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NicS
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1 out of 52 out of 53 out of 54 out of 55 out of 5

New job disclosed by C.Nic

Permanent Linkby NicS on Tue Jul 30, 2013 1:46 am

So, I guess some of you know my new job. I'm Johnny-Jack's personal assistant. And it's been ######6 great! I love it! AND ###$ YOU, MOM. WHY DIDN'T YOU PAY ME A DECENT WAGE WHEN I WORKED FOR YOU FOR 12 YEARS?! I went from $100 a month full time to MY AWESOME CURRENT PAY. SO ###$ YOU FOR MAKING ME YOUR SLAVE SINCE CHILDHOOD.

-C.Nic

0 Comments Viewed 22279 times

Surveillance state by C.Nic & NicS

Permanent Linkby NicS on Sat Jun 08, 2013 5:25 am

First, if you followed the clues from Gawker, congrats. Yes, I left that message on the Zuckerberg-Prism story. Well, Nic did. I'm writing for the both of us here now.

Second, I understand the fear of a surveillance state. I am terrified someone is watching me every time my iPad is on a wireless network because of the front and back facing cameras. With that said, I can usually get around this paranoia by covering it up with my thumb should porn magically appear on my screen as it does at random times in random intervals. So--so strange...

Third, I have no problem living in a police state, none. I have done nothing illegal, and I can fight injustice easily, be it corruption or sheer stupidity, through wits or brute force, and I know how to run and hide or fight. But life isn't a movie, and even if it were, its far from "V for Vendetta".

Conspiracy nuts always have it in their heads that THEY, out of everyone, just get it, maaaaaaaaan. It all makes ######6 sense now. Why doesn't everyone just wake the ###$ up, and see that they are just sheeple being systematically murdered by the government war machine?! Etc. etc. etc.

Look, I'm not ignorant. Not by a long shot. I realize there is a prison industrial and military complex, that pot puts more people away for no legitimate reason, and that most incarcerated people are minorities. Beyond that, I understand why people get scared when the idea of a police state pops up. No one wants to be watched 24/7 by an authoritarian figurehead, judged for everything we do. And they always point to Britain, which has cameras everywhere. But... It's Britain. It's a super industrialized country. It's GDP was 2.445 TRILLION. The only thing wrong are the radicals, like the English Defence League, who are making a surveillance state seem shitloads worse than it actually is.

Look, let me show you how surveillance works for the shops I helped install cameras at in Boise. I know its a pretty big generalization to assume, worldwide, this is how it ######6 works everywhere, but just hear me out. You have hours of video constantly recording, or you have a system that only takes pictures every 7 seconds or whenever, or just a camera that records when it detects motion. All that footage is stored, and if nothing happens, most owners throw that $#%^ away or delete it, or they archive it. The problem then is that they only have a finite amount of space, so they either destory or delete archives, unless its something serious like a kidnapped girl shows up on screen or a robbery, shooting, suspect enters, shoplifting, or, in this day and age, funny accident. Then that gets kept. But odds are great that you going to the Cum N' Go (real store, I swear) is not compelling footage.

Also, people forget that someone has to watch all this $#%^ for key moments. And that's a boring ######6 job, even for hardcore archivists like myself and Nic. We love preserving film and video and all, but ###$ can surveillance work be ######6 boring.

So, from an insiders perspective, I'm not all that concerned. But the NSA had 5 Zettabytes of info. 1 Zettabyte is 1,099,511,627,776 GB large. Multiply that by 5 and you have a LOT of storage to archive surveillance for everything... And? Who the ###$ gets the great (possibly union) job of going through 1 Zettabyte of surveillance video, Facebook posts, tweets and Youtube Videos?

That's probably why the story got leaked. Cause they got the job, went "###$ this" and told the Post and the Guardian.

Therefore, (and this is just my personal theory) If the people running the police state, therefore, have no interest in running the police state, then why the ###$ should I be worried? Simple paranoia is healthy, but letting it consume you turns you into Alex Jones, and if you don't know who that is, congratulations. Never look him up. He's a ######6 moron who says "Wake up, America" so much I want to throw an alarm clock at his head. And I'd probably nail his...

