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You are correct, the leaders of these organizations are highly educated, but let me try and fill in some gaps because I think Pinkocommie's point is excellent and very important. The core constituency of these leaders is poor, young men with no options for education or marriage. These are the shock troops that carry out the agenda of these leaders; by themselves these men have no power. Their power is derived from the legions and legions of young people who have absolutely no options.

Similar phenomena can be seen in the inner city drug wars;often the men who end up leading these gangs1 are highly educated but the young men who choose to actually slang crack on the corner are the ones who feel that this is the only opportunity they have to get out of this life. On the individual level, different forces are at work but from the macro level it appears to me to be the same pattern.

Without the masses of young people supporting them, these leaders have no political clout. And, when there are plenty of opportunities, young people tend to spend their time seizing those opportunities to make a better life for themselves but when a society does not provide this they become restless and violent [yes, this is what young men do, at least this is what every young man I've ever known does...we get bored....we want to blow shit up...we want to break stuff...maybe that was just me and my friends but...] and are willing to do some really really stupid shit.

Whether people like it or not, we are divided up in to two groups: Leaders and followers. The leaders will be the highly educated and influential and they will and do exist in all aspects of society and in all walks of life. The followers are the rest of us who do what we are told; when we have no options and we're told that we have no options because of the evil than we go and fight that organization. Oh well, just my two cents :)

1: I've heard the author of this book on NPR about three times at this point, and something that he always mentions is the gang leader who he works with [JT] is college educated; I don't see that mentioned anywhere on the Amazon site and felt it was important to cite given the circumstances of this discussion.

A softer than expected inner layer was the base of the crustal shifting theory of Charles Hapgood in his Path of the Pole book.

The book and theories were prefaced/backed by Einstein, but it was rejected by geologists.

Maybe there was a seed of truth in Hapgood's work?

As another commenter pointed out, you can't use the design and form-factor of a harmless device when packaging an extremely dangerous device, because you will confuse and possibly harm people unintentionally. Would you package rat poison to look like candy bars or perhaps like a nice slice of deliciously moist cake? Warning labels protect people. They may not serve to protect the buyer of a given device, because they generally tend to know what they're buying and what it's used/not used for; but it can serve to protect somebody unfamiliar with the device, somebody who may happen upon it by random chance. If I owned one of these lights, I would have a sticker on it that said "DO NOT POINT AT FACE. EVER. SRSLY."

incredibly large bucket

Often US citizens, that I speak with on the internets, apologize for their president. But it's not their president I fear, it's the dense 60% of the population that can hardly write.

Nice flamebait, but in fact, America's worst state vis-a-vis college education (West Virginia, 15%) has a higher percentage of residents who are college graduates than the average European country ( We The People , Thomas Patterson, p.16). California and New York have more colleges than any European democracy. More than a third of America's young people enter college, the highest in the world (less than 20% for Western Europe). BTW, speaking of "can hardly write," it's spelled "Internet."

It's time you people start forming an intellectual elite that has some leverage over this critical mass.

The average congressman and senator have much higher education than the average American, who is much higher educated than the average non-American (and how's that "leadership" working out?). Romney was valedictorian of his college, and holds two advanced degrees from Harvard.

And since George Bush graduated from Yale (where he got better grades than his 2004 opponent, John F. Kerry), I'm thinking that your educated elites theory might not hold up in real-world crash testing. Frankly, I'd prefer a little common sense to the "elites" running things. They've been doing that a while.

I used to work on simulations of intelligent self-replicating robots until in the 1980s someone from DARPA literally patted me on the back after I gave a talk and told me to "keep up the good work". To his credit, I don't know if he was praising me for saying how easy it was to make destructive machines (the first ones were even cannibals until I added a sense of "smell" for recognizing self and other) or my comments on how much harder it would be to make robots that cooperated with each other (or with people). I think that truth remains and shows in the comments here -- predatory Daleks are much easier to build than a collaborative R2D2. I left the field -- fearing the focus of the military funding was likely to be more on the Dalek side of things, and focused more on augmenting human capacities (whether gardening, storytelling, software development, or rethinking industrial infrastructure to be more sustainable and inherently more secure and abundant and peace-promoting). I can sometimes wonder myself if I should have kept working towards cooperative robots (the scene in Silent Running where the drones performed surgery together was always an inspiration), but ultimately transcending war (to peace? to something else?) is more likely to come from the ideas of people like (Mr.) Fred Rogers, Leon Shenandoah, Mahatma Gandhi, or James Carse.
"Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood: Family Communications"
http://www.fci.org/
"To Become a Human Being: The Message of Tadodaho Chief Leon Shenandoah"
http://www.amazon.com/Become-Human-Being-Tadodaho-Shenandoah/dp/1571743413
"Gandhi's Words"
http://www.indiaspace.com/quotes.htm
"James P. Carse, Religious War In Light of the Infinite Game, SALT talk"
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-962221125884493114

