Have you ever tried to reach a consensus with 300 million people? You can't
And yet, when two countries are on the brink of war, we use diplomacy to come to a mutually agreed outcome, not voting. Huh. It would be absurd to vote - what if the population of one country was twice that of the other? How come in that situation it is instantly obvious that "winner takes all" voting is unfair, while within a country it's seen as fair?
My preference is not for laws to govern millions of people, anyway. It is for localised governance at a scale that people can join in and actually have a say that makes a difference to their own community. As a country expands and a population increases, the size of each council should stay the same, but there should be more of them. So you don't have one law for the entire country - so what? Many of the problems in society are due to the fact that there is nowhere else to go - everywhere is the same. I'd like to live somewhere with sane drug and privacy laws, and I don't want to have to leave my country to do that. We need to wake people up to the fact that laws are made up, and we can change them if we want to.
If you *don't* vote, you *can't* complain about the results
Yes I can. Who made up that rule? I never agreed to it.
the sheep has no knowledge of how the two wolves will vote.
What they vote for is irrelevant. The sheep isn't abstaining because he doesn't like the choices on the ballot, he's abstaining because he sees the system is broken.
f you decline to vote, then you really have no recourse to complain about the results of that process
Completely backwards. If you vote, you have no recourse to complain about the results of that process.
Example: Two wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner. If the sheep votes, he is implicitly supporting that voting system and cannot complain when the carving knives come out. He had his democratic say, how can he complain about the outcome? The only option which makes sense, which lends any weight to his position, is to refuse to vote and so refuse to endorse the system.
"Winner takes all" is not a just outcome. What is needed is a diplomatic process to reach mutual agreement, with concessions on all sides if necessary. Oh but that requires effort.
would rather do absolutely nothing and ignore the problem rather than try to fix it in any way you could?
Completely the opposite - when you choose to accept and work within a system that is already there then you have to accept its rules and limitations, and you will have only two or three options and very little chance of forcing change.
But there are an infinite amount of ways that you can make change in the world - so why would you restrict yourself to thinking and acting within someone else's boundaries - especially when it's those boundaries that you are trying to change?
I'm not advocating violence or stupid stunts like dressing up as spiderman and scaling a building - but just to free yourself from thinking that you ever have to fill in Form B to get to Point C (Profit). The key to making change in the world (without force or violence) is to appear to be far more reasonable and rational than the other side. To look like you know what you are doing, and to get other people to agree with you. And if you're going to organise a protest, protest reasonably, don't act like a mob, encourage other normal people to join with you, and tell the dreadlocked jugglers to fuck off because they will make your group look like a bunch of incompetent weirdos and drive normal people away from ever joining you. I don't care how doe-eyed and well-meaning they are, dreadlocked jugglers are the kiss of death to any serious protest and you need to tell them where they can stick their didgeridoo./rant.
From personal experience of the UK gov petitions site - many times over - it has no effect whatsoever. It's a sham, a deflection for discontentment, a way of saying they are listening to your concerns without actually doing anything about them. All that happens - no matter how many thousands of signatures a petition gets - is that it ends and then a boilerplate response says how they understand your concerns but you're wrong. It has as much effect as all the millions of protesters in London had on us going to war in Iraq. It makes you realize how little say you have and it's very depressing. As has been said before about voting - taking part only legitimises a corrupt system.
The real "full potential of the internet" is that it allows the government to ignore people on a more massive scale than ever before.
Start at Version 6.3 and work down, gradually removing features and making the product less stable. When it gets to Internal Release 0.01 Alpha, leave the company and go back to college, starting in the last year. When you finish college, go back to school. When you finish primary school (by running backwards out of the gate in to the arms of your mother), spend five years playing with Lego, then Duplo, and finally mud, before crawling feet first, screaming, in to a dark hole and dying.
Sony Ericsson K750i or anything from that series. Connect with Bluetooth or USB, compatible with iPhoto (for photos and videos) and iCal/iSync/Address Book to sync everything else. It has a very good 2MP camera (examples) and something like 2 weeks of standby time.
The K750i is a very old phone now - it came out in 2005 - but that means it's cheap (under £30 on eBay) so you don't have to worry about losing or dropping it.
Of course I'm using it unlocked, PAYG, on Orange in the UK. YMMV.
No. It brings to mind the vision of a middle-aged tea-lady with saggy brown stockings and curlers, smelling of stale bread and mildew, holding a large brightly-coloured banner saying "NEW!", while she coughs, spits, scratches her arse, and then falls down dead.
