Heads up, the winamp 2.95 download from www.oldversion.com triggers a malware alert from Windows Defender.
Another red flag is that the download is via regular HTTP, not HTTPS.
I don't think it helped him (Tim of WbW) either. I don't think it was even supposed to help; reading his writings, I never had the feeling he was offering a solution -- rather, he was fascinated by the phenomenon, and was doing a kind of nerdy, technical analysis of his state. One that I (and others) could resonate with.
What actually helped me was framing the issue in a somewhat buddhist manner. I purchased his Panic Monster and the Monkey, sat them on my desk, and tried to look at them (and thus at my procrastination) with kindness and acceptance.
FWIW, my procrastination hasn't gone away (here I am, on HN); but it shrunk, and it stopped being such a big problem for me.
The less-obvious difference between Mars and "anywhere on Earth" is that no amount of environmental (even tectonic) damage done on Earth is going to affect Mars. I'm not arguing that Mars is orders of magnitude harder than Nevada, but it covers the risk of "we fucked Earth".
But the risk of "we fucked Earth" to the point where it's harder to colonize than Mars is effectively nonexistent. You could set off every nuclear device at once and it would still be easier to live here than on Mars. Even a dinosaur-killing asteroid would still leave the planet easier to live on than Mars. (Many species did survive last time, even without technology.)
Yes, but you see, only one of those possibilities allows me to live out a fantasy of being a cool space colonist like Matt Damon. The other one requires me to be a usual suspect who has to deal with the material outcomes of living in society. So, all things considered -- it's definitely way cooler to believe that Mars is the answer. And as someone who knows absolutely nothing about pollution, the environment, or Mars, but read every Isaac Asimov novel -- I think this isn't being given due consideration.
You know what they say! If you can't make absolutely minimal changes to the political outcomes of your planet, you're absolutely ready to dart off into space onto planets with no breathable atmosphere or water that could have unknown effects on the human body and mind.
Surprised nobody mentioned Dennis Taylor's Bobiverse. While it's a bit on the light side / vacation read (novels aren't very long, the storyline isn't complex), the author is a programmer, the series' universe is refreshingly plausible and consistent, and the humor is suprisingly good.
It's not likely to win any awards for writing, and the author really needs to work harder to stay on a single story rather than tangents of fancy, but it's still quite enjoyable as a series. Apparently, I missed the third book coming out a couple months ago- there goes my weekend.
It would also be fairly simple to build for any computer using just an arduino or a raspberry pi. The computer could send a periodic signal over the serial port, if the arduino doesn't receive a signal for some time it shorts the mainboard's reset pin, causing a reboot.
> You can't possibly trust any company with this kind of service.
That's a good point. However, the Swiss made a lot of money offering comparable services for many years. (Numbered bank accounts.) Also, there's a big difference between simply building such a service and having such a service that is well tested and reliably and securely hosted. It's also a relatively simple matter to test such a service with a small amount of money.
Such services seem highly valuable, but may require practical homomorphic encryption/computation schemes to be themselves practical.
Power over who?
If you as an elite kill your subjects, who will provide for your needs? Who will work the fields that provide your food, who will repair your cars and house automations, who will mow your lawn? We're still far from a sustainable fully-automated food cycle.
So I believe the superclass don't want their subjects dead; they want them submissive, healthy enough to work without dying, and happy enough to not be motivated to try to change the system.
P.S. from a certain POV, money itself is a consolidation of power. The superclass uses money as an enslavement method -- see how most of middle-class are constrained to wage-work for paying back their debts.
You can't "turn off" that bunker, it has multiple diesel generators and lots of fuel reserves. It also has clean water reserves and air filtering capabilities, so you can't gas the people inside.
Physically cutting its uplink lines would be IMHO the most efficient way to neutralize that datacenter.
There is, of course, the other end of the cable connecting to the rest of the world... no need to actually cut the cable. You could do it with software alone really.
Or just getting all their peering exchanges to null route packets in and out. Advantage being that it's cheaper, more effective and less lawsuit prone.
So I'd recommend avoiding oldversion.com.