I fully agree with the sentiment in principle. But "We the people" doesn't exist in America and hasn't for a long time now. The establishment rules, and I think you'll find that (short of a popular revolt by the majority) they will only continue to increase their hold on things.
s regards the prospects of such a revolt (whether armed or "velvet" as in erstwhile Czechoslovakia), don't hold your breath. That could only happen if the economy tanked so badly that the middle class were to disappear. As long as the majority are at least comfortable, there can be no revolution and thus no change.
In every paragraph your position hinges on one single idea: your perception that the US is a benign empire. But every empire in history has viewed itself as benign so your argument has no force behind it. What you don't seem to understand, is that most non-Americans don't view the US as benign at all. The list of countries bombed by the US since the end of WWII might have something to do with it:
China 1945-46 Korea 1950-53 China 1950-53 Guatemala 1954 Indonesia 1958 Cuba 1959-60 Guatemala 1960 Belgian Congo 1964 Guatemala 1964 Dominican Republic 1965-66 Peru 1965 Laos 1964-73 Vietnam 1961-73 Cambodia 1969-70 Guatemala 1967-69 Lebanon 1982-84 Grenada 1983-84 Libya 1986 El Salvador 1981-92 Nicaragua 1981-90 Libya 1986 Iran 1987-88 Libya 1989 Panama 1989-90 Iraq 1991-2002 Kuwait 1991 Somalia 1992-94 Croatia 1994 (of Serbs at Krajina) Bosnia 1995 Iran 1998 (airliner) Sudan 1998 Afghanistan 1998 Yugoslavia 1999 Afghanistan 2001-02
These are not the acts of a "benign" regime. Only an amoral, self-interested one. Bear in mind too that these are only the bombings. There are also numerous US-led and US-sponsored insurgencies and revolutions to add to the record.
I challenge you to explain how the actions of the US and its clients under US direction differ in any way from those of past empires now gone. I believe you will find it impossible. The sole difference is, it was acceptable in the past only because every nation was doing the same or would have done so given the opportunity. In the 21st century that no longer holds true. The rest of the world wants true peace through co-operation, not an imposed and uneasy peace that (when it even works) is only a by-product of one nation's greed.
The demo, tellingly, is a sparse winter tree with no leaves. None of the classical pieces I clicked on led anywhere. Do you think this will be any different when released into the wild?
Classical music, you might think, would be a good example of where it really would work because copyright expired for these long before the corrupt american media associations bought their oppressive laws. However copyright still inheres in individual performances and recordings, so no joy there.
I can see how it would work for subject areas where the base material is free, like open source documentation. But any sort of copyrighted paid-for media is a poor example unless people start surfing the web expecting to buy before they try.
Bollocks. If you only smoke moderately then you won't be paying much tax. It's the same principle as "the polluter pays" and it's the fairest method of funding health services: those who through sheer irresponsibility are likely to cause the biggest drain on communal health funds (whether state-funded or insurance-premium-funded) pay the most.
I say this as someone who still smokes 20 a day and has done so for the past 25 years, the vast majority of whose cigarette money goes to the government, so there is no hypocrisy or special pleading here.
What I do disagree with is the tax thus raised being spent on other things. It should be spent on providing health services - including initiatives to eliminate smoking - and nothing else.
What nonsense. Fascism is defined as the merger of state and corporate power. The left cannot be fascists, or they would not be the left. When the left is authoritarian it is authoritarian socialism (not necessarily communism which is a *specific* economic arrangement),
I'm not sure what your point is. Propaganda is used by every warlike government to stir up the public, yes. And the latent xenophobia that is programmed into our genes makes the public receptive. But there does have to be a grievance there to start with, and the more deep-rooted the grievance, the more effective will be the propaganda. It's fundamental to the whole process. You can't write off the grievance aspect just because it happens to implicate US foreign policy. You're only fooling yourselves.
