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The premise was good. You had a political prisoner and a few non-politicals being sent to a penal colony on the same ship. They were used as expendable explorers when the prison ship encountered an alien derelict, and were able to take control of it. You had a totalitarian state that, due to good propaganda, was largely supported by its inhabitants and an idealist trying to reform it. Unfortunately for him, his crew is made up of his fellow prisoners, who aren't nearly as idealistic...

The writing wasn't bad either, at least in most episodes. I love Vila's line 'I plan to live forever, or die trying' and you can find a lot of other good examples throughout the series. Some of the plots (for example, Rumours of Death) were superb, others were a bit dull.

The sets, however, were incredibly low budget (bits of the ship wobbled when anyone touched them) and the acting was largely second rate, with a few gems.

(which sites an article behind a login)

For those confused, it cites a site that requires a login.

Wikiquote gets you a step closer, but still requires payment to access the paper.

Smoke and Mirrors [2.5]

John: I don't think that's true.
Jen: With all due respect John, I am the head of IT and I have it on good authority. If you type "Google" into Google, you can break the Internet. So please, no one try it, even for a joke. (the executives laugh) It's not a laughing matter. You can break the Internet!

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_IT_Crowd

The third season is really great if you didn't catch it.

I bow to your credibility and respectability. Oh wait, I am actually European and have never lived in the US. This does not mark you as an idiot AT ALL, because as a liberal, progressive and educated European you could never be a judgemental and ignorant stereotyper who jump quickly to conclusions about people based on their country of origin. Certainly not if they were African anyway, but maybe American?

if you dont want to be taken as a right wing nutjob american, DONT talk like one.

I thought it was how the Sweden Democrats, a self-described nationalist (in the National-Socialist Hitlerian sense) party who believes that cultures should belong to a single country, got 7.4% of the poll votes, up from 4.9% 3 months ago and 0 some time before that.Or how the racist Salem march got delayed by the police because they had to root out the storage crate of metal batons that progressive liberals had stored in the forest, together with a stack of gas masks to supplement their black scarf face covers.
Of course, as Swedes the leader of your biggest party is Mona Sahlin, who has said some great things about your country: http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mona_Sahlin

yea, this small outstanding example here, this small outstanding example there. if you take that route, it will take days for me to list the infrigements on freedoms and liberties that has happened in america in that sense, and in many other senses as well. its the end result, and the average that matters.

Funny, I remember a case where four 15-year old girls beat up a 14-year old girl they had bullied from some time and locked her in a shed, then approached an immigrant with finger language to make him an offer, after which he followed them to the shed and raped the girl and paid the four 200 NOK for their helpful service as agreed. And where a young Norwegian girl in an immigrant neighbourhood told about how she wished she was still a virgin, so that she wouldn't be bullied as much and seen as a worthless and dirty whore by those she lived amongst. Of course, since there are no problems in Scandinavia, these must be stories I have made up just to be silly. Please, tell me how they are all lies about the great and safe Scandinavian countries.

funny. i thought exceptions did not make a rule, but apparently, in your skewed reality, they do. i also thought psychopaths and sociopaths existed in every single fucking country regardless of its level, but, apparently, scandinavian countries are exempt from this reality of our world.

please make up such 500 stories that happened in the last year, and you will have your point.

Was it America that screwed over the Swedish governments boosting government salaries to the level that could only be sustained in a credit bubble? Was it America that forced you to give crazy credits to the Baltics? And of course, states that do not believe in America at all, like Venezuela, have done much better out of this, or? The problem with having a lot of rage but locating the sources of problems in the wrong places is that after you destroy those sources you still have the problems.

yea, it was america. if you are under the delusion that it wasnt, take up some reading and learn some reelpolitik and economics. every single fucking individual trusted america and its laws and its corporate world, because there was NO REASON to not trust that a first world country would allow blatant, global scale scam to happen. everyone jumped on the bandwagon, not excluding china, britain, switzerland, for, then the deal looked LEGIT. every single fucking financial institution who could jump on the bandwagon did, BECAUSE IF YOU DIDNT DO IT YOU WOULD BE LEFT FAR BEHIND. that is the nature of business and economics. if you dont jump on a proper, legitimate trend that is occurring, you just vanish from the market. and because everyone thought a whole cou

"The net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." The solution is obvious: Move your servers to a more free-speech friendly country. When the US and Canada start to see that taking down sites at the drop of a hat is very harmful to their hosting businesses, then maybe they will do something about it.

