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The bigger piece of the pie, the one that Apple never game us with the Newton (and still hasn't) is a complete description of how to use the iPods Pixo embedded operating system to program other functions which are more familiar to PDA-people like: sorting, searching data enry via FW keyboard, or FW stylus if you could figure out how to make the display touch-sensative, being able to tell the machine "Make me an appointment with Carol at 5:00 next Tuesday for 2 hours, to ring 45 minues before", and it would auomatically look up Carol in the adressbook modules, check you calendar app to make sure there are no conflicts (and alearting you in that case), then placing the datbook entry, changing the ring parameter to "45 minues before meething" I dont' know if Newton Intelligence (built into the final MP2100) could do quit all that, but it might.

Right no, people trying to extend the iPod past "just an MP3 player" are stuck with the system the iPod has now - basicall a file browser. If Apple would release the lower-lvel APIs to access the hardware and compile C programs down to assembly (for porting Sphinx and Festival, as well a WICKED fast BrickOut game)

Apple did, after some pressure from the Newton community, release the in-house plug-ins and header/libray files for their MPW compilation system (God, what a beast) From the released stuff, people are starting to do some really cook stuff with it, as the recent beta test of an ATA card driver for the Newton by >a href="www.kallisys.com">Paul Guyou has shown, as well as the port of Waba for the Newton by Sean Luke. One person figured out how to do assembly language code programming for the StrongARM chip in Newton, and used this as the basis for a MOD file music player. Another project is aimed at porting an MP3 player to the Newton (I don't know if this is in working beta state yet, but I believe it it)

But many if not all of these endevours "going behind NewtonScript" would be much easier (and faster) if Apple could be persuaded to release all the appropriate headers, memory maps, memory proctection schema in public view (with a licence that says you can't use this in a competing product - althought that would have to be clarified as Apple to my knowledge has never definitively said yea or nea on ever producing a PDA again.

If the QuickDraw hooks were available (the Newton uses a stripped down SE-vintage quickdraw), then program like Waba, instead of using NewtonScript bytecode to do the drawing, which is slow, it could draw directly do the screen. Having the interface to the "Inker Port" which runs the pen input device, would make getting taps and drags to activate the applet faster, as you would have to go though NewtonScript to get them as is done now. If the full specs relating all the communications claases in the "below-Newtonscipt" layer were known, it would be easier to access the serial port, eternet cards from down there.

Some people call for the entire source code to be released, but from what I've heard it was an enourmous mess of speghetti code. But the headers and glue files for the current machines (100,120,130,2000,2100 I believe) could help access these lower level features, which seem to be becoming more an more important as the few Newton users left push their machines to their limits and face compatibility problem with desktop systems.

I don't know about Apple releaseing the entire source code. On one hand, if they released the whole thing, we'd have it but no roadmap; on the other hand, if they cleaned in up, took out the headers and glue, wrote some more comments, it would be VERY expensivive for them (especially as most of the original Newton people are gone from apple) However, in the case that they released EVERYTHING, a community of developers would quickly develop I'm sure to try to figure out what the code does, what should be thrown away in a new implementation of a PDA, and what would be of use to current Newton developers.

Persuading Apple to release the source to the connectivity applications (Newton Book Maker, Newton Tool Kit, and Newton Connection Utilities) would also help, as these apps are the ONLY apps that can interface with the Dock application built into the Newton's ROM. The authentication protocol used includes a DES-encrypted challenge-respononse. This is a BIT of a hitch to making new connectvity apps that can work with the native Dock (as you'd have to after you'd wiped the Newton clean)

Look up Project Ernestine.

A group of researchers applied GOMS (which is a form of task analysis) to a new workstation designed for use by telephone company toll and assistance operators.

The new workstation should have been faster, according to those that designed it, because it:

Ran on a faster network

Had a 'better' GUI

The keyboard was remapped and some of the functions moved to allegedly speed up the operations.

and so on.

However, task analysis (and real-world testing) showed that the new system was in fact slower. There are technical reasons for this, eg. that although the network ran faster, the original system had redrawn line by line and therefore the operators had not needed to wait for the screen to completely draw... but partly, it was that some of the alterations that they had made were about as useful as feet on a fish.

