It’s not a mystery why dystopian fiction is so popular now.

After all, most Americans currently live in a dystopia.

It’s no surprise that a hacker who exposed the Steubenville rape case is quite likely to face more jail time than the rapists.

Hackers and anyone who wants to expose government and corporate secrets that shouldn’t be secret are perceived as a grave threat to any state apparatus, while rapists are not – in many ways, rapists are tools of the system as presently organized and not antagonists at all.

Bradley Manning will also be in jail for eternity while sexual assault prosecution in the military is farcical.

Same reason.

In the future, as we are already trending this direction, I would not be surprised to find that the penalties for hacking and copyright infringement (which is not now a crime if done non-commercially, despite what the copyright industry claims) exceed those of even murder.

This is what happens when corporations are allowed to seize control of the state. It is not unexpected.

Oh hell yeah, we are so doing this.

I’ve been in some crazy flying situations, but never in a plane so small.

Up to 8x the force of gravity? Most untrained people pass out around 5x. Wonder if I will.

People are surprised that the NSA is spying on everyone, like, all the time?

Is this even news? I thought it was common knowledge, and had been for years.

I don’t understand the de facto prohibition against eating dog meat, or why people see it as so bad.

If you eat pig and think eating dog is evil, you are a huge hypocrite. I’d eat dog if I could find it on the menu anywhere. I’d eat cat, too, but seeing how scrawny they are underneath all that fur I doubt there is much meat to be had.

I’d eat any animal that was not treated horribly and that was killed humanely.

Meat is meat and killing is killing; pig, dog, horse, cow. There is really no difference.

If you have a ruff time eating dog meat, you are merely leashed by your social milieu and unable to slip the collar of expectation – so despite your dogged resistance to the idea of canine comestibles and even if you think it is barking mad, if you can put your paws on some dog chow in a country where fingers won’t be wagging at you, why not go ahead and woof some down. It might just be a walk in the gustatory park, and a doggy treat.

What’s most funny (in a depressing way) about this article is the commenters, as even though the article specifically mentions all the research that demonstrates that telecommuting increases productivity, the commenters ignore this and demonstrate exactly the cognitive flaws that the piece bemoans.

My company is firmly against working from home, like most companies. This despite the fact that I am at minimum twice as productive and at maximum around four times as productive at home.

Humans are a flawed design. I will be glad when they are replaced.

This exact experience has happened to me.

“I remember making a comment at amazon’s discussion forums once about how ebooks used to be very cheap back over a decade ago and their original promise was that it would be cheaper due to no printing/distribution/warehousing/shipping costs etc., and people jumped on me insisting it wasn’t true, that ebooks were ‘always’ meant to supposedly be a premium convenience, etc. “

Strange how easily and how profoundly most people are misled by propaganda. It constantly surprises me.

Ebooks when new (about 10 years ago) were advertised as being easier and cheaper then print books. Now, it’s the opposite and almost no one seems to remember when it was any other way, and in fact will flatly deny that it used to be different!

Back when new, ebooks were about 50% cheaper than a brand-new book. Now they are often more expensive. Makes no sense at all.

I intended to write a longer post about how susceptible people are to industrial propaganda and why (consumption becomes part of identity, so reacting negatively to industry propaganda denies one’s own identity), but I have better things to do with my life.

We’re feeling the effects of tropical storm Andrea now.

Just a lot of rain. The main thing it will bring about is many more mosquitoes, which only bother me minimally but antagonize my partner to no end.

When I was 21 or so and still in the army, I went to a mall in North Carolina to watch a movie. I got there too early, bought my ticket, and was waiting on a seat right outside the movie theater for the film to start.

A security guard came up to me and told me that I was “not allowed to loiter.”

“I’m not loitering,” I said. “I’m waiting for the movie to start.” Then I showed him my ticket.

He said I was not allowed to stay there regardless, as it was considered loitering and was against the “rules.”

Then I told him to go screw himself loud enough for all the people around us to hear. I am just really terrible with rules that make no sense and idiots who try to enforce them. And my temper used to be so much worse than it is now.

He told me I’d have to leave and then reached out to grab my arm. I moved back and told him that I knew that since he was not a sworn law officer that he had no right to touch me, and that if he tried to do so again, he’d be bleeding all over the floor.

So I left, and he walked me out the door and all the way to my car. And if I hadn’t been in the Army at the time and with the desire to stay enlisted, I probably would have beaten the hell out of him in the parking lot. But instead as I was getting in my car, I told him that if I ever saw him when I was a civilian again, I would not forget his face and the outcome would be much different than me just leaving meekly in my car.