Frankly I see no difference between how the empires of Europe's past treated their subjects and how America treats the subjects of its empire now. However you cannot rightly compare the two because expectations were different back then and nobody was doing things any differently. Nowadays though we have notions of human rights, international law etc. because the signatories felt they were ready to move beyond that. Of the civilized Western nations, only the mightiest (whose continuing crimes would be exposed and punished by such international controls), is prepared to ignore or withdraw from such treaties.
The amoral self-interest argument is one I've heard before many times here on Slashdot. Note that this argument is being used only by citizens of one particular hegemony: that of the most powerful nation in the world. When you have no moral justification for your action the only course remaining is to abandon morality, so that's no surprise at all. But it's still bogus.
It should be no surprise either that the rest of the world sees things differently. Lacking the means to have everything our own way, the rest of us are still "hampered" by a moral sense of fairness, community and social responsibility (hence the Kyoto treaty, proposals to end global poverty etc). I don't know if such attitudes can survive the temptations of being the mightiest, but I'd like to think that we of the world's fallen empires have moved beyond that for good. Societies can mature and evolve but America is still stuck in the past, in this respect, still pursuing a 19th century weltanschauung (i.e. "Manifest Destiny" as opposed to international co-operation).
A good point, and I suppose it firmly convicts the public in that it's their fault for continuing to patronise these expensively produced but soul-less spectacles. I think my faith in the American market's abiity to produce good movies crumbled when I saw what they did to the ending of Brazil. The purpose of every movie should not be to have every moviegoer leave the theatre feeling warm and content. That's what food is for.
There are scientists of all types of specialisations here. And a good number of the rest of us have at least a college education in science (proper science that is, not the trash you see reported in the sunday tabloids and on sensationalist gee-whiz minority cable channels aimed at the great unwashed).
I understand the sentiment but even making the statement ironically reinforces the mistaken impression that it *is* OK. So please don't do it, you are contributing to the problem.
Try this: the resentment which accrues towards a foreign nation that habitually interferes, with frequently horrible results, in the affairs of their country or their neighbours' countries.
If you are going to act like the world's self-appointed policeman you had better be squeaky clean, immune to corruption and free from self-interest - or else all the mistakes, all the bad judgements you make and most definitely all the hostile and destructive acts you commit will be held against you in the most venomous way possible.
The widespread hatred of the US was inevitable, given its foreign policy. It doesn't require the Islamic world to be jealous, or freedom-hating, or innately anti Western. It only requires them to be human, to have a shred of dignity or pride; to own a scrap of ambition to be their own masters free from the oppression of an interfering foreign state. Even in an evil dictatorship, people will still go to war to fight for their country even if they do so half-heartedly.
Most science fiction writers who were once thought prophetic have been proved in the long run to have been wrong about some things. It should come as no surprise. There is no crystal ball.
Yeah. Hollywood sucks doesn't it? The problem is simply this: excepting the few relatively cases where a sufficiently influential artist gets his own way (or funds a project himself) their films are created primarily as products, rather than works of art. Wonderbread indeed.
Historically, loyalty of existing customers toward Novell has been very high, it seems (from the outside) similar to the apple user mentality in some respects. So I don't think it's the products as such. It's more to do with the fact Microsoft took over all their target markets - which was, as everybody knows, a triumph of marketing and not technical superority.
I agree 100%. Until this software patents debacle I felt proud and forward-looking to call myself a European. But this crap plays right into the hands of the "Little Englanders". Worse, it resurrects all the conspiracy theories about the EU having been conceived by a corrupt plutocracy in the first instance.
Until the Commission and the Council of Ministers prove that they will abide by the will of the people, I want no more part of it.
1. There is no "debate". The global scientific community is settled on the matter. Only some paid lackeys of the energy industry are continuing to spread FUD.
