Hey, let's write to the creators of the Logicomix [http://www.logicomix.com/en/] - they were planning for a second book that would follow Von Neumann and Turing! What better occasion than the 100th anniversary!
I though their work about Russell, Whitehead , Godel and so on was simply superb!
It was designed to break down, that's why the gears are plastic. Everything nowadays is designed to break down. It's called [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_obsolescence].
And it was not economically replaceable because of [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertical_integration] and inflated labor costs.
This whole charade that we call "modern economy" must die...
Just watch the news. Long ago this action stopped being about the civilians. Now it is simply helping one armed group against another. Change of regime, which probably is not desired by the majority of the population. We know it, we just know it whether we admit it or not - all those wars are for money/resources.
Nobody in Europe even blinks. Nobody cares. Nobody even notices anymore.
I fell murderer by proxy. It is done with my money against my will. And if I make too much noise or by chance expose part of the corruption, that would be "aiding the enemy". Gitmo for you, punk!
Welcome to my world, ladies and gentlemen (former subject of the communist experiment here)! I hope you like it! And perhaps, before your final breath you just might realize that your "democracy" is just a front, like our former "communism". Simple labels designed to fool the ruble and conceal the true nature of the game.
You mean Terry has to strap himself with TNT and go to "the gods" like the ones in the White House, Kremlin or the Vatican?
If there is one character that would approve that IS Coen. After all what Terry attempts to do is the equivalent of a TNT explosion in the collective mind of the British.
Ultimately Terry also, just like Coen shows the middle finger to the gods. Sure on the Disc the gods are real but in our world they are as good as real.....
Consider - between sex, drug use (legal or illegal), file-sharing and posting offensive images, is there a SINGLE person on this planet that cannot be successfully smeared or locked away if he/she becomes a nuisance. I know, you can find an example but throw in the mix "terrorist", "aiding the enemy", the whole variety of religious prescriptions, "enemy of the state and the social harmony" and so on and eventually you cover every living soul.
Hey, they borrowed this from Christianity - we are all sinners. Forever. From the moment of birth to the death. I wonder if the Vatican will sue for copyright infringement.
It's also about who consumes the most. Your Al/carbon fiber sports car consumes more natural resources than a whole village in Africa. Get a grip, will ya! Do you not see that when the population flattens, throw-away culture emerges. The consumption of resources per capita in the developed world is constantly rising. Don't you get it? It's not a problem of population but of ****ing Ponzi scheme called "world economy", where money is commodity....
Do these alternatives still track what are you reading? Can they remove content remotely? Do they require you to provide personal data before purchase? If yes on any of those questions, then no, thanks!
I was ecstatic about the e-books as technology. I am a book rat, always been and always will be. "There is never enough shelf-space" - I learned that law of L-space very early in life. But I will never, ever go towards e-books until this model is the only choice:
1. expensive (WTF?!) 2. registration 3. tracking and data mining 4. it can be taken from you and there's nothing to do about it
The same goes for the cloud thingy, BTW, except point one. That's what I first thought. But at 25 euro per year for the cloud if my "WD pocketbook" of 320 GB survives for more than 2 years I am on profit (price 50 euro). And it is enough for everything I own in digital format. Big as a pack of cigarettes and not much heavier.
No to the e-book, no to the cloud. If somehow this is enforced on us (like the incandescent light bulbs for example- they can use the same excuse for the e-books) I will become political activist.....
Believe it. It's probably more than half anyway. When my country was communist only the people who profited (10-15% max) from the system were "believing" in it. The rest of us learned (from our parents) on a very tender age (about 7) that the state is our enemy and if you can screw the state and the Party you do it (but careful not to end up in a Gulag-style camp).
When the gap between words and deeds is so wide as it is in communist regimes AND the people are poor the ideology defeats itself. That's why I now claim that truly "the West is the best" - from cars to brainwashing. Here, in the "free" world we are brainwashed in very sophisticated, scientific way. And we are not hungry. It's perfect system. It makes my bone marrow freeze in horror, though.
OK, I wanted to avoid flame war, but what I actually wanted to say was "I wonder whether the terrorists considered that the world of finance had changed. How can you bankrupt a country that prints its money on a whim and holds the rest of the world at gunpoint". Meaning the USA. Any other country would default but not the US because of its unique position of power in the world.