[ Continued ]

0 Comments Viewed 7490 times

A random talk on Liberty Reserve, Bitcoin and more, By C.Nic

Permanent Linkby NicS on Wed May 29, 2013 4:16 am

Liberty Reserve was, in the most simplistic terms, an anonymous PayPal. I have never used it, mainly because I had no real use for it. If I were to use an anonymous currency, I'd stick to Bitcoin. It's proven itself in my eyes to have great cryptography and security through Silk Road. None of the staff running that beautiful site have been arrested, and I honestly think they never will. I don't want to jinx them, but so far they have been running the site off Tor, making a massive profit and helping sustain the entire Bitcoin economy.

And I really do mean sustain it. I remember just a few months ago, where the price of 1 BTC was, like, $20 dollars. Then as word of Silk Road spread, the price of 1 BTC went past $200, and then it crashed. But for a period of 2-3 months, it really looked like the currency was getting people a profit. Now it's around $100-ish? I dunno, I haven't checked in a while, and if I open a new tab my iPad reloads this page, and I lose all this valuable stuff I've lost. I could just cut and paste everything, but... ###$ that. Too logical.

Speaking of stupid logic, why have libertarians embraced Bitcoin and turned it into a political thing? It makes sense that people who love privacy and freedom like a currency that is designed to be incredibly private and can never be frozen, but why latch onto that and just run with it? It's kinda sad, actually, that a pretty massive political movement and ideology embraced by millions of sound engineers and other ponytail aficionados can be entirely swallowed up by this inanimate thing. I mean, you can BUY physical bitcoins, but that's it. There's nothing tangible you can touch with Bitcoin, except yourself if your a libertarian who gets hard looking at soft currency. I think that makes sense.

Libertarian sadness coins (not my term, someone on Gawker made it up), are an amazing technology I really love and would like to embrace. But the only things to buy are wool socks and drugs off Silk Road. CoinBase has made buying bitcoins SOOOOOOO much easier than it was off Mt.Gox. You can do it by linking a bank account. You don't have to drive to a bank and give them a special routing number that made you look like a suspicious weirdo. Now it's more like PayPal. You can do it all online. ###$. Yeah.

But lets get to Liberty Reserve, which was recently shut down by the US government for being a laundering operation. First, the libertarians have good reason to get pissed off here. This is a ######6 Ridiculous operation. I agree that they should have gotten shut down and arrests are needed since the law is pretty ######6 clear, and they willingly and knowingly broke it. They had this coming. But the fact that massive blue chips like Citibank, Western Union, JP Morgan & Chase & Co., and, most notably HSBC laundered drug money and had no ######6 problem doing it shows intense bias towards big banks and shows that "Too Big to Fail" isn't some catchphrase, its a sad reality. Liberty Reserve, according to The New York Times, laundered something like $6 Billion dollars and had 55 million clients, many I'd assume were one time accounts.

Liberty Reserve was set up so that it could accept money, but you could only do that with an account, much like PayPal. The major difference was if you make a PayPal account, you have to go through so many ID checks to verify legitimacy, which is both appreciated and understandable. Even if they have that stupid penny test where they deposit some amount into your account and you tell them how much they have you. I hate that ######6 thing. It takes too long. 3 days for 20 cents? ###$ that.

Anyways, Liberty Reserve had no identity checks. As it states in the Times article, one of the agents made am account explicitly made for cocaine buying, and set his address as "123 Fake Steeet", and he was able to do ######6 anything. And I'm pretty sure he bought coke with the account so that the agency could get 2 birds with one net (or...

[ Continued ]

3 Comments Viewed 64051 times
1 out of 52 out of 53 out of 54 out of 55 out of 5

Why Boise schools sucked by C.Nic

Permanent Linkby NicS on Thu May 09, 2013 5:47 am

So there's a video that's pissing me off. Here's the link.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iflIOklflrg

For those who can't click the link or those too lazy to watch (its 30 ######6 seconds long!) this kid storms out of his history class and says the teacher sucks and only hands out packets. Basically my entire high school career.

The thing was, well, we loved high school because we thought we were learning. It wasn't until 2 months after graduation that we realized "Holy ######6 $#%^, we learned Nothing!"