I think I was reading too much in to it now, it's just that it's _so_ brief as to look terse, and I agree we really don't want to be scaring off potential interviewees, so maybe there's a lesson there in how future interviews could be introduced by the editors. Anyway, I'll add my thanks to Mr. Welte for providing a +5 Interesting and Informative read.
Maybe I'm reading too much in to it, but that line in the summary, and the from-the-dept.-of line came across as sarcasm, though I couldn't see anything in Mr. Welte's replies that would have prompted it. Either way, it reads oddly.
Answer: because superstition and symbolism have fuck all to do with each other./duh
We're not sending his ashes in to space in an attempt to send him to the sci-fi-afterlife, or to appease the "Shatner God". We're sending him in to space because they're bloody Doohan's ashes and we can.
It is not beyond the promoters to take the line "Whatever you do, do not go and see this film!" from a review and use the last five words in the promo material.
That's appalling. It should of course be "Go to see this film".
And the thing is, dinosaurs didn't even use toothpaste. That's how far out of whack the laws are with the technology - toothpaste and dinosaurs don't even exist in the same world. How can a dinosaur even attempt to squeeze the toothpaste back in to the tube - the toothpaste is millions of years away in the future, being squeezed out more and more while the dinosaur is powerless to stop it. All it can do is waggle its little front legs and roar in frustration. For all it's mighty strength and razor-sharp teeth, it is impotent in the face of future toothpaste.
And even if it could get to the toothpaste it couldn't even brush its teeth because its tiny arms won't reach its terrible mouth. How the mighty fall - not through asteroid strike or an ice age, but through lack of toothpaste. We have all the toothpaste, here in the future. True, much is gone forever, washed down the plugholes of the past, but the lion's share of the toothpaste is still to come, and we shall spread it far out of the tube, beyond this horizon, beyond the reach of the dinosaurs of the past with their smelly breath and dirty teeth. Yes indeed, my friend - the toothpaste is, indeed, well and truly out of the tube, and the dummies and the desperate can only stand and quiver. Stand and quiver.
Am I the only one that sees value in preserving important parts of our history for future generations?
No, actually I think you're in the majority, but that still doesn't mean you're right. I understand the need to record our past, but not to preserve it at the expense of being able to do something useful with it now.
I think the reason many people feel a need to museumify old buildings is because much of what we build now is ugly and inhuman. That is the problem that needs to be fixed, and then let the rise and fall of beautiful buildings continue without sectioning off parts of our increasingly cramped world as museums.
"Enclosing a sentence in Quotation Marks doesn't make it correct or profound." -- R.O.Bably
"People tend to think that their own values are the best and finest values a human being could have, that other people would do well to follow their example, and that the flaws in their own logic are virtues." -- R.O.Bably
also
"We need specialists in our society, without them we would never have flown, never have reached the moon, never have discovered DNA or black holes. That Heinlein quote is bollocks." -- R.O.Bably
The language has evolved beyond your notion of what it should be. Get over it.
"Get over it" implies that something has changed irrevocably, but if the language is evolving then the muddying of definitions can be resisted. Which is it?
Language is understood by consensus - meanings are implicitly agreed upon by whatever group is using it at any one time. It constantly changes, and equally that means changes can be redirected and resisted. There is nothing to get over, I understand what language is. In my original post I was defending the GPs definition of the word "unique" - there are valid reasons for its meaning not to be diluted (ie clarity), and the GP was not wrong, as the parent suggested, to exclude the meaning of just "unusual".
It looks to me like you're fighting for a new definition of the word "unique" while I'm comfortable with the old definitions. I just don't see what you gain by diluting the definition to make it less clear.
You can decide any word means anything but the purpose of language is to communicate ideas clearly, and the only reasons for muddying a definition seem to be ignorance, attention-seeking, or malice ("it is a great way to provoke nutty folk"). We already have other words that mean "very unusual", use them. And of course you can have two unique things if they are different, but the title is referring to two things which are the same.
Mine just arrived this morning (the 1TB Caviar model) and it is extremely quiet (I bought it for a Home Theatre PC). It brings home the point, though, that they may have made great strides in power savings and noise reduction, but the real hurdle with a 1TB drive is the time it takes to copy 1TB of data. I'm transferring everything across from my old 500GB drive via Firewire 400 and it's going to take a total of 7 hours. That's just to half-fill the drive.