I agree with you that the source is biased, but that doesn't invalidate the data. As C.S. Lewis once said, "You must show that a man is wrong before you start explaining why he is wrong". (I'm not an AGW denier btw)

Ah yes, the famous Atheist turned Christian. Let's keep quoting him, shall we?

There have been men before who got so interested in proving the existence of God that they came to care nothing for God himself as if the good Lord had nothing to do but to exist. There have been some who were so preoccupied with spreading Christianity that they never gave a thought to Christ. ~ C.S. Lewis

Now the million dollar question: was he talking about science in your quote or faith?

Was this a surprise to anyone?

As the submitter, yeah I have to admit it kind of was. This is a really unique opportunity for a case against CoS because normally the cases come from outsiders.

Lindstein was eight years old and says he was forced to work for 16 years. He was removed from school at age 12. Now, if you were removed from school at age 12, you probably aren't very well suited for a high paying job. So you have someone who's lost much of their youth to Scientology and has the motivation to see this suit through to the end.

You see, when you sue or slander Scientology, you might not realize what you're getting yourself into. People end up doing jail for posting verbal attacks on Scientology online. To quote the late L. Ron Hubbard on his policy:

This is the correct procedure: Spot who is attacking us. Start investigating them promptly for felonies or worse using our own professionals, not outside agencies. Double curve our reply by saying we welcome an investigation of them. Start feeding lurid, blood sex crime actual evidence on the attackers to the press. Don't ever tamely submit to an investigation of us. Make it rough, rough on attackers all the way. * "Attacks on Scientology" (25 February 1966)

That's what you're dealing with. That's what Lindstein has in his future. He probably knows it, his lawyer probably knows it. But he will soon be subjected to character assassination, harassment of just barely legal amounts, indirect threats and the same for any family he may have.

So yeah, I'm a pleasantly surprised that such an opportune individual has stepped forward to speak and let us know what Scientology is. Because in so many other cases, the individual has been silenced one way or another. And scientology has refined it's processes to force its members quiet and they have the resources and legal representation to make magic happen in the courts.

I hope Lindstein is telling the whole truth and nothing but the truth. I wish him the best of luck in the courtroom and for justice to be brought against those who forced him into labor and stripped him of his right to knowledge.

"Who's" is a contraction of "who is". It should read "There's one thing stronger than all the armies in the world and that is an idea whose time has come. - Victor Hugo"

"Your job is being a professor and researcher: That's one hell of a good excuse for some of the brain-damages of Minix."
"An infinite number of monkeys typing into GNU emacs would never make a good program."
"Your problem has nothing to do with git, and everything to do with emacs. And then you have the _gall_ to talk about "unix design" and not gumming programs together, when you yourself use the most gummed-up piece of absolute sh*t there is!"
"When you say "I wrote a program that crashed Windows", people just stare at you blankly and say 'Hey, I got those with the system, *for free*'."
"My personal opinion of Mach is not very high. Frankly, it's a piece of crap. It contains all the design mistakes you can make, and even managed to make up a few of its own."
"In short: just say NO TO DRUGS, and maybe you won't end up like the Hurd people."
"Personally, I'm _not_ interested in making device drivers look like user-level. They aren't, they shouldn't be, and microkernels are just stupid."

And I didn't even get that far down the page.

Then again, if it was between him and de Raadt ...

"Many forms of Government have been tried and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time."

Read comment,
Read code,
Do they agree?
- Yes, good, this is probably not the bug
- No, is this a bug?
- Yes, comment is correct, fix code, check if bug still exists
- No, correct comment.

When code and comments disagree, both are probably wrong.

ah, I don't think that was really Patton, but George C. Scott in the movie that said that; but, still one hell of a line.

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/George_S._Patton

Certainly, Aristotle from Lives of Eminent Philosophers. As you can see the correct ending is fear of law not rule of law.

Political tags — such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth — are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire. The former are idealists acting from highest motives for the greatest good of the greatest number. The latter are surly curmudgeons, suspicious and lacking in altruism. But they are more comfortable neighbors than the other sort.