I wonder whether the terrorists considered that the world of finance had changed. How can you bankrupt a country that prints its money on a whim?
That and another thing is everything is business today. Everything must be profitable. Ergo it is good for the economy to have more of everything since everything is profitable. Including more sick people, more crime, more terrorism and more wars.
How much more it has to be repeated that peace, health and happiness are not as profitable as war, illness and misery. Wake up, world! Hello.... can anyone hear me?!
I wish the BBC would stop calling tablets "iPad". No kidding, just pay attention during the news. If they say that a newspaper X has launched version for a tablet, they say " you can now read it on your iPad". And no, it was not the case that the subscription was for iPad only (I checked).
I don't think the newsreaders do it intentionally but still...
No, it explains a lot about the present culture of the world, especially USA and the the rest of the western world. Someone posted it already in another discussion, but.. [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Z9WVZddH9w] Zeitgeist: Moving Forward.
You know, you hit a nerve here. Phage treatment is known and applied successfully in the former USSR for well over 50 years. There was this Horizon episode [http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8887931967515748990#] that said it all.
WHY this treatment has been neglected by the so-called first world countries? Oh, you cannot patent a phage that evolves by itself. The horror! Nature provides the cure but, by the gods, we will never use it because it is FREE! This is the road to communism!!
The people behind this outrage should be removed from society for life!
Why would the laws of Nature impinge on your free will? I don't understand the stament in your first paragraph. If you decide to jump from a high building without any equipment it was your free will. Now, if you want to will gravity away while you are falling, that's something else.
Do you define free will as "being able to brake the laws of Nature"? I guess not. I think free will is more like - "being able to do anything within the framework of the laws of Nature."
Besides, we now know that the natural world is not as deterministic as we thought. Your hypothetical decision to jump/or not was most likely not "recorded" in the fabric of the Big Bang and there is no causality chain that traces the outcome of your decision all the way back to t=0.
True, but I got the Creative because it had (much) better sound and was cheaper. The Apple was cooler and much better looking but it was not the better in what it was meant to be - music player.
Creative are still better until this day. And don't get me started on what an old-fashioned (read: before the smart phone look-alike "craze" corrupted them) Cowon player in combo with Sen. IE7 headphones can do with FLAC files....
Hmm, according to Robert Green [http://www.amazon.com/Strategies-War-Joost-Elffers-Books/dp/0143112783/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1305619446&sr=8-1] who dedicated the last chapter in his book to terrorism, the baddies have won on every account.
It was fascinating to read about the origins of this particular type of warfare. As far as I can remember the story went that a group of people from a certain province of the Persian Empire managed to basically bring down the empire in about 20 years by performing no more than 50 (unpredictable) public killings of different figures of authority. 50 killings in 20 years and you defeat an Empire!! Once they started what follows was something like this
- People in power getting more paranoid (check) - People in power surrounding themselves with ever more protection (check) - Attacks by the imperial army on the province that did not achieve anything else but spend lost of money and effort for nothing (check) - Because of all the above the people of the empire felt their rulers are getting ever further from them, both physically and in attitude (check) - Because of the paranoia and mistrusts the efficiency of governing declined sharply; people started to rumble and grumble against this - the gap between the people and the rulers kept widening (check)
I put the (check) implying that all those things happened to the US (the story repeats itself) and to a lesser extent to their western allies. In our case, due to mass communication and other advances in society the US has the extra “benefit” of
- Negative opinions about the US flourished all over the world including allied countries. - Scandals about mistreatment, happy trigger solders, torture and shady practices by all kinds of “agencies” are blurring the line between the “good guys” and the “bad guys”.
What I really do not understand at all is – how can it be that nobody from the military said, “let’s look at history and do not repeat the mistakes of the past”. It is basic knowledge to every self-respecting strategist that the worst possible response to terrorism is to attack a country, to wage a war. It only “helps” by bleeding your resources and creating much, much more potential combatants (think the man going to his wedding only to find the place flattered by a drone or guided missile).
Since it is absolutely impossible that the above is not known to the decision makers, that leaves me with a very crazy speculation – that the people who took the decisions did not intend to combat terrorism. What they wanted I don’t know, but what they did was exactly the opposite of what they should have done...
