Re:American Culture Not That Bad
on
The Last Place
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
If i want an abortion, i can march my ass down town and get one.
Yeah, right past the "tolerant" americans holding their picket signs, their list from the Nuremberg Files, and their tote bag full of weapons which has "choose life" printed on the outside.
if i want to have a gay marraige, I can go to vermont or new mexico.
We're so "tolerant" that 4% of our state governments allow gay marriage. And then there's always the issue of dealing with our "tolerant" neo-nazis, Aaron McKinneys, and "tolerant" churches and conservative groups?
if i want to claim glaucoma and smoke a fat tasty spliff, I go to Cali (id rather fly to amsterdam, but whatev).
I'll agree a lot of people are tolerant to light drug use, but my problem with it is that as long as it's widespread and illegal, it makes a lot of people arrestable for something the majority of the public accepts.
Funny that you dont realize how much of a role intolerance plays in the two international issues you addressed. If im living in Israel and Im Palestinian, you bet your ass I'll be seeing some intolerance. If im a Catholic living in the wrong Neghborhood in Belfast, you bet your ass I'll be seeing some intolerance. But if I'm any of these living in any neighborhood in the U.S. I'll bet your ass that no one will give a flying fuck.
You're mostly correct as far as extent, but your colorfully metaphored assertion that there is complete racial apathy here in the USA is a little bit inaccurate.
For example, what about a black family living in an all-white community in a southern state, or a young married couple moving into a community of mostly retirees? While in most cases, we've reached the point where physical violence is rare between these groups, there is certianly at least a small degree of intolerance.
Re:American Culture Not That Bad
on
The Last Place
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Our music is diverse
Only if you know where to look. Remember, before the internet, the same crap you hear on all of the current Clear Channel radio stations was the majority1 of what would make it to other countries.
our people tend to work
True, but we seem to be prejudiced against rest and relaxation of any sort. What ever happened to enjoying life? What's the big deal if you die a "successful" millionaire if you Can't Take it With You"TM?
My roommate from England tells me about how many Europeans get a month of vacation per year; they get even more (6 weeks?) if they've got some seniority. The average full-time American employee gets two weeks of vacation time per year, and those with seniority may even be lucky enough to get three! And even when we do finally get to take some down time, we still can't get some rest and relaxation without overworking ourselves.
and our culture is mostly tolerant on issues
More like Apathy. Passivity. Sheep-like behavior.
There are many issues which are worth some time to consider:
Human rights
Civil rights
Racism
Affirmative Action
Funding education
Arms control
Campaign finance
Missile defense
Immigration
The USA PATRIOT ACT, UCITA, DMCA, etc
The corruption of mainstream media
Medicare/Medicaid
AIDS
Drug patents
Disabled rights
Juvenile justice
Conflicts in Africa
The cause of poverty
Third World Debt
Free trade and globalization
Creeping corporate power
Consumerism
International criminal court
The Middle East
The War on TerrorTM
Foreign Policy
Israel and Palestine
Kosovo
Chechnya
East Timor
China
Genetically modified food
Global Warming
Animal/Nature conservation
Human cloning
Prayer in school
Gun control
Patient rights
Euthanasia
Privacy
Terrorism
Tobacco
Health Care
United Nations
Veterans
Tort Reform
Separation of church and state
Bill of Rights
(just to name a few)
At least some of these issues should be things people talk about and think about every day, instead of going home to be brainwashed by MTV or the latest episode of Friends (aka "culture"). I know there *are* people in the USA who do stay on top of the issues, but for the most part, people prefer to stick their heads in the ground and be apathetic (aka "tolerant") of how everything is going now. Honestly, do you think our leaders are going to make the right decisions?
Television is like Alcohol
on
The Last Place
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Lately, I like to consider watching television and/or movies, the same as most people think of the consumption of alcoholic beverages. It's fine to do it socially, while in the company of friends or family, but taking in too much (especially while you're only by yourself), is not good for you.