But developing Daleks continues. See Manuel De Landa's book:
"War in the Age of Intelligent Machines"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_the_Age_of_Intelligent_Machines
"The next threshold point, or singularity, to be reached, according to de Landa, is the point where man and machine cease to oppose themselves, becoming one single war machine, and when that war machine itself is crossed by the machinic phylum -- this last condition might be compared to Deleuze's call for the desiring molecular machines to use the social machines, instead of being composed and manipulated in order to form a complex molar machines. The developments of artificial intelligence, which will sooner or later lead to the creation of "predatory machines", that is intelligent machines. Even if "the advent of [truly autonomous weapons] may be quite far in the future, the will to endow machines with predatory capabilities has been institutionalized in the [US] military" (p.128) warns de Landa. This disconnection of the war machines from the machinic phylum, of the military institution from the social formation, may result in erratic war machines that become nomads because of a lack of political control: if battles are not strategically ordered following political objectives, then even their victories become meaningless."

And see Manuel De Landa (indirectly) on why intelligent killbots will never work as intended for technical reasons. The implication of what he writes below, is, if an intelligent machine's mind (like a person's) is a mix of hierarchies and meshworks, and receives input from the outside, it will be as unpredictable (or more so) than a person. It might be a good *partner* to people (hopefully for benign tasks like self-driving cars

No, when fascism comes to this country, it will be wearing a smile.

What's on it - Orrin Hatch's greatest hits?

And here's a look at the piracy underground.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html?node=342430011
Amazon Flexible Payment System

ART is R-Brain-Mind expression: not social-construct/symbol/iconography!

1. I'm slightly autistic ( + other damage ), so I didn't even know R-Mind ( Totality ) mode existed, until the
"You criticize it, but you can't really do it, can you?"
criticism annoyed me enough to force me to push through learning that brain-mode shift, in my mid/late 30's.
( it took years for me to do, though non-brain-damaged ones can do it in days )

2. http://www.drawright.com/
Betty Edwards, Ph.D ( don't know if it was teaching, or brain-mind stuff ) wrote
The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain
which can get even us aspergers-types to know the brain-mind shift ( Left-brain-to-Right-brain ) that art is founded on
from symbol/cutting/reductionism/logic
to emotion-depth-pattern-organic-whole-totality.

3. Having so late in life gained the entire-dimension of my own brain/mind that totality is made-of,
it's plain & bloody obvious that Stephen Jay Gould ( & countless others ) didn't know/experience it.
( which is a profound loss, both for them, & for our whole world.
How many die without knowing at-all, one's-own Totality-knowing mind?
Among our distorted world, most, it seems )

Nor, for that matter, did many so-called "artists".

The disconnect between what art-making is,
and what society says art is, is based on social-position/construct crap.

But if anyone wants to experience the totality/wholeness yourself,
honestly DO the work-through of that book,
whose exercises are specific to undoing the damage done to our minds by an L-brain-mode specific "education"

http://www.amazon.com/New-Drawing-Right-Side-Brain/dp/0874774241/

Symbols Don't Make Anything Be ART,
the Externalization of Totality, in a healing/negentropic way, is ART:
What IS, IS, even though what-is isn't obediently distorted by symbol-systems!

The Linux version of the downloader is in the works :

http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=200154260
If you use Linux, you can currently buy individual songs. A Linux version of the Amazon MP3 Downloader is under development, and when released will allow entire album purchases.