Robert A. Heinlein, Time Enough for Love
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Robert_A._Heinlein

erm Asimov made his intent quite clear:

What I will be remembered for are the Foundation Trilogy and the Three Laws of Robotics. What I want to be remembered for is no one book, or no dozen books. Any single thing I have written can be paralleled or even surpassed by something someone else has done. However, my total corpus for quantity, quality and variety can be duplicated by no one else. That is what I want to be remembered for.

[1]
The more bullshit they put out under I robot, the less and less he is remembered for being a brilliant all round writer.

What are you trying to say here? None of those attacks are morally justifiable in the least, and are simply war crimes by any objective definition. Shit, even two of the main people involved seem to think so. Of course this doesn't stop some people from trying to justify these actions, but they're wrong.

That wasn't because of some great military industrial complex, instead it all came down to raw materials. Germany had to import most of its war materials, especially oil, hence why Operation Barbarossa was so important to them, getting the Soviet oil fields was paramount to their war efforts. The Japanese had the same problem, hence their need to snatch as much of the Pacific as they could when the USA (which IIRC supplied more than 50% of their oil before they invaded China) and of course the UK required resupply or the wolf packs would have starved them to death.

Now compare that to the USA of the 1930s, hell even to a large extent the USA of today-coal, iron, steel mills, oil, lumber, cotton, the breadbasket. If the wolf pack joined with the imperial navy and completely blocked off all shipping to the USA, which in itself would be no easy feat, the United States would still be able to build impressive war weapons and crank them out like Ford cranked out cars. And THAT was why Yamamoto said "In the first six to twelve months of a war with the United States and Great Britain I will run wild and win victory upon victory. But then, if the war continues after that, I have no expectation of success.". That was because he knew that with as much raw materials as the USA had access to once they cranked up production the excrement would hit the bladed cooling device.

So it wasn't the might of the USA, but the combination of men and materials available to the USA that made them a threat.

1981: 640K ought to be enough for anybody.

2009: 10 Million servers ought to be enough for any company.

The relevant quote:

There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.

There is another theory which states that this has already happened.

and another that could possibly be relevant here (imagine this one as one line per page, as published):

Anything that happens, happens.
Anything that, in happening, causes something else to happen, causes something else to happen.
Anything that, in happening, causes itself to happen again, happens again.
It doesn't necessarily do it in chronological order, though.

(source)

It's bad enough traveling from US airport to US airport as a US citizen. My how we've given up our rights.

I feel a Benjamin Franklin quote/paraphrase coming on (here):
    He who would trade liberty for some temporary security, deserves neither liberty nor security.

Meh, check out Theo's wikiquote page:
"So the HP guy comes up to me (at the Melbourne conference) and he says, 'If you say nasty things like that to vendors you're not going to get anything'. I said 'no, in eight years of saying nothing, we've got nothing, and I'm going to start saying nasty things, in the hope that some of these vendors will start giving me money so I'll shut up'."

Doesn't sound much like "love" or "charity" to me. Sounds to me like a man that's tried of giving and giving and giving and never getting anything back, yet refuses to acknowledge that as long as the license doesn't require anyone to give anything back, corporations don't. Their obligations are to the stockholders, not to fair dealings. Squeeze your costs as much as possible, get as much money as possible out of your customers, turn a big profit. That's what drives most companies all the time and all companies most of the time. Theo seems to be going by much the same drive as Linus, he wants to do this "right", he wants to make the best possible product. But unlike Linus, he hasn't gotten everyone else on board.

It's possible what is in OpenBSD is better, per se. But compared to Linux it's like an obscure niche site compared to wikipedia, it's where everyone contributes and it's huge, hard to manage but ends up being so much more useful. You got people working on Linux to make it run better on everything from cell phones to supercomputers. You got people working on getting all sorts of wierd hardware work. You got people working on desktop responsiveness and heavy server workloads. You got all sorts of research work, build farms and regression tests being run all over the place. OpenSSH may be a polished gem, but it's only the front door lock. But for everything else if you're relying on the masses to develop your OS, I'm going where the masses are. That is in no small part the license, though I know there's also other reasons...

I doubt there's a single 30 line block of code in there that isn't violating someones patent.

