Slashdot Mirror

"Historically, imitation has frequently been proposed as the central mechanism mediating the reproduction, spread, intergenerational transmission and stabilization of human cultural forms, population-specific behavioral traditions found in groups of non-human primates, or both"

-Sylvia's recipe: The role of imitation and pedagogy in the transmission of human culture http://www.ceu.hu/node/7740

You'll note that nowhere in that text you will find "progress" or a synonym. Instead it basically says "Monkey see, monkey do."

"Historically, imitation has frequently been proposed as the central mechanism mediating the reproduction, spread, intergenerational transmission and stabilization of human cultural forms, population-specific behavioral traditions found in groups of non-human primates, or both"

-Sylvia's recipe: The role of imitation and pedagogy in the transmission of human culture
http://www.ceu.hu/node/7740

Man, since this is Slashdot wouldn't you expect the article be about computer memory when you see 'DDR'...

Not at my age: to me, "DDR" will always be the Deutsche Demokratische Republik, that is, the German Democratic Republic, or East Germany, Prussian disdain and Hitler's Berlin "transformed" by the New Socialist Man and drab gray concrete apartments named after "Heroes of the Proletariat".

Here's the music, a old-fashioned socialist worker's hymm Nationalhymne der DDR / Anthem of GDR ("Auferstanden aus Ruinen" / "Resurrected from ruins") (get more of your "Socialism before it hit the dustbin of history" groove on here; in all honesty if you can ignore the frozen political prisoners of the ,a href='http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulag'>Gulag Archipelago, the music itself is pretty stirring).

And here's the workout, starting with the youth cadre, The Young Pioneers of the Five-Year Balance Beam Plan (learn more about "mass gymnastics under communism", and remember to scroll right-- the pages are literally about 800 X 4000).

Man, since this is Slashdot wouldn't you expect the article be about computer memory when you see 'DDR'...

Not at my age: to me, "DDR" will always be the Deutsche Demokratische Republik, that is, the German Democratic Republic, or East Germany, Prussian disdain and Hitler's Berlin "transformed" by the New Socialist Man and drab gray concrete apartments named after "Heroes of the Proletariat".

Here's the music, a old-fashioned socialist worker's hymm Nationalhymne der DDR / Anthem of GDR ("Auferstanden aus Ruinen" / "Resurrected from ruins") (get more of your "Socialism before it hit the dustbin of history" groove on here; in all honesty if you can ignore the frozen political prisoners of the ,a href='http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulag'>Gulag Archipelago, the music itself is pretty stirring).

And here's the workout, starting with the youth cadre, The Young Pioneers of the Five-Year Balance Beam Plan (learn more about "mass gymnastics under communism", and remember to scroll right-- the pages are literally about 800 X 4000).

The more people I meet from East Europe, the more I am convinced that the two worlds were much more similar than what we westerners were raised to believe.
People from former East Germany don't shun their origins as people from Nazi Germany would have (see 79qm DDR, which I am told is a quite precise account of the facts by East Germans). Some are even fond of the old eastern flag. A Czech girl told me that, visiting San Francisco, she was appalled by seeing American girls executing a Spartakiad. They were cheerleaders.

There were abuses of human rights on both fields, sometimes specular in type if not in magnitude; McCarthy in the US, stalinist purges in the USSR (Ok, McCarthy never got to that magnitude); invasion of Czechoslovakia and Hungary there, coups in Greece and Chile here; Vietnam for the US and Afghanistan for the USSR (Ok, the USSR was fighting the good fight and the US not, but their methods did not differ much, and civilians suffered most in both cases).

On the other hand, things went on pretty normally for average people on both sides. It was dangerous being against communism in the USSR as much as it was being a communist in the US, and the likelihood of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union to lose their elections was pretty much the same as the American Communist Party's to win them.

This is not to say "everybody's a human-right criminal, blast human rights, they were all good fellas".
It is to say that, instead of laughing at propaganda crap in other countries, you should think what propaganda they fed you as truth; that is the most dangerous, as nobody is out there telling you how ludicrous lies you are being exposed to. For instance some may be interested in what was going on in 1984.

One thing is watching Goebbels on the Discovery Channel with a Brit telling you what a jerk he was, another one is being a German, who had been on the brink of starvation before nazism, that has no other information channels than the nazi state's, that stands in a cheering crowd, and who, when Joseph asks, "Wolles Sie den totalen Krieg?", cannot help shouting "Ja!".

The big thing here is, you have to stop worrying about the student and users rights.

The big thing here is, you have to stop worrying about users' rights. Some users are terrorists, some are Communists, some are dissidents, some are Revanchists, some are Homosexuals, some are Jews.

These people are Enemies of State, and their activities must be tracked -- minutely tracked -- so that we can learn what other Anti-Social Counter-Revolutionaries these traitors to the Motherland are collaborating with.

Then we can remove all these Dissident Intellectual Cosmopolitan Terrorists to the Gulag, or KZ Dachau, or to Guantanamo -- or Manzanar -- because it has happened here.

I'm sure there were some honorable men working at I.G. Farben who never dreamed that Zyklon-B would be used as anything other than an insecticide.

And the grandparent poster I'm sure never built his network tools to suppress political dissent or to accumulate evidence of users' sexual proclivities. Bit I'll bet these uses have occurred to Admiral Poindexter.

(Clumsy Soviet-era insults taken from here.)

http://www.syslab.ceu.hu/corliss/0-TitlePrefContAc k.html

http://www.syslab.ceu.hu/corliss/Nature.html

here's the link at nature.com: http://www.nature.com/nsu/021202/021202-3.html

http://www.syslab.ceu.hu/corliss/0-TitlePrefContAc k.html

http://www.syslab.ceu.hu/corliss/Nature.html

here's the link at nature.com: http://www.nature.com/nsu/021202/021202-3.html