It's good for the environment. Before reaching for the troll mod think - humans are so devastating to nature that the absence of people compensates for the contamination and then more..... reference the Chernobyl site.
I'm not writing this as some kind of pro- nuclear apologist but to make you think. I personally want to see every power station in the world exploding. Then we will have thousands preservation areas devoid of us for millennia. This will do much more than all green organizations combined. It's a sorry state of affairs if I am writing this and it actualy makes sense....
But kudos to Brin - he earned me my first +5 post on/. With his traumatic experiences during his long life in totalitarian state between the age of 0 and 4.
I blame the "throw-away society" economy model. I read something long time ago - vertical integration, making spare parts artificially too expensive and so on. It was a bit of shock - I though the throw away effect is unintentional and undesirable by-product of free market economy, not the actual goal!!
OK, but what happens when the majority of the creatures become cheaters? They die because of over population.
I know that group selection is discredited but your example illustrates something different. It's the classic hawk- dove equilibrium. Population composed only of saints gives the first bastard enormous advantage so certainly a bastard will emerge, but if all are bastard the species dies.
The big problem of human society is that the minority of bastards/ cheaters by virtue of being bastards naturally occupies positions of power.
So they make the rules of society and naturally create system which rewards disproportionally high the cheater behavior. Thus more and more people become tempted to cheat. But if it gets too much it will bring the death of us all.....
If I may ask - does your "quake eye" see problems with flat TV's?
I have allegedly 400 Hz plasma (Panasonic) and I see blurring and lag all the time. But only when watching Blue-Ray, not DVD's or cable TV (digital). Could be my Blue ray player is too slow, but damn it, it was a new and rather expensive model at the time (got it middle of 2009). Also Panasonic. I have heard from colleagues that there seems to be quite some subjectivity in this - some people see the lag, some not. My wife never sees it for instance.
Also, since my PC CRT is about to die, which model 120Hz LCD you recommend?
Slashdot Mirror
Hey, let's write to the creators of the Logicomix [http://www.logicomix.com/en/] - they were planning for a second book that would follow Von Neumann and Turing! What better occasion than the 100th anniversary!
I though their work about Russell, Whitehead , Godel and so on was simply superb!
It was designed to break down, that's why the gears are plastic. Everything nowadays is designed to break down. It's called [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_obsolescence].
And it was not economically replaceable because of [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertical_integration] and inflated labor costs.
This whole charade that we call "modern economy" must die...
Just watch the news. Long ago this action stopped being about the civilians. Now it is simply helping one armed group against another. Change of regime, which probably is not desired by the majority of the population. We know it, we just know it whether we admit it or not - all those wars are for money/resources.
Nobody in Europe even blinks. Nobody cares. Nobody even notices anymore.
I fell murderer by proxy. It is done with my money against my will. And if I make too much noise or by chance expose part of the corruption, that would be "aiding the enemy". Gitmo for you, punk!
Welcome to my world, ladies and gentlemen (former subject of the communist experiment here)! I hope you like it! And perhaps, before your final breath you just might realize that your "democracy" is just a front, like our former "communism". Simple labels designed to fool the ruble and conceal the true nature of the game.
Gods, I hate our species....
You mean Terry has to strap himself with TNT and go to "the gods" like the ones in the White House, Kremlin or the Vatican?
If there is one character that would approve that IS Coen. After all what Terry attempts to do is the equivalent of a TNT explosion in the collective mind of the British.
Ultimately Terry also, just like Coen shows the middle finger to the gods. Sure on the Disc the gods are real but in our world they are as good as real.....
Thanks for the detailed info!
Cheers,
Evtim
This!
Consider - between sex, drug use (legal or illegal), file-sharing and posting offensive images, is there a SINGLE person on this planet that cannot be successfully smeared or locked away if he/she becomes a nuisance. I know, you can find an example but throw in the mix "terrorist", "aiding the enemy", the whole variety of religious prescriptions, "enemy of the state and the social harmony" and so on and eventually you cover every living soul.
Hey, they borrowed this from Christianity - we are all sinners. Forever. From the moment of birth to the death. I wonder if the Vatican will sue for copyright infringement.
Whooph, whoof, grrrrr.... (I am a dog, you insensitive clod!)