"If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged"

Seems it applies equally well to source code.

It's a joke paraphrased as best as I could remember from Dr. Strangelove; the pinical of Cold War era gallows humor. Have a read for that and other greate quotes: http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Dr._Strangelove_or:_How_I_Learned_to_Stop_Worrying_and_Love_the_Bomb The point of the quote, indeed of the whole movie, is the ridiculousness of the thinking of the time. Some of those quotes were themselves lifted right out of the official briefings and strategies; a fact which is simultaneously hilarious and terrifying.

"Among the many misdeeds of the British rule in India, history will look upon the act of depriving a whole nation of arms, as the blackest."

It's sourced from his autobiography, apparently. Rather ironic that the Indians got their independence and then continued to disarm their population. Then their cops cowered in fear and didn't return fire while their fellow citizens were being gunned down during the Mumbai attacks.

I'd like to hear the anti crowd rationalize away a gun ban in the face of that kind of violence. Armed citizens could have halted those attacks in the early stages and saved lives.

Not that I would know either way but apparently, it's attributable to an incident at a dance involving Emma Goldman.

Actually science has been many religions unto itself for a long time:

Translation: "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it." -- Max Planck (translated)
from http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Max_Planck

-Steve

"If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today's ideas were invented, and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today"
-- Bill Gates in his "Challenges and Strategy" memo 16 May 1991

They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety. --Benjamin Franklin

It is rather idiotic to relate using a computer to using operating a vehicle. A two ton piece of steel flying down the highway at 120k/h is vastly more of a public safety threat than any shmo using a laptop. Not only does this proposition fail to consider the nightmare of registering private individuals, but it does not take into consideration the corporate nightmare it would cause. Who would need the license, the individual operating the computer, or the owner of the computer? Would this mean that internet cafes (and the small anonymity they provide) be doomed because everyone would be forced to provide some sort of identifier token? What about libraries? This sort of identification requirement would force libraries and their entire mission of providing freely accessible information in jeopardy.

This looks like either a poorly thought out plan to help regulate stupidity or a power grab. As evidenced by warning labels on coffee cups, plastic bags and every other mass-produced item, trying to protect people from their own stupidity is nearly impossible. On the other hand, this would be a huge boon for those that wish to dissolve freedom and anonymity on the internet. Granted the average person leaves flashing neon signs with most of their personal data flashing in 1km high letters when they browse, there are still a large number of people that take online anonymity seriously and use it to their advantage for all sorts of reasons the most important being political dissidents.

A simpler solution would be to set up a Great-Firewall much like China's. Even though the GFW has proven to be less than great, it provides basically the same mechanism for keeping people out of the reach of "dangerous ideas".

Let's focus on educating people as to their rights and responsible behavior rather than trying to remove their liberties. We should also probably focus some of that energy on making the intertubes more robust and less prone to point failures and exploits; making the network more robust and idiot proof would benefit the entire world and help make dangerous and promiscuous users a danger to them selves rather than the entire world.

"A government big enough to give you everything you want, is strong enough to take everything you have" Gerald Ford

Fixed that for you.

Einstein once said, ""The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education."

"

I have two complaints.

1. Do you really think that Einstein held forth on each insignificant detail of everyday life? Aphorisms and bons mots are more likely to come from Oscar Wilde, Poor Richard, or Mark Twain. This is the sort of gullible naivete that fuels urban legends and endlessly forwarded emails.
2. Why should anyone care about Einstein's opinion on primary education and honeybees? If a statement can't stand on its own, don't bring Einstein into it. Even if you're discussing physics, "According to Einstein... " should only be used as a short-hand to indicate the source of your information, not as a validation of it.

Looks like the Real Genius fans out there are finally living the dream.

Sigh. Not until I can hammer a six inch spike through a board with my penis.

If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Gulag_Archipelago

In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But, in practice, there is. -- Jan L. A. van de Snepscheut

A Turing machine is a form of thought experiment with utility in many aspects of information science and mathematics. It was never intended as a platform to prove algorithms. That it has uses for algorithms is part of the proof of its general utility - which in the modern day goes far beyond afield of computer science. Typically algorithms are expressed not as Turing Machine code but in a format similar to a mathematical proof, in an actual programming language or as something called "abstract code" which has similarities to actual programming languages but without the distractions of implementation details.

