I don't really know what the letter of the law is, but generally anything that involves violence or degradation combined with sex is considered obscene. So yeah, that site would be considered obscene under Canadian law. I'm not sure what is meant by "nothing on the site is illegal but it could be considered obscene under Canadian law". My impression had always been that obscene materials were illegal...
As for whether it should be up to the court to decide, I know that customs agents have discretion in decidind whether something is obscene. Another poster mentioned the "Little Sisters vs. Big Brother" case. There a lesbian bookstore was regularly having all their shipments seized at the border over things that decidedly were not obscene under Canadian law. Apparently the procedure you have to go through to get anything back that was wrongly seized is ridiculous.
Day scares me; he seems to honestly, earnestly believe in just about everything I hold abhorrent. I think that to the bottom of his soul he is a good man who wants to do things I consider evil.
Chretien, on the other hand, just disgusts me. I consider him not to have a soul at all. I don't think he believes in anything - he might as well be a publicly traded corporation for all the principle he shows.
If I voted for the party I liked, it would be the NDP - not that I think McDonough would make a great PM, but there's no chance of that this year. I do think that having NDPers in opposition could inject some conscience into the whole process, though. Oh, and in response to the above posting - I think about as much of the BC NDP as you do, but I think the Saskatchewan NDP are great. The federal ones, I put somewhere in between.
So, I'm in the terible position of having to worry about weakening the Liberals - come one, the Chretien Liberals! Under a different leader, it might not be so bad, but this guy shows his contempt for democracy every time he opens his mouth.
I guess I'm just waiting for the day they introduce None Of The Above legislation in Canada
They were supposed to separate the real conscientious objectors from the draft dodgers. The problem was that the children of the upper and middle classes dodged the draft by getting educational exemptions.
Also, IIRC, to be a 'recognized' pacifist, you had to be able to quote the pacifist philosophers that had influenced your pacifism. In other words, they weren't looking for the dedicated pacifists, so much as the well-read ones. That's why Muhammad Ali went to jail for his pacifism - his justification famously started "No Viet Cong ever called me nigger.", not "After extensive reading of Tolstoy, Hegel, and (insert big names in philosophy from the 60's and 70's)..."
Personally, I can see how it would take as much courage to dodge the draft by leaving the country as it would to go fight when you're called up. Leaving the country, you were basically giving up the right to see your family, your friends, your home forever.
Incidentally, when was amnesty granted to draft dodgers who escaped to other countries? (It was granted, right? )
States with a "shall-issue" gun permit law have an 84% reduction in multiple victim shootings.
You wouldn't happen to have any statistics on what happens to their rates of single victim shootings, would you? Or on what proportion of overall shootings is represented by multiple victim shootings both in states with and without such laws?
Not sure I agree with you on some of the details, but I would like to get in a few words of support for the general idea.
Just as a general response to the people who are saying "pollution tax" will never work: It won't work on you personally, because you have souls, and behave according to them. It has a good chance to work on corporations, since they have money at their "souls", and behave according to it. Sure, I'm willing to spend $20 for a $5 bottle of liquor, when mouthwash has just as much ethanol, because my actions are not purely economic. But if you make pollution economically impractical, companies will do what is economically practical.
In Germany, there is a law, whereby any company selling a product is charged, in advance, by the government, the cost of its future disposal. The government is not "micromanaging" anything, it's simply refusing to provide a free service to these companies. Because that's what free garbage disposal is, a subsidy of companies that produce waste, with the cost borne evenly by those that are and those that aren't wasteful.
When this was introduced, corps were screaming blue murder, it was going to cripple the German economy, blah blah. Now, taking a look around German supermarkets, you hardly ever see peacock-tail type packaging. (I mean those packages so common in N. America, where the product is tiny, but the box is huge to take up shelf space - basically a big box of air ) You also don't see much of the sort of thing where two plastic bags of chips are packed inside a cardboard box, which is in turn wrapped in plastic.
As a Canadian, I can confidently say, we are not siphoning your root passwords North.