I use Proxomitron. It's a local proxy that lets me do regular expression-like search/replace on the incoming HTML, and the incoming/outgoing HTTP headers. I just wrote some filters today that take out all images, all javascript, all colors and fonts, and gives me plain old text with normal layout. As a matter of fact, it was Yahoo groups's incessant click-through ads that made me install Proxomitron. Now I just detect the "Continue" link and replace it with a document.location.replace() JS script.
You can save several different configs which you can swap between, allow certian sites to pass-through by default, and it has a button on the main GUI to toggle on/off all filters if you are getting snagged on something it's filtering.
I've been considering putting together some filters so I can strip out excess content by using my home computer as a proxy for my palm pilot (running Xiino).
I'm kind of disappointed that development has stopped on it, but I'm figuring someone will pick up the torch and take the idea further.
Yeah, well now that Carnivore 2.0 is installed everywhere (thanks to the USA PATRIOT ACT), it'll be a nice automatic process to round up all of the information they need about the "domestic electronic terrorists".
If this bill passes, I think it's time to officially declare this government a plutocracy.
"There has grown in the minds of certain groups in this country the idea that just because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with guaranteeing such a profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary to public interest. This strange doctrine is supported by neither statute or common law. Neither corporations or individuals have the right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back." -- Robert Heinlein
"He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it." --Martin Luther King, Jr.
"If ever time should come, when vain and aspiring men shall possess the highest seats in Government, our country will stand in need of its experienced Patriots to prevent its ruin." --Samuel Adams
"Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of State and corporate power." --Benito Mussolini
""I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country." --Thomas Jefferson 1812
"I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavour to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed." --Abraham Lincoln 1865
The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to the point where it becomes stronger than the democratic state itself. That in its essence is fascism -- ownership of government by an individual, by a group or any controlling private power." --President Franklin D. Roosevelt
"The goal is to keep the bewildered herd bewildered. It's unnecessary for them to trouble themselves with what's happening in the world. In fact, it's undesirable -- if they see too much of reality they may set themselves to change it." --Noam Chomsky
I agree. They are always all nice and friendly, and then once they get a product that beats the competition, the R&D stops. Just look at Outlook Express as a prime example. It hasn't changed significantly since IE4 (maybe even 3?), yet it's still the cleanest and snappiest email client on windows.
I just wish it had a more powerful rules capability and that it handled newsgroups more efficiently. I'd also like to find a way to re-enable the infamous junk filter they got in trouble over a few years ago, as I found it fairly effective.
It just seems like all major innovations stopped once they became more popular than all the other email clients.
Excuse me, GCP, I'm with the local health clinic and we're going around town and giving people free eye exams today. Would you look right here for just a second.....
It comes with syntax highlighting for HTML, CSS, PHP, ASP, Perl, C/C++, Java, JavaScript and VBScript, plus you can get user-created "STX" files for many other languages, or write your own. Each token color can be easily configured from a pallete selection dialog.
My favorite feature though is the built in FTP (File Open/Save/Save As) system, which makes opening a file on a remote FTP server as seamless as opening a file on your local machine.
Here's a few other features which I felt seemed noteworthy:
Regular-expression like search and replace (across one or all open documents)
Group files into "projects", which are saved in the config and easily accessible by a "Project" menu at any time.
Keyboard macro recording/playback/save ability
ASCII chart reference
Document templates
User-configurable tools
On-screen document selector tabs (for quicking jumping between open documents)
Can make whitespace chars visible
Fullscreen mode
Spellchecker
IE integration for quick previews
Box select/insert/overwrite
Reformat paragraphs
Monitor clipboard
HTML entity conversion
Cliptext palette
Function list generation
Line sort with options for de-dupe, case sensistivity, ascending/descending, start at column, ascii order
Split views
PC,Unix,Mac EOL modes
On-screen line numbers with each line
Print Preview (option to include line numbers)
All program functions can be reassigned to different keyboard combinations
User-configurable toolbar
Sorry, I guess I got carried away:) I really like this program though, and I've been using it for about three or four years now. It's probably the only program I've ever registered within 15 minutes of downloading:)
I don't like the default colors and font that come with it. I prefer dark backgrounds, so I always set the background to black, then let the lumance level of all the default syntax highlighting colors to "200". I also don't like the default variable-width font, as I prefer mono-spaced fonts, but I don't like Courier, so I set it to the windows "FixedSys" font. Once I've made these adjustments, EditPlus looks more like a UNIX terminal than a Visual* editor.