Anyway, the article the summary seems to be slashdotted, so here's the review at TechReport I read before I ordered it, with lots of graphs and comparisons.
Slashdot Mirror
And yet, when two countries are on the brink of war, we use diplomacy to come to a mutually agreed outcome, not voting. Huh. It would be absurd to vote - what if the population of one country was twice that of the other? How come in that situation it is instantly obvious that "winner takes all" voting is unfair, while within a country it's seen as fair?
My preference is not for laws to govern millions of people, anyway. It is for localised governance at a scale that people can join in and actually have a say that makes a difference to their own community. As a country expands and a population increases, the size of each council should stay the same, but there should be more of them. So you don't have one law for the entire country - so what? Many of the problems in society are due to the fact that there is nowhere else to go - everywhere is the same. I'd like to live somewhere with sane drug and privacy laws, and I don't want to have to leave my country to do that. We need to wake people up to the fact that laws are made up, and we can change them if we want to.
Yes I can. Who made up that rule? I never agreed to it.
What they vote for is irrelevant. The sheep isn't abstaining because he doesn't like the choices on the ballot, he's abstaining because he sees the system is broken.
I'm posting this before the election.
Completely backwards. If you vote, you have no recourse to complain about the results of that process.
Example: Two wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner. If the sheep votes, he is implicitly supporting that voting system and cannot complain when the carving knives come out. He had his democratic say, how can he complain about the outcome? The only option which makes sense, which lends any weight to his position, is to refuse to vote and so refuse to endorse the system.
"Winner takes all" is not a just outcome. What is needed is a diplomatic process to reach mutual agreement, with concessions on all sides if necessary. Oh but that requires effort.
Voting just legitimises a corrupt system.
There isn't supposed to be any trust in a surveillance society - that's the whole reason for the surveillance.
Completely the opposite - when you choose to accept and work within a system that is already there then you have to accept its rules and limitations, and you will have only two or three options and very little chance of forcing change.
/rant.
But there are an infinite amount of ways that you can make change in the world - so why would you restrict yourself to thinking and acting within someone else's boundaries - especially when it's those boundaries that you are trying to change?
I'm not advocating violence or stupid stunts like dressing up as spiderman and scaling a building - but just to free yourself from thinking that you ever have to fill in Form B to get to Point C (Profit). The key to making change in the world (without force or violence) is to appear to be far more reasonable and rational than the other side. To look like you know what you are doing, and to get other people to agree with you. And if you're going to organise a protest, protest reasonably, don't act like a mob, encourage other normal people to join with you, and tell the dreadlocked jugglers to fuck off because they will make your group look like a bunch of incompetent weirdos and drive normal people away from ever joining you. I don't care how doe-eyed and well-meaning they are, dreadlocked jugglers are the kiss of death to any serious protest and you need to tell them where they can stick their didgeridoo.
From personal experience of the UK gov petitions site - many times over - it has no effect whatsoever. It's a sham, a deflection for discontentment, a way of saying they are listening to your concerns without actually doing anything about them. All that happens - no matter how many thousands of signatures a petition gets - is that it ends and then a boilerplate response says how they understand your concerns but you're wrong. It has as much effect as all the millions of protesters in London had on us going to war in Iraq. It makes you realize how little say you have and it's very depressing. As has been said before about voting - taking part only legitimises a corrupt system.
The real "full potential of the internet" is that it allows the government to ignore people on a more massive scale than ever before.
Start at Version 6.3 and work down, gradually removing features and making the product less stable. When it gets to Internal Release 0.01 Alpha, leave the company and go back to college, starting in the last year. When you finish college, go back to school. When you finish primary school (by running backwards out of the gate in to the arms of your mother), spend five years playing with Lego, then Duplo, and finally mud, before crawling feet first, screaming, in to a dark hole and dying.
If only everything was so simple.
Sony Ericsson K750i or anything from that series. Connect with Bluetooth or USB, compatible with iPhoto (for photos and videos) and iCal/iSync/Address Book to sync everything else. It has a very good 2MP camera (examples) and something like 2 weeks of standby time.
The K750i is a very old phone now - it came out in 2005 - but that means it's cheap (under £30 on eBay) so you don't have to worry about losing or dropping it.
Of course I'm using it unlocked, PAYG, on Orange in the UK. YMMV.