A 'better gui'? What does that have to do with telecom operation? And many of the changes they'd made to the keyboard had taken operations that they would originally have done in 'slack time' and placed them in the critical path so that the operators actually had to type faster...

All this doesn't prove that command lines are necessarily faster.

What it does show is that many of the assumptions made by those who try to design 'better interfaces' are wrong - eg. the GUI - and that if you want to design an efficient user interface, you absolutely have to do it to suit a particular user or class of users. For a different user - say, an untrained beginner to the job - the Project Ernestine interface might have been far easier to use.... and therefore initially more efficient...

*sigh*

UI research is a hard problem. In my personal opinion, the current state of research is seriously broken in a number of ways - how do you measure the usability of a program? Why, you measure its efficiency! Um... but maybe I'm not looking to get my image drawn 0.56 seconds faster, but to get some artistic inspiration going? Well then, the 'state of the art' choice is probably heuristic evaluation, which is virtually empirical and just about has a sort of scientific basis. And it certainly won't tell you just how happy a user is. At which point it all comes down to using questionnaires. And at that point, you might as well kiss all this scientific theory stuff goodbye completely...

We tend to think of software as a tool, and computers as the beepy box on which those tools rely. I feel that this devalues the computer. User interfaces, in my uninformed opinion, tend to hide the computer (the freedom, as with the command line, to create more tools, fluidly) behind buttons, toolbars, and predefined courses of action. But what do I know? ;-)

I think the exerpt was saying that it's hard to tempt programmers making from 50-80k into being somebody's post-doc researcher, making maybe $20k a year, or less.

If you work professionally in bioinformatics, you will do much better, probably on par with being a programmer professionally. This guy was just pointing out that its much harder to convince bright and well trained people to slave for nothing in the academic world, since their skills are still rare and in high demand. Since everyone's working for private corporations, nothing gets published, so the body of open research in bioinformatics increases only very slowly.

You can find a list of bioinformatics programs here: http://www.ib3.gmu.edu/courses/bioinfogradprgm.htm l

That's the great thing about the Constitution - it's always evolving, based on the decisions and judgements handed down by the Supreme Court.

I toured one UNDP project that used IT Corps people in Egypt. It was a young project, but it had potential.

Dreamcasts are powered by Hitachi's SuperH 4 CPU. This is a plain, run-of-the-mill 32-bit processor. It's got a 32-bit address bus too, just like your PC. I don't know who started the rumor that it's a 128-bit system, but it seems to stick. Maybe because it was released after the N64, they assumed that the size of the words had double for the next generation? Or maybe because it has a "128-bit wide vector FPU" engine. If this is so, then your Pentium MMX is also 128-bit with it's MMX instruction support (can do among other things 128-bit quadword operations).

If you can think of a reason why a video game console would need a number greater than 4x1024^3 to represent some integer quantity, I'd like to hear it.
Check this out while you're at it:
http://mason.gmu.edu/~ngoldber/chip_truth.html

You seem to be confusing evolutionary game theory with evolutionary algorithms.

Co-evolutionary algorithms can be cooperative or competitive (or maybe even some combination of the two). Danny Hillis, of Thinking Machines fame, developed a competitive co-evolutionary system that plied a system evolving sorting networks against systems that evolved difficult datasets. This system produced significantly better sorting networks than an evolutionary algorithm that just evolved sorting networks. Mitch Potter's doctoral thesis is on co-operative evolution, and makes for possibly good introductory reading.

The notion of "fleeing parasitic programs" is, as far as I know, a fantasy.

• sdts++, a C++ toolkit for reading SDTS spatial datasets.
• ec++ a evolutionary algorithm C++ library.

I'm also working on a temporal-spatial feature-oriented library and application suite to support USGS research. Once it's mature it'll also be released as OSS.

A specialization. It could be anything you want. I chose Computer Science. You could also design a degree by working with a counselor. The program very closely mirrored the general university's program in many cases. I think I didnt have to take maybe one or two courses that the standard CS degree had.
24 credits of general study "learning communities". You could take a variety of courses. For instance, I took a course about American History, and I took a course in which we did a case study of Washington, D.C. in order to study what "progress" really was. These classes all used a case study method of teaching and were very hands-on and interactive with the teachers.
12 credits of internship. I split this up into about 3 different internships. My final internship landed me a great permanent job in the Linux development world.
A set of electives. I took a lot of creative writing and poetry writing courses as I very much enjoyed both.

