Suzuran

The nice thing about all the tapes and recorders is that when you know you're completely fucked, you can be damn near assured that the last things you choose to say will be preserved. Whether you make it a last message to your family, or as many technical details as you can throw out that might help the investigation and keep someone else from dying the same way. In a way, documenting as much as you can of your impending death becomes your final task.

Free will is the most expensive thing in the world.

Well, duh, I mean, if they have to pick a side, how are they supposed to continue fleecing both sides?

Don't worry, they can just throw it away when it becomes inconvenient.

How does that work, don't the immigrants become Germans when they gain citizenship?

Well, they aren't running any camps yet, so how can you prove they will actually run camps in the future? You can't, so internet argument rules require you must accept that the opposite is factual.

I told the leopard I did not consent to my face being eaten, but it ate my face anyway.

Even if it's in bad faith, that doesn't make it invalid, and internet argument rules require you continue to engage.

Management always takes credit for labor.

I thought it was to force people who are running smaller services to give up. Decreasing the number of services on the internet decreases its total attack surface, therefore simple logic dictates that to maximize total internet security we should make it as difficult and expensive as possible to operate a service on the internet.

No, a long uptime is evidence of the crime of not sacrificing sufficiently on the altar of security. You must be constantly interrupting service for security patches, firmware updates, release upgrades, etc. so your users are constantly reminded that security is your paramount concern.

>why the hell would anyone want a job where a mistake results in personal ruin?

I guess you think pilots, doctors, air traffic controllers, etc. are all made up?

Netscape died because we all hated it. Back when Apache didn't exist yet, we were forced to run Netscape's server. (Even if Apache did exist, we didn't have the $20K per-seat license fee for DEC's C compiler so we wouldn't have been able to compile it anyway). Netscape's license terms were such that we had to open our books to them. They would read through all of our transactions and decide how much we would have to pay them that term. If they saw transactions to a party they didn't like, they would charge us more. They had no competition in our space, so they could name their terms. There was no competition and they liked it that way. When Apache became available we switched to it out of spite.

My mother was looking for cheat codes for some video game she was playing and she ended up on Fandom. I had installed uBlock Origin for her because she had a history of being victimized by malware. Fandom detected it and served her the "BLOCKING ADS IS STEALING FROM YOUR FELLOW FANS!" scare stuff, with instructions for removing uBO. She followed the instructions because she thought that's what she needed to do to access the information, and Fandom immediately served her ransomware.

Great, now every website can block those operating systems since they can't participate in the age assurances the websites will be required to use.

On days when I need gas I just leave for work about 10 minutes earlier than usual and drive to Costco, which means I turn up at the station about 15 minutes after the fuel pumps open and several hours before the actual store opens. I've never had to wait; I don't think I've ever seen more than 4 cars there. Then I just drive from the Costco to work. This only adds about one mile to the trip.

The Costco is always packed in the afternoon though, both the store and the pumps. I think everyone waits for the store to open, or they wait for their lunch break on the assumption that it will be worse during the evening commute.

I still have a box with about a dozen of those around here somewhere; They were still useful even well into the era of on-motherboard ethernet because installing the operating system over the LAN was a lot less of a hassle than swapping CDs around and finding out that the drive or the media went flaky etc. Network boot support for the on-motherboard devices was frequently crap or just plain missing, but the 3c905 could slot a proper boot ROM. The last revs of the board even came with said boot ROM right from the factory.

I have a vague memory that there was one particular revision that had some kind of flaw which made it undesirable; It would drop DMAs or interrupts or something like that. The A revision maybe? I'll probably remember at some particularly annoying time.

They are continuing to be maintained only because the FAA fought very hard for that ability. The rest of the government does not understand (or care) why the FAA wants to keep "obsolete" systems, and the FAA is subject to their legislative whims.

Don't worry, our government is doing their level best to make GPS the only option for air navigation. After all, we all know that technology NEVER fails, and the sooner we can turn off all those big bad old ground radars and navigation aids, the sooner we can sell all that real estate and use the money for things that the American public desperately needs, like more corporate bailouts and bathroom security cameras.

The problem is not that society is hierarchical, the problem is that position in the hierarchy rarely maps to expertise or trustworthiness. Instead it usually maps to whoever is best at exploiting and then destroying others to raise their position in the hierarchy.

Edit for clarity: The biggest part of the "You're too stupid..." thing I mentioned is that we are being led to believe we can't even determine who is and isn't credible in any given field, so we must solicit claimed authority and then blindly obey whoever shows up first. Sometimes this solicitation is in the form of a post, but increasingly it's an AI-generated "web" search response where the index/training data has been torqued to direct people toward economic outcomes desired by the AI/search engine's owners.

"We" don't research it ourselves because we are increasingly taught that we are either too stupid to conduct our own research or not qualified to understand the results, and we must rely on someone else who represents a position of authority. Preferably politicians/influencers/marketing departments/AI models/etc. which can then direct us to make purchasing decisions of benefit to our masters.

It's not my problem if the math doesn't work, or if my money doesn't pay for me. The contract as presented to me by the government is "You will pay into this system, it provides Social Security to the aged and disabled. If you do not pay into this system, you will be judged guilty of a criminal offense and sentenced accordingly." The specifics of who pays and for what are the government's problem, not mine. Whether or not the government is guilty of fraud or misrepresentation does not affect the terms. I fail to see why I should consider the government free of the obligations they themselves have mandated.

Does it matter? In the US, we send a sizable portion of our paychecks to the government's Social Security program so it can provide for us in this exact scenario. The government dictated the terms and we upheld our end of the contract on pain of incarceration. Now it's time for the government to uphold their end.

You guys are missing the point entirely. Absolutionism is not about being right, it's about everyone else being wrong and therefore deserving of abuse.

My favorite complaint during development of our simulator was someone who insisted we give them the means to replace the "jingoistic" American markings from the spacecraft so they could pretend the mission was flown by some multinational utopian organization like Starfleet. Of course, that person evaporated when things actually started to work and they would have to actually put effort into their Starfleet artwork instead of just continually trying to start political slapfights on the internet.

The moon hoaxers were boring and unfunny. I remember writing something along the lines of "There is a chance that this will never work because it was all a hoax and never worked in the first place, but I will try anyway because I am an optimist." I think that made them madder than anything else.

The real problem with it turned out to be that while the software is complete it expected data to be provided from both the crew and the ground at different points in the mission. Without this external data (and more importantly, the procedures and processes that generated it) the software is really just a very obtuse desk clock.

Actually making use of the software required years of extra work in document archaeology and reverse engineering the processes and constraints that generated the data used during the flights.

moar liek chad hominem amirite

My apologies for incorrectly assuming your nationality.

CLOSED WONTFIX Working as intended

You are not allowed to discuss human rights until your government stops its unprovoked war on Iran, issues a full repudiation of the policies that led to it, and makes full reparations to the entire rest of the world whose energy prices you have driven up for the benefit of a handful of wealthy inside traders.

Edit: Parent poster wasn't American. I incorrectly assumed their nationality.