily.

Ten to one it is a rounding error on his tax dodges oops sorry, tax evasions.

Anyway, sooner or later, the people always get the government and infrastructure they deserve... the US government and infrastructure rotten to the core? How... unexpected, giving the nature of your average American who rather deny himself a thousand dollars for the fear someone else might get a penny of him.

Yeah, and if people just used the amount of car they need to get from A to B, polution would plummet and fuel prices would go down and the roads wouldn't need so much maintenance. You FIRST!

The original web was designed as a gigantic book where instead of footnotes, you could click on a reference and read it from there. Everything else is fluff but it is that fluff that made the web. Want to see the original web, just browse wikipedia. It is very useful, even essential perhaps BUT it is not all of the web. All of the web is content sites that don't want you to leave for other sites. It is games, it is forums, it is applications that are on the web despite being better suited to a desktop. The web has far outgrown its original vision.

BUT it could only do this because there WAS a standard to follow. A web application being so easy to install (runs on any browser equipped machine) only works if whatever browser is installed follows a standard. The reason Gmail has long since replaced outlook express is that you need to install outlook express and configure it. With the gmail web application, you just go to the url and it just works. That could NEVER have happened if there were a dozen different browsers out there with a dozen different markup languages. Proof?

There are PLENTY of markup languages, I remember one from an old color matrix printer where you could insert color codes. .rtf is a markup language. xml is a horrid collection of them.

HTML works because anyone can look up the specs and the spec doesn't constantly change. We KNOW what happens when you let everyone create their own version, it is called IE and I will kill you before we go back to those days and not a jury in the world will convict me.

And if you want a markup language that does more? CREATE YOUR FUCKING OWN ONE! You are perfectly free to create a new type of "browser" with a new way to getting it to render data files into whatever you bloody well please. Plenty gone before you. And you know why you know of so fucking few? Because everytime somebody says "this should be a new standard" ten other people say exactly the same thing.

You can't create a new standard without getting everybody onboard and that means making compromises.

You can already extent HTML all you want, create a new element if you must but just don't claim to follow the standard strict and you are free to use whatever means you want to then render those new elements. Many common librabries already do this.

But this guy wants to take the strict standard and then add to it and then have it become the new standard. That won't work.

That’s why there are no free dinners at Dropcam—around 6:00 pm the company

I am sorry, at WHAT time? Ever heard the song 9 to 5? 9 to 5! Dinner is at 6 o'clock. Having to stay at work till six and then the commute means you won't be home close to 8. Kids will be in bed by that time. Dinner will be waiting in the oven.

A GOOD going home hour is 5... oh wait. that is rush hour, means you leave "early" and arrive home just as late. Do you know what would be even BETTER? A company with FLEXIBLE hours and a max 8 hours on the workfloor. Now THAT would be a social company. Even better if you can take a half day off to deal with plumbers and other stuff.

Nobody left in the last 4 years. Geez, I wonder why. An economy down the drain may have something to do with it.

Don't get me wrong, a company that doesn't expect unpaid overtime in exchange for a greasy cold pizza (especially if there is no pizza) everyday gets pretty old pretty fast. But closing the doors at 6 doesn't show much of an improvement. You are still putting in a long day, except now you don't get free dinner at the end of the day. What about those without a family for who a company dinner saves time not having to cook for themselves?

It is telling that the article calls him a wunderkind idealist and then fails to list any idealistic thing in the next few paragraphs.

And let them have the well payed middle income families earning a living in factories and sending their children to school and buying all the products those factories produce. That will show them, let them have the American dream while the US has the eh... wait what?

There is this idea among some tea party idiots that you can cut half the economy and still have a healthy economy. That is like reasoning that since you do all your thinking with your head (well, non-tea party members do) you can cut of that useless gut bit at the bottom and be fine.

A normal working economy needs something to do for all layers of the work force. The supposed bright people are not capable nor willing to work for everyone else, so where are the people who are not leaders in their field going to work, and if they are not working, how are they going to pay for the products made by the 1% of workers?

The choice isn't between high paying and low paying. The choice is between low paying and non paying. If the west continues as it is doing now, soon we can't even afford to buy chinese made anymore.

Oh and Japan was once the dump ground for unwanted manufacturing too. Kiddies like Locater16 just don't understand anything. Not history, not economics or common sense.

The original series were turned into two classic adventure games where you solved puzzles by thinking. TNG inspired some adventure but also some combat games. By the time of Voyager we are into blasting endless corridors filled with aliens FPS style. The series has over time descended from a happy vision of the future to a disotopian minimalist view of the future.

You cannot be both a fan of the original series and Enterprise because they have nothing in common. It would be like thinking that both Little Shop of Horror productions are the same... they are not and you will be very disappointed with one if you like the other.

You can see it in a comment below, "at least the new movies will be PG-13"... that says it all. Do not judge a movie by the writing or the acting or the fun of watching it, judge it by the swear words".

Some kiddies just want everything to be simple violence with anti-heroes who want to see the world burn because that is what is in their own little minds. It is what classic comics have always catered for, muscle bound men who act in think in mono-syllables and have a secret identity where their go nowhere selfs really are super heroes everybody loves and admires... nothing freudian about that. In Japan instead little boys strap on giant robots suits and crush the city they live in underfoot. Gosh, I wonder if there could be an entry in the shrinks hand book about that.

The new Star Trek appeals to that kind of audience. Leave your brain at home and show 1 dimensial characters (except for the 3d tits) and an explosion every 10 seconds or their attention will drift.

Lets see, the original had:

1 spunky princess

1 lovable rogue WITH a talking pet that only he understood.

1 Young boy guided by an ancient wizard and two sidekick characters one of which only he understands.

The only difference between Star Wars and a BAD disney movie is that Star Wars was a GOOD Disney movie, of which Disney has made PLENTY.