I think their goal may be practical to quantum computing. I could explain this here, but I already did it here. Basically, you need to be able to create a quantum copier to create a quantum computer. Building a quantum copier is difficult because, due to the no-cloning theorem, arbitrary quantum states cannot be copied perfectly every time. You can either clone a subset of quantum states perfectly or you can copy arbitrary states with a certain probability of failure.

It'll end up the same as we will have here in the UK soon - the RIP bill basically states that if you don't give up your encryption key when asked to by the police, you will be imprisoned. Even if you don't have the key! For example a consultant at a company I used to work for had been given a copy of a clients key to hold for safekeeping. The client lost theirs and so had my colleague. The RIP bill could send them both to prison, as the onus would be on them to prove they had lost it (HOW???).

Guilty until proven Innocent - sucks don't it!

The US Govt is just using the WTC incident as a scare to push some pretty heavy anti-freedom legislation through while everyone is still shocked.

Long live Steganography

I'm curious if the UN observer policy has done anything worthwhile.

The American Government consciensiously and systematically adopt the advancement of an aristocracy of the mind with respect to equality before the law.

Perhaps, if we're lucky, the right to vote in America will some day have the prerequsite of correctly explaining the Fallacy of Affirming the Consequent.

The Meteor example I pointed out before is probably a bad example for our purposes, because those meteors don't (all) just rely on the earth's gravity for acceleration. Most already have a relative speed of many thousands of miles per hour before they ever get near the earth's gravity well.
Now, the article said that the bomber would be capable of delivering strikes from 60 miles+ let's just round that to 5000 ft per mile 5000 * 60 = 300,000 ft. Now let's round this again to 100,000 meters. I know it's not exact, but bear with me...
Now with an altitude of 100,000 meters, we simply use 9.8m/s^2 as our acceleration rate. This will give us a speed of 2243 meters per second at 0 feet. Keep in mind that this formula does not account for friction of the atmosphere. Now let's figure out how much force we're going to deliver, okay? The military uses 500 and 1000 lb bombs a s a sort of standard. These labels are for the entire bomb, not just the explosives. Typically half of that weight is explosives... So let's assume that they'll continue to use these denominations. Let's even go with the lighter one to support your argument. Now 500 Lbs is 227.27 Kgs Let's again round down to 225.

Now, let's recap:
We have our theoretical (frictionless) impact velocity:
2243 m/s
We have our mass:
225 Kgs
We have our altitude:
100,000 m

Now to calculate energy we use the formula:
mass * g * altitude where g = 9.8m/s^2
Using this we get:
220,500,000 joules, which according to your formula of 4200 Gigajoules per kilotonne is 0.0525 kilotonnes. Not much when you're thinking of things in nuclear proportions, but that is a hell of a lot when you consider that his is a single 500 pound bomb without a warhead.
Just for referance, the Hiroshima bomb had a yield of 20 kilotonnes.

Okay, by now half of you are thinking to yourselves that that's a big yield for a "conventional" weapon. And I'm sure a lot of you are still scratching your heads and saying "well what about the drag?" That's where Jovlinger is right. There *will* be drag acting upon the missile-meteor. Not only will it slow it down, but it is likley to reduce the mass of the bomb too, due to much of it's mass burning up on reentry. The only site I was able to find that deals at all with both of these paramaters (mass lost and drag that varies with variable atmospheric density) is here The test at the botom of the page is the most relavent one since it uses a 90 degree entry angle. However it is only a 100kg model. Even still, 66% of it's mass survives reentry and it impacts with 795 kilojoules... Keep in mind this is less than half of our theoretical meteor-missile. Now, what does all this mean? I havn't the foggiest idea. Is this weapon anywhere nuclear class? No. But these numbers, I believe are quite respectable for conventional weapons. By the way, if none of this makes any sence to you, it's probably because I havn't slept in 36 hours, so if someone wants to try and translate this post into something more human readable, be my guest ( :
Um.... yeah.

I don't think it's fair to imply that Soviet atrocities began with Stalin

You are quite right as a quick search on Google will show. For example, see this link.