On the occasions I've considered switching to Linux, EditPlus is probably one of the few things holding me back from doing so.
It says a great deal that software, which was designed to circumvent opressive foreign government, is put into use in public schools, libraries, etc.
Excellent statement.
It won't be long before our ISPs consolodate into one company, and we'll have to do the same type of software on our dial-up and broadband connections at home to let us access news and information that wasn't spoon-fed to us by Disney/AOL/TW/MSN.
And if you're a sociologist doing online research of, for example, the impact of evolving internet connectivity in middle-eastern countries, you might want some encryption as well, to avoid that visit from your friendly local FBI agents.
"This is a government of the people, by the people and for the people no longer. It is a government of corporations, by corporations, and for corporations." --President Rutherford B. Hayes
If we're all so clever enough to have created/discovered such awesome systems as public-key encryption, solomon-reed encoding, asynchronous circuit logic, chaos, spintronics, cellular automata, quantum computing, human genome sequencing, and quantum entanglement, why can't we figure out a solution to the problem of anonymous, but accountable voting systems?
Why can't these voting computers print out a hard-copy to the voter, which shows them visually what they voted for, and contains a barcode (1 or 2d) which uniquely identifies the vote so that some amount of accounting can be done to show the computer isn't cheating.
1.5 millibit/s equals 666+(2/3) sec/bit? I'll take a 110 baud modem over that;-)
1.5 millibit/sec - I wonder how many Libraries of Congress per microfortnight that'd be? hmmm... Assuming the most often figure that 1LOC = 10TB, that's
I spent some time in the power distribution office of a local power plant, and they had a big indicator in red LEDs showing the AC frequency, which read 60.0000 most of the time, but occasionally I'd see it click to 59.9999 or 60.0001 for a moment, but I never seen an 8 or 2 on there...
At least you won't have to worry about overheating as much, since the processor will slow down if it heats up... Which makes for an inherent negative feedback...:)
Carl Sassenrath designed a lot of the core components of the AmigaOS kernel. He used to have a more extensive website there, but there is some information about his past and current projects. Now he's leading the design of a system called REBOL that seems to be a bit interesting.
The really cool 1200-piece tub which went for around $15-20 seems to be discontinued. Does anyone else know a good way to buy basic pieces in bulk?
For that matter, does anyone know a fairly inexpensive way to buy technic pieces in bulk? I'd love to take a crack at a lego 4-bit adding machine:)
As long as I'm already posting, I'd also like to add to the software-related discussion with some really old favorites of mine on the C64 and Amiga, including the Fireworks Construction Kit (I have weird flashbacks to this program occasionally), and on the Amiga was something I remember being quite cool called the 3D Construction Kit.
While I give the Half-Life and Morrowind editors the most credit for best (simple, but good quality) 3D editors, I really wish there were something just as easy to use, but with the ability to toss in all kinds of cool effects easily such as partially-reflective glass, mirrors, realistic water, duststorms, etc but all without ME having to worry about cube-maps, multitexturing, and pixel shaders and all that. I guess what I'm looking for is something that easily lets me model in fairly realistic looking 3D some of the places I've been, or imaginary places.
I know I could do all of this with expensive 3D programs like 3DS, Lightwave, or Maya, but I really want simplicity to start, with a hidden complexity that I can eventually go into when I am ready. I think that is the key to a good tool is something that is really easy to use the first time you load it, but as soon as you begin to get to know it and yearn for more flexibility and control, you can pull off the hood and get deep into the guts.