The assumption that a pure algorithm must use a Turing machine as a standard platform is revealed as an error in this way: Turing machines have not only infinite storage, but infinite performance - the time to perform operations is not important to the operation of a Turing machine. For algorithms though efficiency of performance in number of operations, and hence time, is second only (and sometimes not even then) to correctness. Efficient use of resources like memory is an important metric for evaluating fitness of an algorithm. The Turing Machine doesn't consider these metrics because its purpose is not to find fit algorithms, but rather to serve as a generic type of operator for mathematic functions dealing with information.

In his momentous paper "On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem"[14] (submitted on 28 May 1936), Turing reformulated Kurt Gödel's 1931 results on the limits of proof and computation, replacing Gödel's universal arithmetic-based formal language with what are now called Turing machines, formal and simple devices. He proved that some such machine would be capable of performing any conceivable mathematical problem if it were representable as an algorithm, even if no actual Turing machine would be likely to have practical applications, being much slower than practically realisable alternatives. - op. cit.

Although I agree with both you and the grandparent I feel you've missed some essence of the truth here.

On a completely different note: Determinism has some utility - it doesn't have all utility. Every lawyer and salesman knows that ambiguity can also be a useful tool.

"WTF? Yes, all rich people hate community... When I asked him why he was doing it he just laughed in my face and muttered something about "community sucks" before throwing the armani jacket back on, hopping in his BMW and driving off like a bat out of hell. "

Yep, that's pretty much word for word what Margaret Thatcher said in 1987:

"And, you know, there's no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look after themselves first. It is our duty to look after ourselves and then, also, to look after our neighbours."

Set the soup kitchens on fire? Hardly, dahling. Far too much effort. So much cheaper to just de-fund them.

It's their own fault they're poor, you know.

"I really thought we had moved beyond this class warfare nonsense a long time ago."

Not until the rich stop making war on the poor, no, we haven't "moved beyond" the class war.

"In 1960, Robert Menard was a commander aboard the USS Constellation when he was part of a meeting between United States Navy personnel and their counterparts in the Japanese Defense Forces. Fifteen years had passed since VJ Day, most of those at the meeting were WWII veterans, and men who had fought each other to the death at sea were now comrades in battle who could confide in each other.

Someone at the table asked a Japanese admiral why, with the Pacific Fleet devastated at Pearl Harbor and the mainland U.S. forces in what Japan had to know was a pathetic state of unreadiness, Japan had not simply invaded the West Coast. Commander Menard would never forget the crafty look on the Japanese commander's face as he frankly answered the question.

'You are right,' he told the Americans. 'We did indeed know much about your preparedness. We knew that probably every second home in your country contained firearms. We knew that your country actually had state championships for private citizens shooting military rifles. We were not fools to set foot in such quicksand.'"

The above was excerpted from the Wikiquote page on Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, commander-in-chief of the Japanese Combined Fleet during WWII. The discussion explains how a particular quote concerning a "rifle behind every blade of grass" may have been erroneously attributed to Yamamoto who had indeed expressed reservations about entering into war with the United States in other well-attributed quotes, even if he made no specific mention of private gun ownership.

However, the above quote is good second-hand (i.e. better than hearsay) evidence that private gun ownership was and is a substantial deterrent against foreign invasion. In fact, it is also known that Hitler was deterred from invading Switzerland for similar reasons (i.e. a rifle in every home), comparing Switzerland to a 'porcupine'.

As for the military stripping recruits of everything they know, I cannot speak from first hand experience. However, there is a certain familiarity and practice with ones muscle memory and hand-eye coordination that comes from frequent handling and firing of rifles that would undoubtedly be useful when later qualifying at the rifle range. One might expect that recruits who grew up shooting with proper instruction (NOT gangbangers who shoot sideways and are lucky if they don't shoot their own foot) and were more familiar with guns would have better initial scores than those who did not. Perhaps someone else can confirm this?