There is a project called CyPRG going on with several professors, one (Todd La Porte)at George Mason University in Virginia, one at U Arizona and one in Denmark at the University of Roskilde. They are rating government websites for what they call "openness" and are coming up with very interesting results. I happen to know Todd, and he and I are working together on some related stuff. Give them a look-see.

There is a project called CyPRG going on with several professors, one (Todd La Porte)at George Mason University in Virginia, one at U Arizona and one in Denmark at the University of Roskilde. They are rating government websites for what they call "openness" and are coming up with very interesting results. I happen to know Todd, and he and I are working together on some related stuff. Give them a look-see.

Ok--now go read about the deaths of 80 innocent civilians in their own homes at the hands of US Defense and the FBI in 1993; read how the United States is the world leader in incarceration, with many of the jailed being casualties of the War on Drugs; read about the victims of racial profiling in the US ("Driving while black"); read about prison labour in the United States; or police brutality; perhaps even the many violations of international law by the United States.

Go read all of those links (and while you're at it, brush up on your history; for instance, slavery in the United States), and come back and tell me that you welcome the US as a power any more than China. Take off your rose-coloured US-media-manipulated glasses, and realize that America is as affected by propaganda convincing its citizens that their country faultless as China is.

Damn good thing, that. Mao's "Great Leap Forward" caused the biggest famine in human history; he presided over a laogai system which claimed well over 10 million lives; and his "Cultural Revolution" also murdered over 10 million people. Moreover he helped instigate the death and enslavement of millions of Koreans in order to expand communism's influence. Tens of millions fled in desparation to Hong Kong, Taiwan, Malaysia, and even the US. Good riddance to the bloodiest tyrant ever, Mao Tse-Tung.

The capitalist roaders in the party that Mao called upon the masses to overthrow did exactly as he warned they would when they came to power (after his death in 1976)

Yeah, they put a lid on all the dying and suffering, and the living standard in China is finally rising steadily now that they're somewhat less communist.

In light of the tens of millions of victims of Chinese communism, I declare that you, P30P73Z-H4X0R are one sick and twisted individual for defending history's most prolific[*]mass murderer, Mao. You are a complete shame an d disgrace.

(It's not a flame if it's completely true.)

[*] or possibly the second most prolific mass murderer.

--

You might also want to check out programs like George Mason's SCS (School of Computational Sciences) . This sort of thing is their speciality.

Have you ever cared to read about anarchism and what they offer?

Try this FAQ to get started.

The average citizen is quite ignorant about most scientific issues, and a single charismatic scientist can be highly influential in persuading people to pursue wrongheaded ideas. For example, Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb, has been arguably the most influential person in spreading the idea that the earth is "overpopulated." In the early 1970's he predicted many dire consequences as result of population growth. Among other things, he predict that ten's of millions of children would starve in countries like India.

Ehrlich supported rather drastic measures to prevent the catastrophe he believed to be inevitable--including such things as the forced sterilization of all Indian men with three or more children, and adding contraceptives to food and water supplies.

Julian Simon, an economist at the University of Maryland, challenged Ehrlich's theories. He argued that humans were the "ultimate resource" and that the results of human ingenuity--better fertilizers, new crop varieties, more efficient farming techniques--would allow humans to keep pace with expected population growth.

One of Ehrlich's predictions was that the price of limited resources, such as elemental metals, would rise as more humans competed for the same resources.

Simon offered Ehrlich a wager centered on the market price of metals. "...Ehrlich would pick a quantity of any five metals he liked worth $1,000 in 1980. If the 1990 value of the metals, after adjusting for inflation, was more than $1,000 (i.e. the metals became more scarce), Ehrlich would win. If, however, the value of the metals after inflation was less than $1,000 (i.e. the metals became less scare), Simon would win. The loser would mail the winner a check for the change in price.

Ehrlich agreed to the bet and chose copper, chrome, nickel, tin and tungsten.

By 1990, all five metal were below their real price level in 1970. Ehrlich lost the bet and sent Simon a check for $576.07. Prices of the metals chosen fell so much that Simon would have won the bet even if the prices hadn't been adjusted for inflation..." (see Brian Carnell's overpopulation.com for more details about the wager.)