So get a better video card, install it in the AGP slot, move a jumper (if necessary), and get over it. If you like everything else that much, the extra $5 you spend because of a little unused silicon should be worth it.
You can make google even more money by daily searching for such keywords as "mass marketing", "bulk email", "bulk advertising", and then clicking on all of the sponsored links that look like spamcorps. I've used google's adwords feature, and based on how much it's told me it would cost for some keywords, I'd guesstimate those links cost the companies they link to at least a dollar per click for those near the top...
Slashdot Mirror
Very simple. The RIAA does not want diversity. They do not want small bands to be heard and potentially change people's tastes. They want to keep corporate POP music popular and they want the Top 40 to be WHAT YOU WILL LISTEN TO AND BUY(TM)©®$¥£.
Yeah, right past the "tolerant" americans holding their picket signs, their list from the Nuremberg Files, and their tote bag full of weapons which has "choose life" printed on the outside.
if i want to have a gay marraige, I can go to vermont or new mexico.
We're so "tolerant" that 4% of our state governments allow gay marriage. And then there's always the issue of dealing with our "tolerant" neo-nazis, Aaron McKinneys, and "tolerant" churches and conservative groups?
if i want to claim glaucoma and smoke a fat tasty spliff, I go to Cali (id rather fly to amsterdam, but whatev).
I'll agree a lot of people are tolerant to light drug use, but my problem with it is that as long as it's widespread and illegal, it makes a lot of people arrestable for something the majority of the public accepts.
Funny that you dont realize how much of a role intolerance plays in the two international issues you addressed. If im living in Israel and Im Palestinian, you bet your ass I'll be seeing some intolerance. If im a Catholic living in the wrong Neghborhood in Belfast, you bet your ass I'll be seeing some intolerance. But if I'm any of these living in any neighborhood in the U.S. I'll bet your ass that no one will give a flying fuck.
You're mostly correct as far as extent, but your colorfully metaphored assertion that there is complete racial apathy here in the USA is a little bit inaccurate. For example, what about a black family living in an all-white community in a southern state, or a young married couple moving into a community of mostly retirees? While in most cases, we've reached the point where physical violence is rare between these groups, there is certianly at least a small degree of intolerance.
Only if you know where to look. Remember, before the internet, the same crap you hear on all of the current Clear Channel radio stations was the majority1 of what would make it to other countries.
our people tend to work
True, but we seem to be prejudiced against rest and relaxation of any sort. What ever happened to enjoying life? What's the big deal if you die a "successful" millionaire if you Can't Take it With You"TM?
My roommate from England tells me about how many Europeans get a month of vacation per year; they get even more (6 weeks?) if they've got some seniority. The average full-time American employee gets two weeks of vacation time per year, and those with seniority may even be lucky enough to get three! And even when we do finally get to take some down time, we still can't get some rest and relaxation without overworking ourselves.
and our culture is mostly tolerant on issues
More like Apathy. Passivity. Sheep-like behavior.
There are many issues which are worth some time to consider:
- Human rights
- Civil rights
- Racism
- Affirmative Action
- Funding education
- Arms control
- Campaign finance
- Missile defense
- Immigration
- The USA PATRIOT ACT, UCITA, DMCA, etc
- The corruption of mainstream media
- Medicare/Medicaid
- AIDS
- Drug patents
- Disabled rights
- Juvenile justice
- Conflicts in Africa
- The cause of poverty
- Third World Debt
- Free trade and globalization
- Creeping corporate power
- Consumerism
- International criminal court
- The Middle East
- The War on TerrorTM
- Foreign Policy
- Israel and Palestine
- Kosovo
- Chechnya
- East Timor
- China
- Genetically modified food
- Global Warming
- Animal/Nature conservation
- Human cloning
- Prayer in school
- Gun control
- Patient rights
- Euthanasia
- Privacy
- Terrorism
- Tobacco
- Health Care
- United Nations
- Veterans
- Tort Reform
- Separation of church and state
- Bill of Rights
(just to name a few)At least some of these issues should be things people talk about and think about every day, instead of going home to be brainwashed by MTV or the latest episode of Friends (aka "culture"). I know there *are* people in the USA who do stay on top of the issues, but for the most part, people prefer to stick their heads in the ground and be apathetic (aka "tolerant") of how everything is going now. Honestly, do you think our leaders are going to make the right decisions?