Though not very well supported, the Windows downloader works in Wine :

http://mad-scientist.us/amazon.html

RFID For Dummies (Paperback)
by Patrick J. Sweeney II

http://www.amazon.com/RFID-Dummies-Patrick-J-Sweeney/dp/076457910X

Perhaps you can add a chapter to the next release though ;)

Real pirates don't like P2P pirates.

Obviously we're going to have the SAME discussion we always do so rather than the usual I recommend everyone who wishes to learn read this book. Yes it covers all of IP not just patents or software patents in particular. You all could use the fresh perspective.

Great post. I recommend you read this.

OK, so how do you explain that on the Amazon site best selling DVD players including traditional DVD players, HD-DVD, and Blu Ray the three versions of HD-DVD player hold 1st, 3rd, and 5th place and have been holding there ever since Toshiba slashed prices? Currently there is only one Blu Ray player in the top 10 list and it is on the 9th place and dropping. Don't believe me? Check it out for yourself:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/electronics/172514/ref=pd_ts_e_nav

Now, you can either claim that there are a lot of dumb people out there buying a dying technology or look at it from the opposite perspective: that there is a growing number of people out there who do not believe the PR hype of media or the Internet any more, which would make them, well, quite smart, no? While second option sounds a lot more hopeful, I am not holding my breath. Yet, unless Toshiba has bribed Amazon to skew the stats (for which I currently have no reason to believe), figures in the link above sure paint a different image of the current situation.

Another thing that comes into mind based on my brief exploration of the Blu Ray and HD-DVD movie libraries (I haven't invested in either yet), I must say that apart from Pixar, currently HD-DVD has a lot more titles that are worth getting (HD or not).

FreeBSD Handbook
The Complete FreeBSD

I used Linux back in the 90s, but it was such a toy OS it wasn't going to help my career at the time. FreeBSD, however, has been serving high profile sites such as ftp.cdrom.com from this time. This proves FreeBSD's maturity, unfortunately the lawsuit left a bad taste in everyone's mouth forever. If I had a choice between FreeBSD and Linux, i would go for FreeBSD (assuming hardware support and that there were no other versions of unix in the shop). Unfortunately, FreeBSD lacks in enterprise support so RedHat, SuSE, et al have won the market.

Is in the top ten, with eight of the remaining top slots taken by the market leader and one taken by the other top three vendor.

What was your point again?

I am one of those people who uses Gmail as a backup betting it's more reliable than my hard drive.

Furthermore, some of us have already decided that the new High-Def Movies don't really provide all that much of an advantage to us. DVDs were much much more convenient than VHS tapes:
- they don't wear out just by being played
- they don't melt just because you leave them in a car
- they don't take up nearly as much cabinet space
- and (most importantly for me) you can stick them in your laptop and watch them

Blu-Ray and HD-DVD don't seem to have any practical advantages beyond better picture and sound. There's the possibility of sticking whole seasons of TV on a single disc, but they don't seem to be doing that.

It may well be that HD DVD will be dead before the end of the year. However, that did not stop me from purchasing an HD-A3 for $129 with free shipping, no tax, and 7 HD DVDs, which I promptly eBayed for a total of $84. Thus, I acquired a device that plays "some" HD movies, and upscales most others, and plays well with my 42" LCD HDTV for a grand sum of $45. And I didn't have to give Sony a dime (like many /.ers, I refuse to even countenance Sony after their rootkit debacle). I don't feel like I wasted anything, because I guarantee you this - regular DVD isn't going anywhere anytime soon, and by the time it does, BluRay will be nowhere near the cost that it is now. Maybe then, I can feel better about having to give into Sony's dominance of the market.

This one.

The newly price-reduced Toshiba HD-DVD players are currently the #1 and #4 best-selling players on Amazon.com. The best-selling Blue-Ray players are #5 and #10. I wonder if HD-DVD players are now out-selling Blue-Ray players overall.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/electronics/1036922/ref=pd_zg_hrsr_e_1_3_last

The MSRP on the three models from Toshiba are $149.99, $199.99 and $299.99. Sales at Amazon seem brisk enough.

Oh, it's also worth noting that all three current Toshiba players (A3, A30, A35) have been in the top ten at Amazon since the price cut.