From:
"How to Become As Rich As Bill Gates"
http://philip.greenspun.com/bg/
"""
William Henry Gates III made his best decision on October 28, 1955, the night he was born. He chose J.W. Maxwell as his great-grandfather. Maxwell founded Seattle's National City Bank in 1906. His son, James Willard Maxwell was also a banker and established a million-dollar trust fund for William (Bill) Henry Gates III. In some of the later lessons, you will be encouraged to take entrepreneurial risks. You may find it comforting to remember that at any time you can fall back on a trust fund worth many millions of 1998 dollars.
"""

In Bill Gates' own language, "Is this fair?" The guy is born a multi-millionaire, writes his commercial software on publicly funded computer at Harvard, learned to write software by dumpster diving at a computer center, and then, after all that, he writes a letter like this? That's chutzpah. From:
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Bill_Gates
"The best way to prepare [to be a programmer] is to write programs, and to study great programs that other people have written. In my case, I went to the garbage cans at the Computer Science Center and fished out listings of their operating system."

Bill Gate's could have spent his lifetime writing free software. That being born a multi-millionaire was not enough for him is a sign of an illness that causes "financial obesity", not something to be emulated. But, in the end, it is not Bill Gates who has destroyed our society as much as all the people who want to be the next Bill Gates and support regressive social policies they hope to benefit from someday.

From:
"The Wrath of the Millionaire Wannabe's"
http://conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/47/
"""
Of course eventually, these guy realize that not only are they not millionaires, they're not making much progress toward that noble goal. That's when they get ugly. You see, they see themselves as capable, intelligent, hard working people - and they are for the most part - who "have what it takes" to "make it". They believe that the difference between those who "make it" and those who don't is being "capable, intelligent and hardworking". Things like "having rich parents", "getting just plain lucky" or "being a crook" don't factor into the equation anywhere. No, American society is a natural hierarchy where the most capable are "rich beyond their wildest dreams", and the non-rich are chumps that just don't measure up. ... But here's something I'll bet the dittoheads haven't thought of. Maybe they're the chumps. Maybe they've been sold a bogus "American dream" that never existed. Maybe "the rules" they play by were written by the people who have "made it" - not by the people who haven't. And maybe - just maybe - the people who have "made it" wrote those rules to keep the wannabes chasing a dream that's a mirage. Maybe Thomas Jefferson, George Washington and Samuel Adams didn't fight to make the world safe for John D. Rockefeller - or Don LaPre, either. Maybe the Rolls Royce complete with bimbo was left out of our inalienable rights for a reason. Maybe the "pursuit of happiness" Thomas Jefferson wrote about was something a bit more profound than the empty joy of owning things you don't need so you can look down of down on the lesser mortals who lack your "ability". Maybe Thomas Jefferson intended the "pursuit of happiness" to be something attainable not just for anybody - but for everybody.
"""

See also the way that programmers could afford to work for "free" making free stuff:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income

Bill Gates is a smart and creative and hard working guy, no one can dispute that. It is too bad he did not apply that to helping all of societ

Logically define right and wrong.

If you want to speak universally (or at least as universally as you can from the perspective of a given sentient species) then I think that Heinlein's source for moral behavior is correct: right and wrong are judged solely against how the actions impact the survival and advancement of the species. Any other test or condition is just noise against that cosmic imperative. This test of right or wrong is meted out by the universe, so you don't have to worry about a human judgement getting involved.

See http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Robert_A._Heinlein for some better direct quotes on this topic. Include the section entitled "Pragmatics of patriotism" for ideas that build further upon this basic idea.

In fact, the entire human civilization has progressed so far only because of the rare geniuses who discovered/invented new forms of math, science and technology.

No, we're where we are because of the rare hardass motherfuckers who have what it takes to make something of a good idea. Remember the 99% perspiration quote?

You're supposed to congratulate him on being all culturally thenthative

If you're trying to lisp, use a few more parentheses.

He has to impress the boyish looking girl at the campus bookstore with quotes from Zinn and Chomski.

I was surprised that Wikiquote's collection of Chomsky quotes appears not to have any related to language.

"We require our suppliers to treat all workers with dignity and respect"

PULL!

Only wimps use tape backup: _real_ men just upload their important stuff on ftp, and let the rest of the world mirror it ;)
- Linus Torvalds

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Linus_Torvalds

> I don't play WOW, and I don't get laid regularly. Where does that leave me?

Put this man in cell #1, and give him a drink.