No. It brings to mind the vision of a middle-aged tea-lady with saggy brown stockings and curlers, smelling of stale bread and mildew, holding a large brightly-coloured banner saying "NEW!", while she coughs, spits, scratches her arse, and then falls down dead.
I think I was reading too much in to it now, it's just that it's _so_ brief as to look terse, and I agree we really don't want to be scaring off potential interviewees, so maybe there's a lesson there in how future interviews could be introduced by the editors. Anyway, I'll add my thanks to Mr. Welte for providing a +5 Interesting and Informative read.
Maybe I'm reading too much in to it, but that line in the summary, and the from-the-dept.-of line came across as sarcasm, though I couldn't see anything in Mr. Welte's replies that would have prompted it. Either way, it reads oddly.
Answer: because superstition and symbolism have fuck all to do with each other. /duh
We're not sending his ashes in to space in an attempt to send him to the sci-fi-afterlife, or to appease the "Shatner God". We're sending him in to space because they're bloody Doohan's ashes and we can.
That's appalling. It should of course be "Go to see this film".
And the thing is, dinosaurs didn't even use toothpaste. That's how far out of whack the laws are with the technology - toothpaste and dinosaurs don't even exist in the same world. How can a dinosaur even attempt to squeeze the toothpaste back in to the tube - the toothpaste is millions of years away in the future, being squeezed out more and more while the dinosaur is powerless to stop it. All it can do is waggle its little front legs and roar in frustration. For all it's mighty strength and razor-sharp teeth, it is impotent in the face of future toothpaste.
And even if it could get to the toothpaste it couldn't even brush its teeth because its tiny arms won't reach its terrible mouth. How the mighty fall - not through asteroid strike or an ice age, but through lack of toothpaste. We have all the toothpaste, here in the future. True, much is gone forever, washed down the plugholes of the past, but the lion's share of the toothpaste is still to come, and we shall spread it far out of the tube, beyond this horizon, beyond the reach of the dinosaurs of the past with their smelly breath and dirty teeth. Yes indeed, my friend - the toothpaste is, indeed, well and truly out of the tube, and the dummies and the desperate can only stand and quiver. Stand and quiver.
I, for one, welcome our Neolithic Lourdes.
I think the reason many people feel a need to museumify old buildings is because much of what we build now is ugly and inhuman. That is the problem that needs to be fixed, and then let the rise and fall of beautiful buildings continue without sectioning off parts of our increasingly cramped world as museums.
The suit is a decoy. You need to follow the pyjamas.
Yes
All three TV series of The Mighty Boosh and the radio series are available on iTunes.
"Enclosing a sentence in Quotation Marks doesn't make it correct or profound." -- R.O.Bably
"People tend to think that their own values are the best and finest values a human being could have, that other people would do well to follow their example, and that the flaws in their own logic are virtues." -- R.O.Bably
also
"We need specialists in our society, without them we would never have flown, never have reached the moon, never have discovered DNA or black holes. That Heinlein quote is bollocks." -- R.O.Bably
No, it's just that the system is designed for chauffeur-driven cars.
Language is understood by consensus - meanings are implicitly agreed upon by whatever group is using it at any one time. It constantly changes, and equally that means changes can be redirected and resisted. There is nothing to get over, I understand what language is. In my original post I was defending the GPs definition of the word "unique" - there are valid reasons for its meaning not to be diluted (ie clarity), and the GP was not wrong, as the parent suggested, to exclude the meaning of just "unusual".
It looks to me like you're fighting for a new definition of the word "unique" while I'm comfortable with the old definitions. I just don't see what you gain by diluting the definition to make it less clear.
You can decide any word means anything but the purpose of language is to communicate ideas clearly, and the only reasons for muddying a definition seem to be ignorance, attention-seeking, or malice ("it is a great way to provoke nutty folk"). We already have other words that mean "very unusual", use them. And of course you can have two unique things if they are different, but the title is referring to two things which are the same.
Colour me provoked.
Mine just arrived this morning (the 1TB Caviar model) and it is extremely quiet (I bought it for a Home Theatre PC). It brings home the point, though, that they may have made great strides in power savings and noise reduction, but the real hurdle with a 1TB drive is the time it takes to copy 1TB of data. I'm transferring everything across from my old 500GB drive via Firewire 400 and it's going to take a total of 7 hours. That's just to half-fill the drive.
Anyway, the article the summary seems to be slashdotted, so here's the review at TechReport I read before I ordered it, with lots of graphs and comparisons.