2. The science is not "weak". That is why the global scientific community is settled on the matter. Your grasp of science is what is weak here. Hint: you won't find any accurate protrayal of the evidence in the tabloid press, or on TV, or in any of the US establishment-controlled media. For obvious reasons.
The problem with guns specifically, is that they are devices you can carry concealed in your pocket which effectively enable push-button killing.
When devices like this are both easy to obtain and socially accepted, it is no wonder that in the US disputes and arguments more frequently escalate into murders than happens elsewhere in the "civilized" world.
This doesn't apply to everybody of course, but many people are capable of losing their temper under some set of circumstances. And the thing about losing your temper, what characterizes that state as it were, is that you tend to react without due consideration of the consequences.
If you had to pull out a bow and arrow and nock the arrow and hold back the string etc etc, you're more likely to think twice about what you're doing (and of course a bow would be as difficult to conceal as a rifle). If you had to get up close and use a knife, then murders would be limited to a smaller number of people who were sufficiently violent that this would not put them off. But when you only have to pull this object out of your pocket and wave it at them in order to intimidate them, and then when this is done you find that you only have to squeeze the trigger to punish your co-disputant *really thoroughly*...this is a temptation that is just too seductive and too quick and easy to fulfil, for someone who is no longer in control of their temper. And it is available to just about everybody.
That's why I think the US gun policy is stupid, and the US electorate is insane for continuing to allow it.
As others have pointed out, the constitutional reason for the right to bear guns was in order to arm a militia that would guard against tyrannical government. It made sense when the government and the citizens had access to equal weaponry. But it doesn't work in an age when governments have access to nerve gas, tanks, rockets, aeroplanes loaded with cluster bombs, fleets of attack helicopters armed with chain guns and so on, much of which can easily be deployed from a distance. Your right to bear arms no longer fulfils the purpose set out in your constitution.
So to avoid fooling yourselves you need to either demand access to equally devastating weaponry (stupid, too many nutjobs out there) or else face the facts and just give up the guns.
Gill, there is a difference between healthy skepticism on the one hand, and on the other a complete inability to distinguish between concrete evidence and the overly pious skepticism of people with a clear vested interest.
The Bush dynasty's money comes from oil and its Texan powerbase is an oil economy. If we burn less oil they will get less money. That is a pretty direct connection and no far-fetched concoction of conspiracy theories is necessary to flush it out.
The sort of skepticism you are supporting is the very same kind that was touted by the tobacco companies in the face of a century's worth of respiratory diseases research. It's not skepticism at all, it's misdirection. The only kind of misdirection possible when the facts do not support your argument, i.e. "Do not believe in the facts!".
Farming is not unique to humans. To take just one example, parasol ants (native to the Amazon rainforest, IIRC) carry pieces of leaf back to their colony, to use as food for their fungus farm.
It *was* in equilibium, until we screwed it up with our greenhouse gas emissions. Now it's moving towards a new equilibrium point, and nobody really knows what that will mean for global climate change, except that climate change there will certainly be.
However some of the grosser effects are worth putting money on. Since the oceans are already warming up and both (1) warmer water is less dense and (2) there is already measurable ice loss from the poles, it is very likely indeed that sea levels will rise.
And you're missing the point, Maestro4K. If enough customers make enough trouble over unplayable disks, the stores will refuse to stock them, and the new format will die.
NMR was originally used for analysis of chemical samples. These are not scanned spatially, and so NMR itself is not really an imaging technology.
The new name of "Magnetic Resonance Imaging" wasn't adopted for NMR, which is still called NMR. MRI instead describes a new completely new technology which incidentally relies upon NMR in the same way that PET scanning relies upon positron emission and CAT scanning relies upon X rays.
The point being that the new imaging technology would have needed a new name anyway. Although the inventors would surely have avoided the word "Nuclear" for the obvious reasons anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
This isn't a free speech issue. Its about a slogan that is counter-productive.