... no one has the intention to erect a firewall

Don't you Britishers' have a law against throttling or capping?
I thought Internet Access was a Fundamental Right under EU laws.
Doesn't it apply to Britain too?
Although the main reason Britain entered the ECC is to set the Germans against the French, the French against the Italians, the Italians against the Dutch., thus, in the immemorial words of Sir Humphrey: "Britain has had the same foreign policy objective for at least the last five hundred years - to create a disunited Europe."

• FORTRAN's tragic fate has been its wide acceptance, mentally chaining thousands and thousands of programmers to our past mistakes.
• When FORTRAN has been called an infantile disorder, full PL/1, with its growth characteristics of a dangerous tumor, could turn out to be a fatal disease.
• FORTRAN, 'the infantile disorder', by now nearly 20 years old, is hopelessly inadequate for whatever computer application you have in mind today: it is now too clumsy, too risky, and too expensive to use.
• In the good old days physicists repeated each other's experiments, just to be sure. Today they stick to FORTRAN, so that they can share each other's programs, bugs included.

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Monkey_Island#Running_gags

"Isn't it odd? When a politician or a movie star retires, we read front page stories about it. But when a philosopher retires, people do not even notice it."
"They do, eventually."

>>I might be less critical of such actions if it weren't for the fact that "security" isn't being improved or actually even being addressed.

"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."

Of course, this was also said by a major figure of what we would call, today, an insurgent force, fighting against the established government of the country. He spent much of that war in another country, raising funds to support what those who claimed they had a legitimate government considered to be a terrorist action. By recent standards, for the funding part alone, two guys were sentenced to 65 years, just this week.

His name was Benjamin Franklin.

Are you sure he said that? Wikiquotes lists the quote as disputed because there has been no citation given for it. When did he say it? And if he did, what was the context?

I'm not a Rush fan, but I have listened to his show a few times, enough to realize that he's an entertainer more than a politician, and he often says stuff just to be funny that if taken out of context is really bad. Or maybe he did say it and it wasn't a joke... it's possible, though it does seem to be inconsistent with his actions, as the GP pointed out.

Without a citation, though, it's really hard to know how much credence to lend this alleged quote.

The "proportion", huh? That's a rather transparent and silly attempt at sophistry, isn't it?

Not at all... When comparing politicians and officials, keeping in mind the number of their subjects is absolutely necessary.

Based on motivation, goals, and results it's not even close.

The evil of Che's motivation and goals surely exceeded those of Hitler's. Even if Hitler succeeded in exterminating all of the world's Jewry (and the hapless Gypsies), Che's success — a Communist regime world-wide would've been worse. Hitler aimed to genocide about 12 million Jews, plus a few more million of other "untermensh" peoples. Che's hero Stalin has killed over 30 million of USSR's citizens (through labor camps, deliberate starvation, and mass executions) even before his war with Hitler started...

If Hitler were to prevail in imposing a Fascist regime world-wide (which, BTW, does not seem to have been his goal), it would still have been better, than a similarly all-encompassing Communist regime. Because Fascism is Communism-lite . Hitler's personal bent on genocide was an aberration — neither the rest of prominent Nazis, nor allied Fascist leaders, like Mussolini or Franco, shared it. Franco's Spain was the safest place in Europe for Jews, in fact, during the WW2. Romania — a Fascist ally of Germany — would not participate in the genocide either, and Jews living on territories occupied by Romanians have largely survived the war. On the other hand, there is no Communist regime in history without mass-murder: North Korea, China, USSR, Cuba, Cambodia have all experienced it... And Che promised to continue:

I have sworn before a picture of the old and mourned comrade Stalin that I won't rest until I see these capitalist octopuses annihilated.

For that reason alone (and there are others), aiming for world-wide Communism, as did Che, is worse, than aiming for world-wide Fascism, as, maybe, did Hitler...

Like I said, he was a hard man, in many ways a bad man, and a misguided man but he did have an interesting life.

Well, if their having "an interesting life" is all, that's needed for you to put somebody's portrait on your body, you can, indeed, cover yourself with faces of tyrants and criminals... Peaceful hard work and honesty "are for suckers" and tend to be boring (witness Hollywood's obsession with Mafia, lesser criminals, and, indeed, Che Guevara). But it would still be major turn-off for me, to know a girl has done this...