It's also about who consumes the most. Your Al/carbon fiber sports car consumes more natural resources than a whole village in Africa. Get a grip, will ya! Do you not see that when the population flattens, throw-away culture emerges. The consumption of resources per capita in the developed world is constantly rising. Don't you get it? It's not a problem of population but of ****ing Ponzi scheme called "world economy", where money is commodity....
Do these alternatives still track what are you reading? Can they remove content remotely? Do they require you to provide personal data before purchase? If yes on any of those questions, then no, thanks!
I was ecstatic about the e-books as technology. I am a book rat, always been and always will be. "There is never enough shelf-space" - I learned that law of L-space very early in life. But I will never, ever go towards e-books until this model is the only choice:
1. expensive (WTF?!)
2. registration
3. tracking and data mining
4. it can be taken from you and there's nothing to do about it
The same goes for the cloud thingy, BTW, except point one. That's what I first thought. But at 25 euro per year for the cloud if my "WD pocketbook" of 320 GB survives for more than 2 years I am on profit (price 50 euro). And it is enough for everything I own in digital format. Big as a pack of cigarettes and not much heavier.
No to the e-book, no to the cloud. If somehow this is enforced on us (like the incandescent light bulbs for example- they can use the same excuse for the e-books) I will become political activist.....
Believe it. It's probably more than half anyway. When my country was communist only the people who profited (10-15% max) from the system were "believing" in it. The rest of us learned (from our parents) on a very tender age (about 7) that the state is our enemy and if you can screw the state and the Party you do it (but careful not to end up in a Gulag-style camp).
When the gap between words and deeds is so wide as it is in communist regimes AND the people are poor the ideology defeats itself. That's why I now claim that truly "the West is the best" - from cars to brainwashing. Here, in the "free" world we are brainwashed in very sophisticated, scientific way. And we are not hungry. It's perfect system. It makes my bone marrow freeze in horror, though.
OK, I wanted to avoid flame war, but what I actually wanted to say was "I wonder whether the terrorists considered that the world of finance had changed. How can you bankrupt a country that prints its money on a whim and holds the rest of the world at gunpoint". Meaning the USA. Any other country would default but not the US because of its unique position of power in the world.
I wonder whether the terrorists considered that the world of finance had changed. How can you bankrupt a country that prints its money on a whim?
That and another thing is everything is business today. Everything must be profitable. Ergo it is good for the economy to have more of everything since everything is profitable. Including more sick people, more crime, more terrorism and more wars.
How much more it has to be repeated that peace, health and happiness are not as profitable as war, illness and misery. Wake up, world! Hello.... can anyone hear me?!
I wish the BBC would stop calling tablets "iPad". No kidding, just pay attention during the news. If they say that a newspaper X has launched version for a tablet, they say " you can now read it on your iPad". And no, it was not the case that the subscription was for iPad only (I checked).
I don't think the newsreaders do it intentionally but still...
No, it explains a lot about the present culture of the world, especially USA and the the rest of the western world. Someone posted it already in another discussion, but.. [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Z9WVZddH9w] Zeitgeist: Moving Forward.
You know, you hit a nerve here. Phage treatment is known and applied successfully in the former USSR for well over 50 years. There was this Horizon episode [http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8887931967515748990#] that said it all.
WHY this treatment has been neglected by the so-called first world countries? Oh, you cannot patent a phage that evolves by itself. The horror! Nature provides the cure but, by the gods, we will never use it because it is FREE! This is the road to communism!!
The people behind this outrage should be removed from society for life!
Why would the laws of Nature impinge on your free will? I don't understand the stament in your first paragraph. If you decide to jump from a high building without any equipment it was your free will. Now, if you want to will gravity away while you are falling, that's something else.
Do you define free will as "being able to brake the laws of Nature"? I guess not. I think free will is more like - "being able to do anything within the framework of the laws of Nature."
Besides, we now know that the natural world is not as deterministic as we thought. Your hypothetical decision to jump/or not was most likely not "recorded" in the fabric of the Big Bang and there is no causality chain that traces the outcome of your decision all the way back to t=0.
I've always been in favour of Dyson sphere [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere]. Surely not a big deal for very advanced species...
True, but I got the Creative because it had (much) better sound and was cheaper. The Apple was cooler and much better looking but it was not the better in what it was meant to be - music player.