I fully agree with the sentiment in principle. But "We the people" doesn't exist in America and hasn't for a long time now. The establishment rules, and I think you'll find that (short of a popular revolt by the majority) they will only continue to increase their hold on things.
s regards the prospects of such a revolt (whether armed or "velvet" as in erstwhile Czechoslovakia), don't hold your breath. That could only happen if the economy tanked so badly that the middle class were to disappear. As long as the majority are at least comfortable, there can be no revolution and thus no change.
Heh - plenty of material there for future "atmospheric" retro-style sci-fi movies.
In every paragraph your position hinges on one single idea: your perception that the US is a benign empire. But every empire in history has viewed itself as benign so your argument has no force behind it. What you don't seem to understand, is that most non-Americans don't view the US as benign at all. The list of countries bombed by the US since the end of WWII might have something to do with it:
China 1945-46
Korea 1950-53
China 1950-53
Guatemala 1954
Indonesia 1958
Cuba 1959-60
Guatemala 1960
Belgian Congo 1964
Guatemala 1964
Dominican Republic 1965-66
Peru 1965
Laos 1964-73
Vietnam 1961-73
Cambodia 1969-70
Guatemala 1967-69
Lebanon 1982-84
Grenada 1983-84
Libya 1986
El Salvador 1981-92
Nicaragua 1981-90
Libya 1986
Iran 1987-88
Libya 1989
Panama 1989-90
Iraq 1991-2002
Kuwait 1991
Somalia 1992-94
Croatia 1994 (of Serbs at Krajina)
Bosnia 1995
Iran 1998 (airliner)
Sudan 1998
Afghanistan 1998
Yugoslavia 1999
Afghanistan 2001-02
These are not the acts of a "benign" regime. Only an amoral, self-interested one. Bear in mind too that these are only the bombings. There are also numerous US-led and US-sponsored insurgencies and revolutions to add to the record.
I challenge you to explain how the actions of the US and its clients under US direction differ in any way from those of past empires now gone. I believe you will find it impossible. The sole difference is, it was acceptable in the past only because every nation was doing the same or would have done so given the opportunity. In the 21st century that no longer holds true. The rest of the world wants true peace through co-operation, not an imposed and uneasy peace that (when it even works) is only a by-product of one nation's greed.
Paid content.
The demo, tellingly, is a sparse winter tree with no leaves. None of the classical pieces I clicked on led anywhere. Do you think this will be any different when released into the wild?
Classical music, you might think, would be a good example of where it really would work because copyright expired for these long before the corrupt american media associations bought their oppressive laws. However copyright still inheres in individual performances and recordings, so no joy there.
I can see how it would work for subject areas where the base material is free, like open source documentation. But any sort of copyrighted paid-for media is a poor example unless people start surfing the web expecting to buy before they try.
Bollocks. If you only smoke moderately then you won't be paying much tax. It's the same principle as "the polluter pays" and it's the fairest method of funding health services: those who through sheer irresponsibility are likely to cause the biggest drain on communal health funds (whether state-funded or insurance-premium-funded) pay the most.
I say this as someone who still smokes 20 a day and has done so for the past 25 years, the vast majority of whose cigarette money goes to the government, so there is no hypocrisy or special pleading here.
What I do disagree with is the tax thus raised being spent on other things. It should be spent on providing health services - including initiatives to eliminate smoking - and nothing else.
What nonsense. Fascism is defined as the merger of state and corporate power. The left cannot be fascists, or they would not be the left. When the left is authoritarian it is authoritarian socialism (not necessarily communism which is a *specific* economic arrangement),
I'm not sure what your point is. Propaganda is used by every warlike government to stir up the public, yes. And the latent xenophobia that is programmed into our genes makes the public receptive. But there does have to be a grievance there to start with, and the more deep-rooted the grievance, the more effective will be the propaganda. It's fundamental to the whole process. You can't write off the grievance aspect just because it happens to implicate US foreign policy. You're only fooling yourselves.