I am not as hotheaded now as I was then, but I honestly can’t say I’d do anything any differently now – except this time I’d probably let him grab my arm, and then take him down right in the middle of the mall. Yes, I realize that is not productive and would not change anything. But protests against stupidity and the petty enforcers of tyranny don’t need to be. They just need to happen, sometimes no matter the cost.

The security guard didn’t react much after our initial confrontation to anything I said. I think he didn’t expect to get that much pugnacious guff from some pretty skinny (though I was in ridiculously good shape then), nerdy-looking guy. I think he was just glad to be rid of me (I get that a lot!).

Note and disclaimer: I am not any kind of bad-ass, nor do I think I am. I am just really, really resistant to idiocy, formerly with a very bad temper, and am generally not afraid of much. And I strongly recommend against anyone doing many, if not most, of the things I have done or one day will do.

I’d rather use Windows ME than Windows 8.

At least Windows ME only crashed once or twice a day. Windows 8 is unusable all the time, all day long, in every situation.

I wish I’d saved the comment as now I cannot find it again, but I saw someone on Reddit aver that no one younger than 15-16 could possibly read and understand Moby Dick.

I read it when I was 9 years old and understood it just fine. It’s not really a difficult book, though some of the language is archaic. I believe I learned the word “ere” from that book, and was also amused by the the term “sallied out” which is used often in the work.

I was probably mentally capable of reading and understanding it when I was 6-7, but hadn’t yet discovered it. In that era, I mainly read National Geographics and other non-fiction and didn’t read much fiction.

If this sounds impossible, remember that at the time I was scoring in the 99th percentile of high school seniors for reading comprehension.

Yeah, I started early and never stopped.

My ability to use the internet it appears will be over sooner than I expected, as Firefox 25 will remove most configurability options as well as having a terrible, eye-shatteringly bad interface.

The Chrome browser is equally bad if not worse, and of course IE is completely unusable.

Assuming that most pages will work on a version of Firefox that I can actually use for 2-3 years after Firefox 25 comes out is a fairly good assumption, I think. After that, it’s likely that I will curtail or nearly completely eliminate most internet usage as the experience will become intolerable since then I will be forced to use the new interface or have many pages render broken.

I find terrible interfaces to be complete unusable, so it’s no exaggeration to expect that in five years my recreational internet usage will drop from 3-4 hours a day now to nearly 0 as user-hostile interfaces are all that is available.

It’s very sad because one of the primary reasons Firefox came to the fore was its configurability; it’s why it stole so much market share from IE. Why make it more like the terrible, slow (if you are doing anything serious) Chrome browser I have no idea.

The developer arrogance treadmill continues, I guess. Too bad there is not likely to be a fork, or a usable browser in the future.

Unlike with OSes, the internet is evolving quickly so it’s not likely I can get 10 years of usage out of Firefox 24 (the last sane version) as I will be able to out of Windows 7. As I’ve noted, the cool thing about me continuing to use Windows 7 while people switch to Windows 8, Unity and Gnome 3 is that it gives me a huge competitive advantage in the workplace as using those interfaces is productivity-killing among my main competition.

I will still use the internet/a browser for work of course, but about 2018 or so I suspect I will only turn on my computer to edit photos and such.

So much opportunity lost, but humans do that – cater to the stupid as there are more of them, and I guess always will be.

Office 2007 – the first version of Office with the ribbon interface – has been out for well over six years now, and I still need to Google basic operations that I did effortlessly in pre-ribbon versions of Office.

What a terrible, terrible interface, designed to make work easier for someone who uses Office once a year, but punishes anyone more competent on every damn use.

Office was the first symptom of making things so dumb that they are nearly impossible to use. It’s designed to make extremely easy operations slightly easier, while making nearly anything else almost impossible.

It just occurred to me that for the traditional 20% down payment on a house in Seattle, it is possible to buy a nicer house here in the Tampa area for that down payment alone.

A $900,000 house in Seattle proper would be about a $180,000 house here. The $180,000 house here unless you bought in a very, very exclusive neighborhood would probably be better than the $900,000 Seattle house slightly.

$9000,000 * 0.2 = $180,000.

Damn.

The Chrome browser is completely unusable, and it looks like Firefox is going the same way.

If that’s the browser of the future, it seems I will not be able to use any browser at all. In the future, it seems I will also not be able to use the internet or computers at all as they will have been dumbed down and restricted to such a degree that using them is utterly pointless.

I am sure I will still do very minor things on the internet at that point, but with no obvious professional OS in sight and every piece of software going only for the LCD, it’s not clear that there will be anything someone like me – who actually knows how to use a computer and a browser – would actually enjoy doing.

It’s mystifying this trend to make everything the worst possible product, and then to tell everyone – even the people who depend on this software professionally – that it’s for “their own good.”