Robin Hanson took the idea of wagering about scientific questions a step further, proposing to create an idea futures market. "...Imagine a betting pool on disputed science questions, where the current odds are treated as the current intellectual consensus. For example, people might bet on whether cold fusion will be used to produce power by the year 2020. Right now the odds would be fairly low - say 20-to-1 against. But as the results of new research became known, and if more people became convinced that cold fusion worked, the odds would rise. And if cold fusion became a reality by 2020, those early supporters would make a bundle.

Such betting markets would become "idea futures" markets - like corn futures markets, except you'd bet on the future settlement of a scientific controversy instead of the future price of corn. The system could increase the public's interest and role in science, and betting odds could serve as a scientific barometer to guide mass media and public policy...."(Idea Futures: How making wagers on the future can make it happen faster by Robin Hanson. WIRED, Sept. 1995, Idees Fortes section, p.125 )

State gambling laws unfortunately prohibit the formation of such markets. As a result, a potentially very valuable mechanism for eliminating dangerously unfounded ideas is thwarted.

I applaud all those creative technical minds trying to come up with interesting and useful applications for this networks, but without hard info, we're just pissing in the wind and blowing hot air.

There's a fairly recent and detailed IEEE report on the Iridium network

Here's a chart of competing systems that are up, or will be up soon

Here's a fairly complete description of several current satellite telephone systems with info on frequency allocations, ground stations, and other important network details [has a chapter on iridium]

Here's a article in Test System News testing Iridium handsets and network for real world performance

More to come....

In fact, in "Screwtape Letters," one of the devils etches out what could be the Corporatist Marketing Manifesto: "Allow no preeminence among your subjects. Let no man live who is wiser or better or more famous or even handsomer than the mass. Cut them all down to a level; all slaves, all ciphers, all nobodies. All equals. Thus Tyrants could practice, in a sense, "democracy."

Geeee!!! Sounds like big bad ole communism (tm) to me!!!

--
Here's my mirror

Actually you are the one that needs to do some reading. Libertarian is a word the european anarchists adopted for themselves after the agents provacateurs and the bomb throwing idiots managed to co-opt the name in popular usage. In the US that usage never became popular, but the word was similarly applied by emerging right-anarchists like Murray Rothbard to distinguish themselves from the typically european left-anarchists, who were called libertarians in europe but anarchists here.

Yes, it's confusing. But no more so than the fact that liberal is commonly used in this country to refer to the left, whereas in most other countries it refers to the right.

Anarchy - from the greek "an" meaning not or no, and "archos" meaning ruler, thus a synonm for freedom (not being ruled over.)

What you define as Libertarian is actually Minarchism - a doctrine generally held by those who are anarchists at heart but just don't believe that people are ready for it yet, and so advocate a "night-watchman" minimal state which can prevent worse states from taking over until people are ready for complete anarchy.

Here, read and understand this - then come back and tell us about anarchism.

Homo sapiens sapiens won't last forever. The only question is whether we wipe out all intelligence in the Solar System due to superweapons, an outcome which we can legitimately label as "bad", or whether "life as we know it" is ended by the rise of greater-than-human intelligence first. Frankly, I think I'll take what's behind door number two.

Bill Joy scores points for pointing out the probability of apocalypse, but vastly more important is accepting the certainty of some apocalypse and deciding which one we want. I don't think there's much of a contest between the coinflip chance that AIs are nice to humans and the near-certainty of being murdered by Iraqi nanoweaponry.

Anyway, the Extropians list has been rehashing this issue for years - right down to the argument about how to build an AI - and, unsurprisingly, some Web resources seem to have sprung up along the way. So if you'd rather not reinvent the wheel...

Ope n Directory Singularity category
Singularity Sub-Page in Anders Transhuman Page
Comments on Vinge's Singularity (13 authors write essays; Vinge responds)
Staring into the Singularity
The Plan to Singularity (403K)

For those of you wondering about how to build the AI:
Coding a Transhuman AI (353K)
For those of you wondering about what the AIs will do:
Logic from Frequently Asked Questions about the Meaning of Life

A friend and I (both of us live in Ashburn) have just created a website to try to get the general public involved:

http://adiemus.org/ucita.html

http://mason.gmu.edu/~cparson/ucita.html

(Both pages are the same)

Any editorial comments are welcome, send to cparson@megapipe.net... aside from that, tell your friends!

Hopefully we can get this nonsense thrown out.