We had that experience all 9th grade. It was review of 7th and 8th grade. We ######6 hated it. And to this day, we can't do fractions because it was taught in a way that ensured we remembered for the test, then forgot it afterward. Just a quick memorization technique. Hell, most of the time we didn't remember by the time the test came around! We just forgot, because memorizing formulas sucked more balls than the taste tester for dipping dots. And it's because the P.E. teacher was the English teacher, the English teacher was the science teacher, and the science teacher was the math teacher. We (and I'm dead serious here) ended up in situations where the math teacher was teaching chemistry for weeks on end, and people would skip class to go to another class just to learn math, only to get an absence! And trying to explain to parents was just a ######6 nightmare, because they think your making this $#%^ up, and you can't blame them. It's absurd! It's like a David Lynch film.

So when we had good teachers in high school who ######6 cared and taught their individual subjects, it felt like we were learning. But we weren't. It was the memorization techniques from before put under the guise of caring. And even though I didn't learn a ######6 thing, it felt like I did, because I did great on tests, and that's it. Again, I ######6 passed math, but I can't do it today without looking up Khan academy for some quick review.

But back when I was pissed about 9th grade, I saw a fight between two black refugee kids. The fight got broken up and everyone went their separate ways. The vice principal, *name removed*, came by to get the kids, when I said "Some school your running". And instead of going after the boys fighting, he came after me for a comment. And pulled me into his office, and said "Something you want to say to me?" And I apologized, and he let me go.

What I wanted to scream at him was "You ######6 dumb ###$. Two kids were fighting and you pull me into the office over a ######6 comment? Are you ill? Are you that ######6 stupid? Is this school run by a man so stupid he would rather let two kids fighting go and focus on someone who said a sarcastic #######4 comment? Okay, do you realize the irony here, you ######6 moron? I say 'Some school your running' after a fight and you don't pull the fighters in, you pull in the critic? YOUR ######6 PROVING MY POINT, DUMBASS."

Now, a kid has said a version of what I've wanted to. And I am so ######6 pissed I didn't say that long ago. It's a reminder of where I've come from. A kid angry at how little he was learning, and now I'm in Boston. Home to Harvard and MIT. One of the most intellectual places on earth. And *name removed* is ######6 stuck at a #######5 job, will die alone, and most likely die of a disease that prevents him from ######6 anything for the last 7 miserable years of his life.

Ah. My life is great right now.

-C.Nic

P.S.: Idaho is 47th in the country in education. It's not me overhyping our situation. All the ######6 schools in Boise suck. Probably Idaho, based on that stat. But, from experience, Boise's schools suck more balls than the hoop at a Harlem Globetrotters game.

//NEXT WEEK: CNN sucks. Film at 11.
Last edited by janjones on Thu May 09, 2013 9:00 am, edited 1 time in total.
Reason: name removed

1 Comment Viewed 28259 times

Forcing myself into a relationship before I go By C.Nic

Permanent Linkby NicS on Wed Apr 10, 2013 2:41 am

I don't know why, but lately I've been clamoring for a girlfriend. I really just want somebody to ###$, sure, but also someone who gets me and understands me. And someone who lets me be close to her as well, and let me lean against her and press my cheek against hers, like everyone else around here.

I'm still taking the Boston gig, but I think I've come to the realization that The only reason I miss Boise and want a girlfriend is because I know I'm truly leaving. And I won't be back for a year. Starting a relationship is stupid. And the feeling will probably pass once I move, but right now, its ######6 unbearable.

For years, I tried to convince myself I was lonely, because I never felt anything. Now I know it's just because I haven't found "The One" yet. I know I will.

But leaving Boise, even if just for a year, is creating tension in me. Not sexual, SUPER HORNY TEENAGER #######4, but, y'know... Hunger. Besides intellectual hunger, cause, y'know, Harvard and all, I truly feel like right now I've got to start a relationship (our first real one, since Kelsey was APPARENTLY just FWB, ######6 @@@@@@@) right now.

So I want to ######6 be with someone because I'm leaving. It's instinct at its finest, isn't it? Ah well. TK usually has the cure for that.

Off topic, but you ever read Immanuel Kant's Citique of Pure Reason? That's a ######6 hard book to read. It's like all the non tennis parts of Infinite Jest and all the non bomb parts of Gravity's Rainbow rolled into one boring slab.

-C.Nic

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