Lately, I like to consider watching television and/or movies, the same as most people think of the consumption of alcoholic beverages. It's fine to do it socially, while in the company of friends or family, but taking in too much (especially while you're only by yourself), is not good for you.
You can save several different configs which you can swap between, allow certian sites to pass-through by default, and it has a button on the main GUI to toggle on/off all filters if you are getting snagged on something it's filtering.
I've been considering putting together some filters so I can strip out excess content by using my home computer as a proxy for my palm pilot (running Xiino).
I'm kind of disappointed that development has stopped on it, but I'm figuring someone will pick up the torch and take the idea further.
I know! You mean this? Well, that's from the AP, it was chocolate (not frontpage), and he didn't get arrested - he died. ;)
Yeah, well now that Carnivore 2.0 is installed everywhere (thanks to the USA PATRIOT ACT), it'll be a nice automatic process to round up all of the information they need about the "domestic electronic terrorists".
"There has grown in the minds of certain groups in this country the idea that just because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with guaranteeing such a profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary to public interest. This strange doctrine is supported by neither statute or common law. Neither corporations or individuals have the right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back." -- Robert Heinlein
"He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it." --Martin Luther King, Jr.
"If ever time should come, when vain and aspiring men shall possess the highest seats in Government, our country will stand in need of its experienced Patriots to prevent its ruin." --Samuel Adams
"Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of State and corporate power." --Benito Mussolini
""I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country." --Thomas Jefferson 1812
"I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavour to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed." --Abraham Lincoln 1865
The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to the point where it becomes stronger than the democratic state itself. That in its essence is fascism -- ownership of government by an individual, by a group or any controlling private power." --President Franklin D. Roosevelt
"The goal is to keep the bewildered herd bewildered. It's unnecessary for them to trouble themselves with what's happening in the world. In fact, it's undesirable -- if they see too much of reality they may set themselves to change it." --Noam Chomsky
Ok, am I the only person who saw this article's title as being a bit sexually suggestive?
Ugh. I must have spent far too much time on the computer again this weekend... :)
I just wish it had a more powerful rules capability and that it handled newsgroups more efficiently. I'd also like to find a way to re-enable the infamous junk filter they got in trouble over a few years ago, as I found it fairly effective.
It just seems like all major innovations stopped once they became more popular than all the other email clients.
Bah.
Excuse me, GCP, I'm with the local health clinic and we're going around town and giving people free eye exams today. Would you look right here for just a second.....
->[BRIGHT FLASH]<-
It comes with syntax highlighting for HTML, CSS, PHP, ASP, Perl, C/C++, Java, JavaScript and VBScript, plus you can get user-created "STX" files for many other languages, or write your own. Each token color can be easily configured from a pallete selection dialog.
My favorite feature though is the built in FTP (File Open/Save/Save As) system, which makes opening a file on a remote FTP server as seamless as opening a file on your local machine.
Here's a few other features which I felt seemed noteworthy:
Sorry, I guess I got carried away :) I really like this program though, and I've been using it for about three or four years now. It's probably the only program I've ever registered within 15 minutes of downloading :)
I don't like the default colors and font that come with it. I prefer dark backgrounds, so I always set the background to black, then let the lumance level of all the default syntax highlighting colors to "200". I also don't like the default variable-width font, as I prefer mono-spaced fonts, but I don't like Courier, so I set it to the windows "FixedSys" font. Once I've made these adjustments, EditPlus looks more like a UNIX terminal than a Visual* editor.
