asciilifeform may be hearing of a fella drinking on account of a crapware incident for the first time
asciilifeform: 'So the thing that interests me the most is that this doesn't seem to have been weaponized by anyone. I'd think, given how much disparity there is between modern military units and insurgent groups and how much of that relies on air superiority, that we'd be hearing regularly about lasers being used to blind combat air pilots...' << from comments
asciilifeform: BingoBoingo: lemme guess, the old classic 'fake av' sc4m
asciilifeform: 'i'ma start my own casino now, with sink'n'hookerz'
asciilifeform: but soon it was clear even to imbeciles that flying was an aristocrat's (or totalitarian thug enforcer's...) game.☟︎
asciilifeform: decimation: was not always so. think of the 'barnstormers' of the '30s, the '50s delusions of 'every man and his little flying coffin', etc
asciilifeform: the folks on the ground 'must know their place', is the message.
asciilifeform: the helicopter is the symbol of statal power against the peon schmuck☟︎
asciilifeform: incidentally, the 'laser terrorism' thing is, as always, smoke which is never without fire:
asciilifeform: not merely this, but driven to be spent entirely by microshit's idiot 'operating system pr0gr3ss'
asciilifeform: decimation: what's 'it' << the difference in cpu available to luser today vs. '92
asciilifeform: while being one of the really not so many people who found it properly useful, i will still say that ultimately it was a side effect of a mega-scam
asciilifeform: not so far-fetched to picture it on pent1
asciilifeform: virtually all computer users got vastly more actual 'bang for buck' in 1992 than today
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: outside of a handful of 'naggums' - it was -never- justified
asciilifeform: the folks who are supposed to be buying new computer on microshit's say-so are short a benjie or two for rent this month
asciilifeform: without fat - nothing to power the engine
asciilifeform: without which the idiot crud won't boot
asciilifeform: but the blow their fat disposable income on resulting new computer
asciilifeform: then they can go off to the shops and buy 'windows 95' because the cardboard waving hand says to (actual thing, saw alive, in '95)
asciilifeform: which is to say, it is not enough to con chumps, they must also have fat to be rendered for
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu, BingoBoingo: the basic mechanics here: wintel racket was powered, like many other similar idiocies, by the american 'fat'
asciilifeform: might expensive toy just to keep microshit alive another 2 yrs
asciilifeform: ^ if industrial collapse carries on, it will be difficult to imagine a computer of any description being constructed in 2025 other than out of 'junkyard wars' pieces
asciilifeform: and if you're building computers in the tens or hundreds rather than quajizillions quantities there is no reason not to use germanium, gallium arsenide, doped diamond, etc. chemistries