Creative are still better until this day. And don't get me started on what an old-fashioned (read: before the smart phone look-alike "craze" corrupted them) Cowon player in combo with Sen. IE7 headphones can do with FLAC files....
Hmm, according to Robert Green [http://www.amazon.com/Strategies-War-Joost-Elffers-Books/dp/0143112783/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1305619446&sr=8-1] who dedicated the last chapter in his book to terrorism, the baddies have won on every account.
It was fascinating to read about the origins of this particular type of warfare. As far as I can remember the story went that a group of people from a certain province of the Persian Empire managed to basically bring down the empire in about 20 years by performing no more than 50 (unpredictable) public killings of different figures of authority. 50 killings in 20 years and you defeat an Empire!! Once they started what follows was something like this
- People in power getting more paranoid (check)
- People in power surrounding themselves with ever more protection (check)
- Attacks by the imperial army on the province that did not achieve anything else but spend lost of money and effort for nothing (check)
- Because of all the above the people of the empire felt their rulers are getting ever further from them, both physically and in attitude (check)
- Because of the paranoia and mistrusts the efficiency of governing declined sharply; people started to rumble and grumble against this - the gap between the people and the rulers kept widening (check)
I put the (check) implying that all those things happened to the US (the story repeats itself) and to a lesser extent to their western allies. In our case, due to mass communication and other advances in society the US has the extra “benefit” of
- Negative opinions about the US flourished all over the world including allied countries.
- Scandals about mistreatment, happy trigger solders, torture and shady practices by all kinds of “agencies” are blurring the line between the “good guys” and the “bad guys”.
What I really do not understand at all is – how can it be that nobody from the military said, “let’s look at history and do not repeat the mistakes of the past”. It is basic knowledge to every self-respecting strategist that the worst possible response to terrorism is to attack a country, to wage a war. It only “helps” by bleeding your resources and creating much, much more potential combatants (think the man going to his wedding only to find the place flattered by a drone or guided missile).
Since it is absolutely impossible that the above is not known to the decision makers, that leaves me with a very crazy speculation – that the people who took the decisions did not intend to combat terrorism. What they wanted I don’t know, but what they did was exactly the opposite of what they should have done...
It's good for the environment. Before reaching for the troll mod think - humans are so devastating to nature that the absence of people compensates for the contamination and then more..... reference the Chernobyl site.
I'm not writing this as some kind of pro- nuclear apologist but to make you think. I personally want to see every power station in the world exploding. Then we will have thousands preservation areas devoid of us for millennia. This will do much more than all green organizations combined. It's a sorry state of affairs if I am writing this and it actualy makes sense....
Chrome will rely heavily on the cloud, I read.
No, thanks! Realy Google, don't bother.
But kudos to Brin - he earned me my first +5 post on /. With his traumatic experiences during his long life in totalitarian state between the age of 0 and 4.
I blame the "throw-away society" economy model. I read something long time ago - vertical integration, making spare parts artificially too expensive and so on. It was a bit of shock - I though the throw away effect is unintentional and undesirable by-product of free market economy, not the actual goal!!
OK, but what happens when the majority of the creatures become cheaters? They die because of over population.
I know that group selection is discredited but your example illustrates something different. It's the classic hawk- dove equilibrium. Population composed only of saints gives the first bastard enormous advantage so certainly a bastard will emerge, but if all are bastard the species dies.
The big problem of human society is that the minority of bastards/ cheaters by virtue of being bastards naturally occupies positions of power.
So they make the rules of society and naturally create system which rewards disproportionally high the cheater behavior. Thus more and more people become tempted to cheat. But if it gets too much it will bring the death of us all.....
If I may ask - does your "quake eye" see problems with flat TV's?
I have allegedly 400 Hz plasma (Panasonic) and I see blurring and lag all the time. But only when watching Blue-Ray, not DVD's or cable TV (digital). Could be my Blue ray player is too slow, but damn it, it was a new and rather expensive model at the time (got it middle of 2009). Also Panasonic. I have heard from colleagues that there seems to be quite some subjectivity in this - some people see the lag, some not. My wife never sees it for instance.
Also, since my PC CRT is about to die, which model 120Hz LCD you recommend?
thanks,
evtim