I strongly suspect that more adults are opposed to this activity than endorse it. It's getting attention but not much of the good kind.

When I heard "Scientology Speedrun" I was hoping it would mean getting to operating level thetan as soon as possible. That would have been more interesting than some jokers trying to quickly run through a building I've never seen.

100%. If the superior solution always won, Microsoft Windows would have been relegated to the dustbin long before Windows 95 existed (and we wouldn't be dealing with the disaster pile that is Windows 11 today). Similarly if the superior solution always won we'd have high speed rail in the US connecting all our major cities, but that hasn't happened either.

Including whose wheels you're willing to grease to get your inferior solution a leg up on the ones that are better.

Within a hundred yard radius of my home are several high rise apartment buildings, two pubs, the entrance to three parks (one of which winds between significant transportation routes, a Canadian Legion, a drug store, and a bunch of other stuff. Barely outside that radius is a school, and several more high rises.

So in my case, that little bit of "fuzzing" spells anonymity. My point, though, is that even the smallest steps can help. If you're really serious, there's a lot more you can do without a lot of drama. I personally like the idea of "muddying the data pool" because it's something that can be done by average people without a lot of technological expertise. The larger the number of people involved, the more unreliable that pool becomes. That's all we want, really...to mess up the efforts of government and corporations to thrust themselves into every area of our lives.

The ZIP won out over a superior technology - Imation Superdisk - because it was first to market. Iomega's ZIP disc was proprietary and more expensive per megabyte, while also almost never being bootable. Imation solved those problems with the Superdisk, which could also read 1.44mb floppies in the same drive. However by the time Imation released theirs, Iomega had a huge headstart and few people paid attention.

Later on though Iomega's reliance on their being first to (mass) market ended up killing off their product. They weren't able to hit a cost per mb that was even remotely close to CD-R, let alone USB flash drives - nor could they get anywhere near the speed of USB flash drives. If they had taken the time to innovate further we would probably be talking about new ZIP-related technologies in the 10s of GBs (or larger), instead they are in the dustbin.

Pretty sure that's not a new bug, but the old anti-unicode stance that the slashdot libertarians so boldly took 20 years ago in the name of the empire. Clearly that has turned out well as enrollment keeps climbing and everyone uses this site on a regular basis.

Steps can be taken to make casual surveillance by police and other bad actors a little more difficult, such as turning off location services unless you really need them enabled. As far as I can see, though, the only way to keep the long, flexible nose of our government and corporate rulers out of our business is to poison the data pool. In this particular case, I'd just start with the consideration that there's no requirement for your phone and you to always be in the same place.

I like the poetic justice involved in me ordering plans for a guillotine from that thumbhead pr^ck Bezos.

All you have to do is look what happens when an entertainment giant like Disney gets hold of a franchise. They run it into the ground. Some franchises ruined by corporate greed (not all Disney): Star Trek, Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Mulan, Pirates of the Caribbean, the MCU...probably a lot more if I googled around a bit.

Mega-corporations want maximum profits, and they don't care how much damage they do getting them. And in current business terms, "maximum profits" means wring the asset dry, discard it and move on to the next acquisition. The idea of steady, long-term profitability seems to have died.

Less competition means less innovation, and when one CEO only has to call three other CEOs to figure out how they're going to divide up the pie, there's virtually none.

As a Canadian, I look at the US and I can't help but think, "It might have taken a while, but the Confederacy has finally won the Civil War".

I believe there are good reasons to suspect this story is not true. If this was really a "Survival" style corporate retreat, I would expect instances of cannibalism. Without strong evidence for such behaviour, maybe a femur in the fire pit, or perhaps a couple of picked-clean ribs, I have to question what we're being told.

You're missing the point of the AP, and it's actual composition. I worked at a daily newspaper most of my way through undergrad and knew the ins and outs of the AP better than most.

The main use of the AP was to get international news to outlets who couldn't afford to place staff in places further away from their own location. A great example is any international war, though even big national events (9/11 being a great example) are also places where AP stories are valuable.

The AP carries very little editorial content. Yes there are a few editorial writers who publish there but the volume from them is minimal compared to the objective news reporting. Some people like to claim otherwise but that is from those who aren't actually looking at the body of work on ap.org.

Unfortunately the newspaper model is indeed dying. Many of us are lamenting it and we're not sure what solution could bring it back. Printed news was supported by advertising, both display ads and classified ads. In the 90s your local daily paper likely had 4-8 pages of classified ads, every day. Now the majority of that is on craigslist or facebook. On Sundays your paper had full color printed advertising inserts from over a dozen retailers; many of those retails have since gone out of business and many of the ones who remain don't advertise that way anymore. Online subscriptions can offset a small part of this, but only a small part. Online advertisements are blocked by most readers' browsers, so that isn't productive for newspapers in many cases either.

The tabloid and editorial "journalism" you refer to is successful because it does a better job of selling crap to its audience. Don't confuse it with the professionals at the AP.

My point is that if the US, which at the time was one of the world's leaders in technological innovation, had put time and resources into developing renewable energy, the whole Free World would have weaned itself off burning fossil fuels for power. There would still be other uses for petrochemicals, plastics especially, but the Middle East's stranglehold on the world economy would have been well and truly broken. Looking back at the history of the last half century, including the environmental impact of continued fossil fuel use, it's pretty obvious Carter was right.

Excellent point!

Imagine where the US would be today if politicians had been just a little less greedy and corrupt in the 1970s, and embraced Jimmy Carter's commitment to renewable energy. Probably not a wholesale conversion, but during times like these, all of us across the Free World could just sit back with zero f^cks given and a bag of popcorn, and watch a bunch of religious fanatics burn the whole Middle East to the ground.

Everybody wins.