And it wasn't Disney that added JarJar, it was George Lucas. Disney's comparable movie recently was the Pirates of the Carribean. And if anything, with the later movies they went to far anti-cuddly. Was it the third movie that opened with a scene that would have been cut from Shindlers list for being to gruesome?

For years, Star Wars fans have called for George Lucas to step aside and let others have a go... wel... they got half of their wish. Pitty it will probably be proven that there are worse directors out there then Lucas BUT with one a year, we COULD get lucky.

Disney is about making money and if the bad directors like Abrahms don't deliver, they will find others. And if not... well... after the prequels surely things can only get better well, if Abrahams dies a horrid dead at least.

I own my sole to the company store has deeper meaning then just a song lyric. Mine companies used to pay people not just not enough to survive (so they had to borrow credit from the company store and then be forever in debt) but often in company currency, that could only be spend in the company store. It is a way to enslave people, not free them.

But ah... it was the GOVERNMENT that freed these people by enforcing that salaries should be payed in fiat currencies. So basically, you want to reverse that. Here are your wages, in bitcoins. No you can't convert them anywhere, you can only use them to buy goods from my friends, at whatever prices they set.

Nice.

When you meet a libertarian, remember, the oppression of government is not what he objects to, it is that it is the government doing the subjugation and not him. Remember what the south was really about, it was about freedom from a government that told them to stop denying freedom to other people. When a republican wants to make government so small, he can drown it in a bathtub, ask him what is going to replace it. Ten to one he thinks it is going to be him waving the biggest gun around. Libertarians are all against the government because they want to be the one doing the telling. And frankly unless you own a VERY big gun, no matter how bad the government may be, a local warlord is going to be even worse.

Slate is twisting itself in new corners. Now that it seems the bombers are Tjetchen, they are claiming that since they are technically Caucasian, they are white and therefor it ain't brown people just as they said.

EXCEPT that in the shooting of Trevor by a Hispanic guy, suddenly Hispanic does NOT mean your white because they are Caucasian... wow, it certainly seems as if being white and Caucasian are only the same thing if it is convenient. (By the way, this goes for the left and right).

And by the way, slate is NOT left wing, it is the bleeding heart wing. Real left can and often is very hard and most definitely anti-faith.

Yes, what you say is correct, that is the way it was intended. It is not the reality. With hoarders, miners spending fortunes for creating more bit coins, the original idea has been lost.

If I wish to make a purchase in dollars through bitcoins, I first have to transform real currency in bitcoins, then perform the transaction and the other party has to transform them back. If the value changes during this, bitcoins are useless as a payment mechanism.

SAME as if I did it through paypal and during the transaction the value of the currency changed massively.

Bitcoins hasn't been stable for half an hour consistently. And that hurts because people ARE buying/mining them as an investment.

Original idea: Good.

Ruined by: Greed.

Well, that never happened before.

That is indeed my point. I buy products, not gold. Some products contain gold, some used gold in the process but I do not need a 100 gram bar of gold.

In Holland at least, financial products must carry a legal disclaimer stating that past performance is no indication for the future.

What is this entire flawed study? Trying to predict the future, from past performance.

The Dutch economy is an open economy heavily dependent on the performance of the rest of the world. It doesn't much matter what our leaders do, the rest of the world dictates the state of the Dutch economy. So how do you compare its performance with the rest of world? It doesn't matter what our debt is, it matter how many products Germany ships through Rotterdam. But still, these economists try to compare how The Netherlands fared with X debt against the US which has a totally different economy. How different? The US is one of the bigger countries and is #1 in agri culture. The Netherlands is one of the smallest countries and is #2 in agri culture. Why? Every American black and white cow was created by a dutch boy sticking his arm up a cow. And jerking of a bull. The US exports low value agri cultural products, the Netherlands high value.

But it means the SAME industry, is COMPLETELY different. Baby cow production US style is cowboys and homo sexuality in the prairy. Dutch baby cow production is bestiality and high tech in the desolate north.

It is interesting to note that politicians who claim to want the best for big business are NEVER themselves successful big business owners AND that the successful big business owners never ever agree with them. Wallstreet likes the Republicans supposedly (but the two top financial newspapers advised voting against Romney because even a socialist in the white house would be better) but people like Warren Buffet and Richard Branson sing a very different tune. They think the best way to beat a recession is to spend. Not spend recklessly but invest in the future not in handing out tax cuts to buy votes.

Be wary of any leader who leads out of an ideology and not what is needed right now. Would you go to a doctor whose every answer is "lets amputate"? No? Then why vote for a politician whose every answer is "cut taxes, spend less, except on the pork project I need to get re-elected"? Real leadership is looking at what needs to be done and then do it. Not just have a one size fits all slogan.

When you zoom waaaaay in on Simcity, you see that the polygon count on the sims is just a tat higher then that in Bioshock.

In other words, I fucking hate the "art" direction that Bioshock always had. You may like, I don't and MANY seem to agree with me.

Critics don't make a product, buyers do. And Simcity being a flawed game? Gosh? Really? Well, that is a first. Lots of "can't do that" stuff once you get really stuck in? In a game? Wow! I never experienced that before.

Bioshock another FPS (even if decent, it is still in a long line of others) of which a dozen launch each month with art I don't like. Simcity a highly flawed Simcity game in a genre that sees a handful of titles per decade that are above abysmal.

Bioshock appeals to young kids with no money, Simcity appeals to adults for who 50 bucks for a game they might play for 50 hours is a very cheap form of entertainment.

It ain't "nice" but McD will always pull in more money by appealing to families with cheap burgers, then a quality burger joint aiming at hipsters. Know your market.