it's all about how much time the end-user puts into encrypting their own data. oh, the things you can do with unhelpfully labeled nested zip-splitting...

Um, can we say "war of attrition"?

Is that too much work (to say)?

If it's so idiotic, maybe you shouldn't be grandstanding your version of saying the same god damned thing, you chum huffer.

A similar myth is that fatty foods lead to clogged arteries. I won't bother to go fetch links but let's just say my room mate was drunk and literally screaming this at me at 2AM once, over and over like a child, and the only way to talk him down was to promise I'd go research it at reputable websites and bring him "the proof". Yes you can refute this myth at such as CDC, Mayo Clinic, etc.

If anything, most arteries problems are caused by high sodium. Salts osmose water out out cells, causing "hardening", leading to arterial damage, attracting clotting factor, which builds up and is compounded with some forms of cholesterol in some people (but can still be bad enough on its own), which leads to clogged (clotted) arteries. Then you run into this terrible catch-22 with vitamin K where K is needed to repair the arterial damage but K also goes into producing clotting factor. So the doctors tell you to cut K completely out of your diet, eat liver-killing blood thinners, and shift the problem to yet another part of your body while also synthesizing a condition of hemophilia.

If anything, people worried about clots should cut any high intake of salt out (but not entirely out), not fat out of their diet. Blood pressure completely aside.

And something else fun to learn is that there is a gut flora that produces something called TMAO that can compound and/or cause any artery problems you might have. The great news? The gut flora produces TMAO from l-carnitine. So take your doctor seriously if they recommend cutting red meat intake entirely.

"It won't work just because you say so. In fact it will fail, because I say so."

^-- And that's not anything like the stance I took either in the way I described it or the way it played out. So, bullshit away, I'm not even reading the rest of what you wrote.

I'm not the one proposing harebrained political schemes.

Repair manuals occur only in user-serviceable animals.

One problem adding to the debris-littered future you (accurately) describe is that the corporate advantages of proprietisation, miniaturisation, and planned obsolescence have convened to create a profit model with a steadfast tenet: do not make ANYTHING user-serviceable.

From vacuum cleaners, to power drills, to phones and everything else in between and surrounding, nothing is made user serviceable any more. Try opening up one of the latest mostly-plastic vacuum cleaners. Many of them are made to be snapped together during assembly and not to come back apart, ever. Even routine cleaning is a huge hassle, especially with components that can't be opened up. And power drills, don't get me started. There are power drills from WW2 that still run perfectly even if the brushes haven't been oiled in 20 years. You can open the up and clean, repair, or replace every last component. Some of the components can even be hand-built in the garage or machine tool shop. Try to find that level of performance or serviceability in modern power drills.

A volunteer can easily tear apart 4 of these per hour if given proper training, tools, and work area. I am pretty sure if the labor cost of separating out glass, boards, copper, and other components were zero, then the net return would no longer be negative. And there are plenty of people who need to clock some verified community service and/or other volunteer time; and hundreds of times more people who want to do it just to feel good about themselves.

I wandered into some echo-box on Twitter where a bunch of old farts were being roused into a rabble by some liberal journalist talking about how we need basic / universal income now because soon the robots will take away our jobs and life will be pristine, prosperous, and without war.

I called the journalist out on talking a lot of shit, in response to which he just talked more shit. To quote: "the machines will pay us". I had to point out a few things:

1. Technology is a tool, not a participant.
2. If your big solution involves convincing everyone it will work before it exists, using odd language, it probably won't work.
3. If your method of convincing others your idea is sound is to ask them how it's supposed to work in lieu of rebuttle against criticism, it probably isn't sound.

But then his slew of fogies piped up. "What does not make sense is the current system. Real value supports life. Principle of doing no harm= Equality." "lol, it is simple math, do it yourself." And, "citizens income. We will have to get used to more leisure, half jobs, no war just war movies".

No real substance, just pie in the sky rhetoric.

If I hadn't been blocked by the journalist I would go back there and paste this article. Torvalds is right, talking a bunch of shit doesn't get anything done in engineering, or anything else that is and/or that verges on technical including government.

(Unless, of course, you're a liberal arts major.)

A.C. was just dropping by with the typical, dopy-ass argument of the sort used by energy companies to keep people from becoming non-customers.

It gets pretty bad in some places. I remember in Florida when people started spreading DIY (albeit pricey) methods of feeding power back into the grid and getting a return on your bill, the power companies started giving vouchers instead and those vouchers could only be cashed in at participating locations like the sports arena or mob owned restaurant. Then with the power company feeling their oats over that win, they started suggesting that companies who retool or renovate their plants to be much more energy efficient should not get to pay lower bills. Instead they'll pay the same bill as they normally would based on their historical average usage for that day of the year and anything they don't use will be given to them in the same form of vouchers. That's right around the time I left that part of Florida, between that and NASA continually screwing with the statistics of Cassini blowing up on launch and irradiating the entire coast.

Up here in Michigan there were cases I ran into just as bad. One guy had built a reservoir and was self-sustaining his own collected treated water on his own property. He heated water off some kind of biomass tank underground, and produced a lot of power from a couple of small windmills. He started looking into taking his house completely off the grid and was told he wouldn't be allowed to, that if he did his house would be condemned.

The argument was that local legislation demanded that every home's power supply (that's as complex as the language got) be routed through an approved-of meter, that approved-of meant owned and maintained by an approved-of company (energy provider company), and that the company reserved the right to come out, take readings, and charge appropriately for 'usage'.

So even if the guy kept up his argument for the right to unbridge his house from the power grid entirely, the local energy company still reserved the right - ensconced in habitat regulatory legislation - to actually come out there, read their meter measuring his own usage of his own produced power, and charge him for it as if it was theirs. Otherwise his house could be condemned for not having power "running to it".

Fuck these shills and their stupid fucking arguments and their stranglehold on the people. Fuck energy companies and all of their shills, right into the dirt.

Furthermore, your use of the language "centralized" versus "decentralized" speaks volumes as to the who/what your argument defends.

A better, more accurate argument uses language about distribution, not centralization.

It's distributed power that is less efficient. It needs endless miles of cable to be conducted to distant locations that might not even need it at any given time, and along the way there are endless stations and switches to balance the load to make up for this, all of which also waste power in the form of shed heat and spinning fans.

Meanwhile with independent, renewable, passive power systems such as can be had with on-site solar, you can tailor the solar on a site to that site's historical peak usage and if that site allows more square footage that can be dedicated to solar then you can produce power for other sites nearby if you feel like it.

But what you're more concerned about, and this is very plain, is where is all the energy money supposed to go once energy is more or less free thanks to renewables and on-site systems?

Every time I see people and companies dropping off the grid they are quickly chased down by people sporting backwards arguments like yours, trying to force them to still somehow pay power companies, even when they're off the grid.

If you had a system with a lot of moving parts, constant monitoring, maintenance, and upkeep like a coal-steam-to-turbine-to-power or moving-water-the-turbing-to-power or the like, then sure, guy. Sure, you're right.

Nice fucked up way to use a completely irrelevant argument against a more or less passive install-and-routinely-checkup system like solar, though. Even today's smart meters have devices that use cell towers to report status and problems so a similar system in solar can cut that routine maintenance down considerably to only when and where it is needed.

Stop shilling for centralized power despots.

What did they spend US$65M on in one year?

If you can't get your Windoze virus to play every last format under the sun, what the operating system that runs the internet is capable of doing is the least of your worries.