Not to repeat what others above me have already stated but I want to add another angle on this subject.
Recently I just bought OReilly's Learning Python 3d. Well it is fine that I have it and can take it with me
when I travel, but the thing is I want it also on my computer. So I downloaded yesterday the *illegal* version(pdf).

Numerous times has happened of course the exact opposite, e.g. first downloading the illegal version and then actually buying it.
This applies to Music, etc...
On a side note check out the django online book. Be aware that although it is
available on-line the printed version was at first sold out.

So yeah... it works

Oh I'm not surprised. I've certainly ranted on it long enough. Remember piracy is like crack cocaine. Once hooked it's a hard habit to break.

In the US the media is dominated by corporations, whose majority-stake owners are capitalists, and their hegemony reaches to everything - schools, churches, the current major political parties, even the currently existing unions.

In the US the media is dominated by corporations, whose majority-stake owners are capitalists, and their hegemony reaches to everything - schools, churches, the current major political parties, even the currently existing unions.

That is right, AFAIK. No position as of yet. Whenever you let others think for you, receive revelations for you, or otherwise attempt to control you, you fall into a dangerous trap. When do you start thinking for yourself again? In Hilldale, Utah the fundamentalist-mormon prophet Warren Jeffs had the idea that women should never wear red. All red clothing was collected the next day. Later he had the idea to have the scriptures be the only reading material and burned all of the books in the town's library. Read the chilling account here. A taliban-style regime was in control in that town.

You can try to argue that the fundamentalist Mormon sects aren't Mormon, but that is a non-sequiter. But even if that group's beliefs don't directly align with yours, the bigger picture and question is this: is there ever a point where you'd refuse new edicts coming down "directly from God?" Polygamy came down through such an edict, and those would would stand in its way were threatened with destruction. Read verses 52-54 in D&C 132. I am just wondering, is there some point where you'd grab the reins and take control for yourself? Or does the teacher, bishop, and president of the church always know what is best? It's the same for anyone who lets others think for them- for mormons, for scientologists, for catholics, etc.

They are reverting back to the "Just keep 'em barefoot and pregnant" school of thought. Mitt's wife may not need to work to make ends meet. That is not reality in America today.

GA: Can I give you a side dish of guilt to go along with your job?

story about negative mass from robert forward: http://www.amazon.com/Timemaster-Robert-L-Forward/dp/0595197590

Well maybe not a band name, but check out track # 15 on this great album.

"But, on this not a chance. He does not have the resume in my opinion."

I'd have to disagree, the abstract perfect 'market' or 'capitalism' is this ideal that can never be reached. The fact of the matter is many bright people http://www.monthlyreview.org/598einst.htm have noted that centralization happens as a result of geoemetry of matter/energy efficiency, in other words, monopolies are the natural state of capitalism in the real world, not fairy fairy land of the idealogues. Then you have investors like George soros are saying the same thing, and he most certainly DOES have the qualifications for commenting on capitalism.

http://www.amazon.com/Crisis-Global-Capitalism-Society-Endangered/dp/1891620274/ref=pd_bbs_sr_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1201196777&sr=8-2

After appearing in the Fox segment pimping her book while bashing Mass Effect, it seems that her book ratings on Amazon have taken a turn for the worse...

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1599211793/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top.

Jeffrey Sachs, a famous american economist who was for a time special advisor to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, wrote a book published in 2005 titled "The End of Poverty" where he details just such a revision. This is not as ironic or impossible as it sounds: Sachs is not a dreamer. What he wants to achieve is not suppressing all poverty but rather to suppress life threatening poverty. To do this he proposes to help poor countries by using slight modifications to market forces. Once they get on the development ladder, he argues, extreme poverty should disappear quickly. His proposed time frame for this to occur is 20 years.

See the following link for more information about the book.

http://www.amazon.com/End-Poverty-Jeffrey-Sachs/dp/0141018666/ref=sr_11_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1201185744&sr=11-1

This is real news for real nerds. This story requires reading of Leon Lederman's the God Particle to get to the point where any amount of explanation in the summary would help. Maybe I'm exaggerating a bit, but I'd be really, really impressed if anyone could write a summary for that.