On the occasions I've considered switching to Linux, EditPlus is probably one of the few things holding me back from doing so.
Excellent statement.
It won't be long before our ISPs consolodate into one company, and we'll have to do the same type of software on our dial-up and broadband connections at home to let us access news and information that wasn't spoon-fed to us by Disney/AOL/TW/MSN.
And if you're a sociologist doing online research of, for example, the impact of evolving internet connectivity in middle-eastern countries, you might want some encryption as well, to avoid that visit from your friendly local FBI agents.
"This is a government of the people, by the people and for the people no longer. It is a government of corporations, by corporations, and for corporations." --President Rutherford B. Hayes
Why can't these voting computers print out a hard-copy to the voter, which shows them visually what they voted for, and contains a barcode (1 or 2d) which uniquely identifies the vote so that some amount of accounting can be done to show the computer isn't cheating.
1.5 millibit/sec - I wonder how many Libraries of Congress per microfortnight that'd be? hmmm... Assuming the most often figure that 1LOC = 10TB, that's
BTW, I prefer LOC/attoparsec over the more frequently used LOC/hectare for storage density measurements.
This might solve your problem.
No problem disabling flash here:
C:\WINNT\SYSTEM32\regsvr32.exe C:\WinNT\System32\Macromed\Flash\swflash.ocx /u
Remove the /u to re-enable, and adjust your paths if necessary.
Make two shortcuts and put them in your "Links" toolbar.
I spent some time in the power distribution office of a local power plant, and they had a big indicator in red LEDs showing the AC frequency, which read 60.0000 most of the time, but occasionally I'd see it click to 59.9999 or 60.0001 for a moment, but I never seen an 8 or 2 on there...
At least you won't have to worry about overheating as much, since the processor will slow down if it heats up... Which makes for an inherent negative feedback... :)
Carl Sassenrath designed a lot of the core components of the AmigaOS kernel. He used to have a more extensive website there, but there is some information about his past and current projects. Now he's leading the design of a system called REBOL that seems to be a bit interesting.
Here's a bunch of recalled toys
Some of the cool ones I saw before I got bored:
For that matter, does anyone know a fairly inexpensive way to buy technic pieces in bulk? I'd love to take a crack at a lego 4-bit adding machine :)
As long as I'm already posting, I'd also like to add to the software-related discussion with some really old favorites of mine on the C64 and Amiga, including the Fireworks Construction Kit (I have weird flashbacks to this program occasionally), and on the Amiga was something I remember being quite cool called the 3D Construction Kit.
While I give the Half-Life and Morrowind editors the most credit for best (simple, but good quality) 3D editors, I really wish there were something just as easy to use, but with the ability to toss in all kinds of cool effects easily such as partially-reflective glass, mirrors, realistic water, duststorms, etc but all without ME having to worry about cube-maps, multitexturing, and pixel shaders and all that. I guess what I'm looking for is something that easily lets me model in fairly realistic looking 3D some of the places I've been, or imaginary places.
I know I could do all of this with expensive 3D programs like 3DS, Lightwave, or Maya, but I really want simplicity to start, with a hidden complexity that I can eventually go into when I am ready. I think that is the key to a good tool is something that is really easy to use the first time you load it, but as soon as you begin to get to know it and yearn for more flexibility and control, you can pull off the hood and get deep into the guts.
So get a better video card, install it in the AGP slot, move a jumper (if necessary), and get over it. If you like everything else that much, the extra $5 you spend because of a little unused silicon should be worth it.
You can make google even more money by daily searching for such keywords as "mass marketing", "bulk email", "bulk advertising", and then clicking on all of the sponsored links that look like spamcorps. I've used google's adwords feature, and based on how much it's told me it would cost for some keywords, I'd guesstimate those links cost the companies they link to at least a dollar per click for those near the top...