Yes, AOL HQ is right down the street... I'm sure that has something to do with this (all the politicians practically creamed themselves when AOL moved in... ooh, we're SO technologically savvy, we have AOL in our county!) Also with AOL owning CNN and Microsoft owning NBC, its no surprise that this hasn't shown up on mass media.

folks, it's up to us.

I don't object to the organization helping someone obtain a patent, I just think it can be done somewhat indirectly, and without the need for the organization to end up owning it, (as long as it's licensed under the OPL), and that doing it indirectly can be the more stable solution in the long term.

The strategy I have in mind is to put together either some sort of Idea Futures system as Robin Hanson has discussed, and/or a Castpoint system as Marc Stiegler discusses in Earthweb.

This way other people can end up sponsoring the sort of help you're talking about. As much as I'd like to cross-index all human knowledge myself, partially in order to patent inventions and license them under the OPL with an aim to freeing up knowledge, solving problems, and making money, but mostly because it would be fun, I still think that neither I nor a single organization would be as efficient at it as a system that encourages everybody to have a go. Also, the successful implementation of such a system would show that patents aren't necessary, and that their goals could be met using methods that don't restrict scientific and literary freedoms.

At the moment, however, I think it's more important to develop the license and get legal help in debugging it, and sell people and companies on the idea and the license. That has the possibility of freeing up a lot of patent encumberences quickly, so it's the first thing I'd want to do.

For long term stability, I absolutely agree that we need implement something that helps researchers, for instance, patent their inventions to be licensed under the OPL in the cases where that's possible. (As opposed to cases in which, say, the university claims all rights.)

But I consider selling the license to be the immediate goal. Solving the rest of the world's problems can wait until next year. :-)

While commenting on some problems regarding SETI searches, I provide a discussion of how O'Neill's colonies might be updated using biotechnology and nanotechnology. Steel and aluminium are terrible structural materials compared with diamond, buckytubes and sapphire. The combination of the short replicating times allowed by nanoscale self-replicating systems and the material properties of the strongest materials will allow us to rapidly go far beyond O'Neill's vision -- to the point of dismantling entire planets.

Government support or programs is not required to do this. Molecular Nanotechnology of the type being developed by Zyvex is required. In addition, we need the designs for the nanobots to take apart the asteroids or planets, construct the mass drivers and solar arrays, etc. The lack of molecular designs, is discussed in the Nano@Home proposal. Because we will be able to do the designs at home, a small dedicated group will eventually be able to bootstrap the development of space and achieve the vision O'Neill described. Because of the rapid increase in the available resources (matter and energy) per person, the large number of people living in poverty should disappear as well. The only potential problem I see is if Mind Uploading becomes feasible (or real AIs are developed) and unlimited copying of such entitites is allowed. This has been explored in more detail by Robin Hanson in If Uploads Come First.

While commenting on some problems regarding SETI searches, I provide a discussion of how O'Neill's colonies might be updated using biotechnology and nanotechnology. Steel and aluminium are terrible structural materials compared with diamond, buckytubes and sapphire. The combination of the short replicating times allowed by nanoscale self-replicating systems and the material properties of the strongest materials will allow us to rapidly go far beyond O'Neill's vision -- to the point of dismantling entire planets.

Government support or programs is not required to do this. Molecular Nanotechnology of the type being developed by Zyvex is required. In addition, we need the designs for the nanobots to take apart the asteroids or planets, construct the mass drivers and solar arrays, etc. The lack of molecular designs, is discussed in the Nano@Home proposal. Because we will be able to do the designs at home, a small dedicated group will eventually be able to bootstrap the development of space and achieve the vision O'Neill described. Because of the rapid increase in the available resources (matter and energy) per person, the large number of people living in poverty should disappear as well. The only potential problem I see is if Mind Uploading becomes feasible (or real AIs are developed) and unlimited copying of such entitites is allowed. This has been explored in more detail by Robin Hanson in If Uploads Come First.

I, at least, meant what I wrote. See the other references.

Ok, I looked in Websters. Pedophile is a word, "pedicator" is not. So, I still don't know what you mean.

"Websters" is hardly the end-all and be-all of whether something constitutes a `word' or not. Most of us laugh at "Websters", you know. The OED is a good starting place, much better than any old "Websters" silliness, but even that isn't absolute. Words aren't what you think they are. They derive from many sources, and anyone, especially a native speaker, has full licence to invent new ones.