No, capitalism needs people to be jerks (or at least be jerks for a good portion of the day). It's pretty obvious given the anti-social characteristics that it rewards.

If you look at something like a gift economy, the way you gain status (or at least keep up with the Joneses) is through giving away as much to others as possible. Marcel Mauss is a good starting point for anyone interested (as is David Graeber).

Cooper Lawrence's new book is getting slammed on Amazon for her appearance, and rightly so. The reviews section for the book is filled with people bashing her and her book.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1599211793/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top

Jeffrey sachs a famous american economist who was for a time special advisor to UN secretary general Kofi Annan wrote a book published in 2005 titled "The end of poverty" where he details just such a revision. see http://www.amazon.com/End-Poverty-Jeffrey-Sachs/dp/0141018666/ref=sr_11_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1201185744&sr=11-1

this is not as ironic or impossible as it sounds at first sight, Sachs is not a dreamer, what he wants to achieve is not suppressing all of poverty, but to suppress life threatening poverty. To do this he proposes to help the poor countries get back on the development ladder by using slight modifications to the market forces. once they get on the development ladder he argues, extreme poverty should disappear pretty fast (his proposed time frame is 20 years )

I don't think she'll be selling many books through amazon. The reviews don't look good...

The Cult of Perfection: Making Peace with Your Inner Overachiever

Been There, Done That, Kept the Jewelry: Find True Love--Turn Your Tarnished Dating Past into a Brilliant Romantic Future

The Fixer-upper Man: Turn Mr. Maybe into Mr. Right in 5 Easy Steps

There's probably scope for a few more :-)

I don't think she'll be selling many books through amazon. The reviews don't look good...

The Cult of Perfection: Making Peace with Your Inner Overachiever

Been There, Done That, Kept the Jewelry: Find True Love--Turn Your Tarnished Dating Past into a Brilliant Romantic Future

The Fixer-upper Man: Turn Mr. Maybe into Mr. Right in 5 Easy Steps

There's probably scope for a few more :-)

I don't think she'll be selling many books through amazon. The reviews don't look good...

The Cult of Perfection: Making Peace with Your Inner Overachiever

Been There, Done That, Kept the Jewelry: Find True Love--Turn Your Tarnished Dating Past into a Brilliant Romantic Future

The Fixer-upper Man: Turn Mr. Maybe into Mr. Right in 5 Easy Steps

There's probably scope for a few more :-)

if i were Sun i'd be building an equivalent to SimpleDB. a MySQL cloud. sun could do it. sun should do it. that could be worth 1 billion.

imagine a db cloud that everyone already knows how to use...

This looks good too, by the same author:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0300052413/

In europe people readily do force the government to work in and preserve their best intrests. When the government does something for the people it is the people doing something for the people, not some mysterious alien force.

When the government is corrupted it is private agencies, individuals who corrupt the government so it only serves the intrests of a greedy minority.

Rampant capitalism is simply feudalism and bonded servants. In the US it has been the dismantling of the good work done at the end of the depressions

You can guarantee things will get worse if you create an even more ineffective social security net, allow fewer constraints upon the greed of corporations, less tax for the rich (they should pay the most, they benefit the most)

, fail to ensure free trade is actually fair trade (it ain't free trade if one side can cheat by underpaying workers, with poor and dangerous working conditions, use child slave labour, and polluting the environment).

Failure to turn things around will ensure a path to a more primitive Mexican economy of the previous century that the Mexicans are now endeavouring to leave behind.

You are aware that if you're going to compare OSX prices with Vista ones, you can only make a moderately fair comparison (where feature sets are arguably comparable, if not quite the same) starting with Home Premium and up, right?

And you are aware that $130 is the UPGRADE price for OS X, unless of course you do not abide by the license and install it on non-Apple hardware. Every Apple computer comes with OS X preinstalled, and every new OS X purchase is virtually an upgrade.

And what a surprise, you can find Vista Home Premium UPGRADE on Amazon for $130, not exactly a hole-in-the-wall retailer. All you need to qualify for the upgrade is Windows 2000 or newer, which covers %99 of people looking for an upgrade.

Indeed. In fact some (e.g. Lynn Margulis) believe that this is the primary way species evolve, not through mutation. See her book Aquiring Genomes .