Frankly I see no difference between how the empires of Europe's past treated their subjects and how America treats the subjects of its empire now. However you cannot rightly compare the two because expectations were different back then and nobody was doing things any differently. Nowadays though we have notions of human rights, international law etc. because the signatories felt they were ready to move beyond that. Of the civilized Western nations, only the mightiest (whose continuing crimes would be exposed and punished by such international controls), is prepared to ignore or withdraw from such treaties.
The amoral self-interest argument is one I've heard before many times here on Slashdot. Note that this argument is being used only by citizens of one particular hegemony: that of the most powerful nation in the world. When you have no moral justification for your action the only course remaining is to abandon morality, so that's no surprise at all. But it's still bogus.
It should be no surprise either that the rest of the world sees things differently. Lacking the means to have everything our own way, the rest of us are still "hampered" by a moral sense of fairness, community and social responsibility (hence the Kyoto treaty, proposals to end global poverty etc). I don't know if such attitudes can survive the temptations of being the mightiest, but I'd like to think that we of the world's fallen empires have moved beyond that for good. Societies can mature and evolve but America is still stuck in the past, in this respect, still pursuing a 19th century weltanschauung (i.e. "Manifest Destiny" as opposed to international co-operation).
A good point, and I suppose it firmly convicts the public in that it's their fault for continuing to patronise these expensively produced but soul-less spectacles. I think my faith in the American market's abiity to produce good movies crumbled when I saw what they did to the ending of Brazil. The purpose of every movie should not be to have every moviegoer leave the theatre feeling warm and content. That's what food is for.
There are scientists of all types of specialisations here. And a good number of the rest of us have at least a college education in science (proper science that is, not the trash you see reported in the sunday tabloids and on sensationalist gee-whiz minority cable channels aimed at the great unwashed).
Very lucidly put indeed, congratulations.
I understand the sentiment but even making the statement ironically reinforces the mistaken impression that it *is* OK. So please don't do it, you are contributing to the problem.
Try this: the resentment which accrues towards a foreign nation that habitually interferes, with frequently horrible results, in the affairs of their country or their neighbours' countries.
If you are going to act like the world's self-appointed policeman you had better be squeaky clean, immune to corruption and free from self-interest - or else all the mistakes, all the bad judgements you make and most definitely all the hostile and destructive acts you commit will be held against you in the most venomous way possible.
The widespread hatred of the US was inevitable, given its foreign policy. It doesn't require the Islamic world to be jealous, or freedom-hating, or innately anti Western. It only requires them to be human, to have a shred of dignity or pride; to own a scrap of ambition to be their own masters free from the oppression of an interfering foreign state. Even in an evil dictatorship, people will still go to war to fight for their country even if they do so half-heartedly.
Most science fiction writers who were once thought prophetic have been proved in the long run to have been wrong about some things. It should come as no surprise. There is no crystal ball.
Yeah. Hollywood sucks doesn't it? The problem is simply this: excepting the few relatively cases where a sufficiently influential artist gets his own way (or funds a project himself) their films are created primarily as products, rather than works of art. Wonderbread indeed.
Historically, loyalty of existing customers toward Novell has been very high, it seems (from the outside) similar to the apple user mentality in some respects. So I don't think it's the products as such. It's more to do with the fact Microsoft took over all their target markets - which was, as everybody knows, a triumph of marketing and not technical superority.
I agree 100%. Until this software patents debacle I felt proud and forward-looking to call myself a European. But this crap plays right into the hands of the "Little Englanders". Worse, it resurrects all the conspiracy theories about the EU having been conceived by a corrupt plutocracy in the first instance.
Until the Commission and the Council of Ministers prove that they will abide by the will of the people, I want no more part of it.
OMG- most insightful thing I read all day.
A bunch of straw men there.
1. There is no "debate". The global scientific community is settled on the matter. Only some paid lackeys of the energy industry are continuing to spread FUD.