In this case, however, I did not. In fact, the word in question has seen use for around twenty-four centuries at least, and probably more. I suppose you'd try to tell me that fajitas and quedadillas "weren't words" either, just because "Websters" was ignorant of them.

Furthermore, "Websters" is not a well-defined term. Any one can publish a "Websters". And many people have. And most of them are crap.

Most importantly, I already posted a reference in this thread which, if one were to follow the link, would in graphic and offensive detail explain precisely what the word means, and why. Today, I choose not to violate the delicate sensibilities of the gentle readership of this august forum by printing verbatim such foul material as to be found in that link. Kindly respect that position. Here's another such link that the prurient may read if they're interested.

The alleged connection to pædophile is suspect at best, since the pædo- stem did not appear in pedicator. Circa 110 AD, Suetonius wrote in De Vita Caesarum, Divus Iulius (The Lives of the Caesars, The Deified Julius), citing the earlier C. Licinius Calvus, the following: Bithynia quicquid et pedicator Caesaris umquam habuit.

I don't see why pedicator would be related to pedometer or pedology. I think you're confused pæd- (often written paed-) and ped-. The prevalent America spelling of pædophile as pedophile not only confuses those of us accustomed to and reliant upon proper stemming, it probably also annoys the pedestrians and podiatrists, with the only folks happy with the confusion being the pædogogues. :-)

Hey, nice followup! This is a good start. But your 71 million figure is fundamentally misleading for a simple reason. In any conflict between two peoples, historically, save perhaps the communist examples, both groups will claim that "God" is on their side. Does this self-justification mean that organized religion was responsible for the conflict? Obviously not. And doesn't the party starting the conflict deserve the blame? Unfortunately, this is notoriously difficult to determine.

So we need to define some terms. I propose that "perpetrated in the name of God" (your phrase) implies that the primary purpose of the conflict was religious in nature (not economic or political). You would hopefully agree with this definition since you define the problem group as "organized religions ... attacking another group for their convictions." Obviously social, economic, political, and religious issues do get intertwined, hence the emphasis on "primary" purpose. What evidence would satisfy such a claim? One piece of evidence of a primary religious motive would be public cries by a significant fraction of religious leaders for violent action. An even stronger piece of evidence would be the religious leaders organizing to carry out such violent action.

By these hopefully reasonable definitions, I fail to see how the following would be considered "perpetrated in the name of God":
- 30 M Native Americans- killed largely by disease and for motives of greed over land and in some cases politics (e.g. the French allied with and paid some Indians to fight British/American interests) There *was* an active effort to peacefully convert the Indians, but I've never run across evidence of violent or evil attempts at forced conversion.
- 13 M in WWI- this isn't even remotely a religious conflict; it's almost entirely political fallout from the decline of the Austro-hungarian empire of the Hapsburgs. Warring tribes and nationalism, not warring religions.
- 10 M (?!) in the Balkans - As above, this is an issue of warring tribes, not warring religions as far as I can tell. I could be convinced otherwise given evidence under the above definition.

There goes a quick 50 million of your 71 milion "perpetrated in the name of God" deaths, and I have a different set of concerns with your 15 million Crusade deaths.

The big arrow in your quiver IMHO is the Crusades. Based on my admittedly feeble understanding of it, it *would* qualify as "perpetrated in the name of God" by the above definition. We could argue about whether it was solely driven by the Catholic church's drive for power (a common western view) or whether it was a response to the aggressive "holy war" expansion of Muslims up through Turkey, in North Africa, and through sizeable fractions of Spain. But in either case organized religion seemed to be a driving, encouraging factor feeding the conflict. As for the 15 million figure, it seems rather high. At least one nice and well-sourced web source on genocide, a facinating historical view of the topic, seems to indicate that the number across multiple crusades is under 200,000. Perhaps it is omitting something, but for now, I consider the burden of proof to be in your court. I'd be even more willing to agree that the Inquisitions and the Salem Witch trials conform to my definition, although I'd note their relatively small numbers (in the 5-digit range according to the above source.) What are we down to, 6 million? And I'm skipping addressing some of the other "small potatoes" you mentioned.

