ktd

The odds that anyone will think "The Third World" is a good name for their virtual reality seem minimal at best.

I'm in SV/SF, and this attitude is completely silly. That isn't to say that it doesn't exist, but I would say it's far from the norm, even in tech circles.

>It's obvious, since I'm 30 and not earth-shatteringly successful, that I have some kind of health story...

What?

>Women don't face a severe loss of professional status if they put on weight, unless their employer enjoys being cleaned out in court.

You know, there are a lot of things that happen in the world despite not being legal.

>I don't understand - when you made this decision, did you expect that you were going to be good enough so that these features of chess (draws and deep, well-studied opening theory) were going to be relevant to you?

Yeah. I played chess competitively as a kid, attending state tournaments, taking lessons outside of school, and so on. However, I found that the more I got into it and better I became, the less appealing it seemed.

Ironically, I felt that chess between relative amateurs was much more interesting than chess between more skilled players, because the improvisational component that I loved was much more relevant when people hadn't been going through the opening books.

This is actually a good example of why I'm not particularly interested in chess anymore-- a game that's that heavy on draws and where so many of the situations are adaptations of well-known positions simply isn't that thrilling. I really enjoyed chess when I was a kid, but the better I became and the more I learned about it the less I found it a compelling game.

>It's why there is a centuries-old hatred of inherited wealth and position in all modernized cultures.

Isn't the opposite true?

We can certainly point to famous examples of heirs/heiresses behaving badly, but that seems largely the exception rather than the rule-- by and large, the terms nouveau riche and "new money" carry a negative connotation, while "old money" is associated with taste and sophistication (though certainly also snobbery).

>One of the protections we have against unjust laws is that they are unenforceable.

"The best way to get a bad law repealed is to enforce it strictly." --Abraham Lincoln

This movie isn't misunderstood or clever at all. It was originally exactly as dumb as people think it is (working title: "Bug Hunt On Outpost Nine), but the studio realized they could get the license to Starship Troopers for free.

Verhoeven didn't even read Starship Troopers-- he skimmed a few chapters, decided it was depressing and that Heinlein was a fascist, and made the movie a parody of the book, and a lazy parody at that.

When people call this movie dumb, they're completely right, albeit not for the reasons they may think.

Good. Wearing Google Glass while driving should be banned. The people using cell phones while driving are bad enough.

I suppose the coming months/years will be when we see whether Facebook becomes the "backbone of the social Internet" or just another MySpace. I honestly don't know where the smart money is here-- it's an exciting time!

What kind of "ruin your life" failure do you think people on HN are at risk of undertaking? It strikes me that such levels of failure are very rare, at least among the set who even knows about HN in the first place.

To be honest if you think there is any chance at all that this would happen you are completely disconnected from reality.

The average person doesn't care about NSA surveillance-- just as the average person didn't care about Lincoln arresting newspaper editors and suspending habeas corpus, FDR putting Japanese-Americans in concentration camps, J. Edgar Hoover sending agents to spy on and harass suspected communists (or just people he didn't like), George W. Bush locking up terrorists in Guantanamo, etc.

When you get right down to it, historical precedent strongly indicates that the average person does not care whether the government actually respects the law in its pursuit of national security.