2. The science is not "weak". That is why the global scientific community is settled on the matter. Your grasp of science is what is weak here. Hint: you won't find any accurate protrayal of the evidence in the tabloid press, or on TV, or in any of the US establishment-controlled media. For obvious reasons.
The problem with guns specifically, is that they are devices you can carry concealed in your pocket which effectively enable push-button killing.
When devices like this are both easy to obtain and socially accepted, it is no wonder that in the US disputes and arguments more frequently escalate into murders than happens elsewhere in the "civilized" world.
This doesn't apply to everybody of course, but many people are capable of losing their temper under some set of circumstances. And the thing about losing your temper, what characterizes that state as it were, is that you tend to react without due consideration of the consequences.
If you had to pull out a bow and arrow and nock the arrow and hold back the string etc etc, you're more likely to think twice about what you're doing (and of course a bow would be as difficult to conceal as a rifle). If you had to get up close and use a knife, then murders would be limited to a smaller number of people who were sufficiently violent that this would not put them off. But when you only have to pull this object out of your pocket and wave it at them in order to intimidate them, and then when this is done you find that you only have to squeeze the trigger to punish your co-disputant *really thoroughly*...this is a temptation that is just too seductive and too quick and easy to fulfil, for someone who is no longer in control of their temper. And it is available to just about everybody.
That's why I think the US gun policy is stupid, and the US electorate is insane for continuing to allow it.
As others have pointed out, the constitutional reason for the right to bear guns was in order to arm a militia that would guard against tyrannical government. It made sense when the government and the citizens had access to equal weaponry. But it doesn't work in an age when governments have access to nerve gas, tanks, rockets, aeroplanes loaded with cluster bombs, fleets of attack helicopters armed with chain guns and so on, much of which can easily be deployed from a distance. Your right to bear arms no longer fulfils the purpose set out in your constitution.
So to avoid fooling yourselves you need to either demand access to equally devastating weaponry (stupid, too many nutjobs out there) or else face the facts and just give up the guns.
Gill, there is a difference between healthy skepticism on the one hand, and on the other a complete inability to distinguish between concrete evidence and the overly pious skepticism of people with a clear vested interest.
The Bush dynasty's money comes from oil and its Texan powerbase is an oil economy. If we burn less oil they will get less money. That is a pretty direct connection and no far-fetched concoction of conspiracy theories is necessary to flush it out.
The sort of skepticism you are supporting is the very same kind that was touted by the tobacco companies in the face of a century's worth of respiratory diseases research. It's not skepticism at all, it's misdirection. The only kind of misdirection possible when the facts do not support your argument, i.e. "Do not believe in the facts!".
Farming is not unique to humans. To take just one example, parasol ants (native to the Amazon rainforest, IIRC) carry pieces of leaf back to their colony, to use as food for their fungus farm.
It *was* in equilibium, until we screwed it up with our greenhouse gas emissions. Now it's moving towards a new equilibrium point, and nobody really knows what that will mean for global climate change, except that climate change there will certainly be.
However some of the grosser effects are worth putting money on. Since the oceans are already warming up and both (1) warmer water is less dense and (2) there is already measurable ice loss from the poles, it is very likely indeed that sea levels will rise.
And you're missing the point, Maestro4K. If enough customers make enough trouble over unplayable disks, the stores will refuse to stock them, and the new format will die.
I think this might qualify as an urban myth.
NMR was originally used for analysis of chemical samples. These are not scanned spatially, and so NMR itself is not really an imaging technology.
The new name of "Magnetic Resonance Imaging" wasn't adopted for NMR, which is still called NMR. MRI instead describes a new completely new technology which incidentally relies upon NMR in the same way that PET scanning relies upon positron emission and CAT scanning relies upon X rays.
The point being that the new imaging technology would have needed a new name anyway. Although the inventors would surely have avoided the word "Nuclear" for the obvious reasons anyway.