I'm surprised you omitted the Reformation-era conflicts like the Thirty Years War which were due to an mix of religious and political forces. It's arguable whether such conflicts were primarily religious or primarily political power struggles, but in any case it's a stronger anti-religion case than the three conflicts mentioned above. Tell you what, I'll let you add that one if you let me add Mao alongside Hitler and Stalin. That accounts for another 10-15 million he executed and 30 million he led into man-made starvation.

I don't know whether or not Hitler was a Catholic, but from what I recall reading some of his autobiography, Mein Kampf, religion played little or no role in his upbringing; he was almost completely consumed by political issues. It's also well documented that towards the end of the war, he increasingly became involved in a variety of occult practices, attempting to set up his own state religion based on German myths and the notion of the sanctity of German blood. It's pretty clear (to me at least) that he agreed with Nietsche that God is dead, and let's manipulate whatever religious systems exist to our own ends.

Don't forget, the Hitler extermination figure isn't 6 million; that's the figure referring to the number of Jews exterminated, and doesn't include the blacks, handicapped, homosexuals, Christian opposition, gypsies, Polish people, etc. The overall figure is apparently about double: 12 million.

Now I'd agree with you that there might be various murders throughout the world due to religious and anti-religious individuals. How many murderers or serial killers are religious and how many are areligious or anti-religious? Let's agree that these aren't going to be too countable with our crude methods and keep focused on the bigger social conflicts. I will point out that the systematic allowance of killing of human fetuses, 40 million in America alone over the last 20 years, might be a relevant figure, but I'll try to decline pushing the point once made, in the interest of avoiding another large discussion surrounding definitions of whether fetuses count as human.

So I've added another 16-90 million to your atheist-led tally.

In closing, I think your claim that "taking the whole of history more acts have been attributed to organized religions... than [those committed] solely by atheists" argument, besides being largely unsupported by the facts, also has a severe statistical bias. How is it fair to measure 100-250 years of atheism against 1000+ years of religious behavior?

Look, I'm not trying to exclude religion from culpability; religions *are* culpable for the acts of their followers. "You shall judge a tree by its fruit," as one of them says, urging adherents to carefully screen potential leaders. I'd even agree that religions and religious followers should be held to a higher standard than atheists, since they espouse one. But lets try to look at the evidence without too many preconceptions. What do I make of the evidence? In general, I would say that the nation state is far, far more culpable for mass deaths than religion, which has really only become guilty of great failings when it wrapped its power structures up with those of the state. To the extent that religion encourages restraint on the excercise of state power (due to some moral code,) organized religion can provide a beneficial counterweight in a civilization.

Like you, I'm not trying to offend but attempting to offer a thought-provoking rebuttal. Why does this matter? Besides the issue of "what is true", on a purely pragmatic basis, casting off the moral constraints provided by religion can have significant costs in return for relatively unproven benefits. The "free love" of the '60s didn't come free.

--LP

Another has gotten involved with a fine young man with only a "slight" over-protectiveness problem. You know, just minor things like calling her every 1/2 hour to check up on her, checking the caller ID every night when he gets home, and being very suspicious of any other men who dare to speak to her. And he certainly doesn't like any of us :). The sad part is, we barely ever get to see her anymore -- he's absorbed her almost completely and doesn't let her out to play very often :(.

My main argument against the termination/euthanasia/whatever term you want to use is both emotional and practical. Emotionally, I think it's just wrong. Practically speaking, a good illustration of why it is wrong can be summed up in one person. St ephen Hawking.

He wasn't born disabled, but if his parents could have looked at his genes and see how he would suffer as he grew, they would have been appalled. They might have even considered it a blessing to terminate him as an infant to spare him the suffering. If they had done so, they would have snuffed out a life that was not only full, but truly pushed the envelope of human understanding.

----

Tucker was an "individualist anarchist", and the question of how to interpret the individualist anarchists politically is the source of an enormous argument between anarchists of the right and left today. See An Anarchist FAQ for the left's version, and the Anarchist Theory FAQ for the right's version.

Anyway, there is certainly such a thing as socialism outside of Marxism.

Visit Museum of Communism if you want to see what Marx's intentions were.

To the rest of your comment: You didn't live in Communist/Socialistic country, did you? I did. The government really did not need anything spontaneous, like Linux is.

Jarda Benkovsky
benkovsk (at) pha.pvt.cz