Please, buy this kit. Install it. Listen happily to your mp3's Dance about the room with abandon, not looking at your computer's process monitor. Life is too short to worry about such things, music will make you truly happy.
As long as the sound card is inside the computer case, there's a pretty low ceiling to the sound quality you're going to get out of a computer. The inside of a computer is REALLY bad for EMF noise.
If you doubt this, play a straight audio CD in your computer, and compare to the sound quality from even a pretty low-end CD player-amp setup.
I've never actually heard the sound from one, but the Mac G4 cube is going about it the right way - get digital audio out of the computer box via cable, and do the DTA conversion in a separate, presumably reasonably shielded, amp. I think you're also tied to their little rinky-dink speakers (BOSE or no, there is no way of getting decent bass out of anything that tiny). Still though, that's the way to do it.
Not to mention, having those 128-bit vector registers could hardly hurt for dealing with decompression of audio files, and the lack of fans would mean reasonably little background noise.
Interesting you should say that. I can't dispute what you're saying scientifically, not having any double-blind test results to quote, but...
In my experience, a good number of ravers, at least the ones who go for the music, not the drugs, can tell the difference between vinyl and CD just by listening. I sure can - whenever a DJ who uses CDs comes on, the fullness of the sound goes down. This is of course assuming that the people who set up the sound had a sniff what they were doing in the first place. If they didn't, the DJ might as well be playing wax cylinder records.
As soon as you encode down to 16K 44.1 kHz, there's some loss right there. And the extreme, rich bass of a lot of techno is one place where that really shows up.
How well locked-down is the QNX configuration on iOpeners?
Not at all. There's telnetd running with standard passwords. You crack one, you've cracked them all.
Can you modify the OS from within the OS, or do you have to download the "normal" version onto a computer with a flash writer and overwrite the original installation?
No write protection, and the SanDisk is just a 16 MB IDE drive, looks like a normal HD to the BIOS and OS.
Is there such thing as the superuser in QNX? Does the superuser account exist on iOpeners? Anybody cracked the password yet?
The cinema comment was just meant as a humourous comment on A. I. Hallowell's (already half-joking) statement. I guess it fell flat.
If I haven't totally alienated you, let me make one point though.
Anti-depressants do not make you happy, if they did they'd be used in recreational ways
Well, I don't know much about Prozac or Paxil. I do know however that some psychiatric drugs are used recreationally. Take, for instance, Ritalin. To judge by the press frenzy a few years ago, there must have been more Ritalin going to the streets in some parts of Canada than into people with ADD. (Of course, misdiagnosis of ADD, medical fads, etc., is another topic.) Perhaps the fact that psychiatric drugs aren't used much recreationally has a lot to do with 'good' side effects versus 'bad' ones. As soon as people pick up on a drug's recreational potential (the 'good' outweigh the 'bad'), it gets unfavourable publicity, doctors stop prescribing it, companies stop making it
After all, what was LSD originally used for but psychotherapy? Has its value been diminished since the 50's? Or has it just picked up too much bad publicity, and become a political hot potato? I'm not really qualified to say. Also, take marijuana, which has great medical benefits for people in various situations. Yet it is not used, because people are known to enjoy its effects - side effects are supposed to be 'bad', anything with 'good' side effects must be a narcotic.
Also, as I'm sure you are aware, psychopharmacology is a pretty hit-and-miss business. Someone I know has been on a variety of antidepressants, and the effects they had have varied drastically. Some didn't do a thing for the depression, but added the burden of feeling like a zombie. Others made her so happy it was scary, you'd have sworn she was on meth or cocaine or something. There is a period of some six months she doesn't remember because the stuff they had her on had her so zonked out.
Anyway, after this directionless ramble, what I had originally intended to say (in this reply to your post, that is) was merely that, as you wrote yourself, mental illness is far more of a problem in industrialized wealthy industrialized countries.
Perhaps this has something to do with patterns of work in industrialized countries - instead of being outdoors, moving around, as we evolved to do, we are sitting indoors, carrying out repetitive, unrewarding tasks (as in many factory-type jobs), or else very mentally stressful and competitive calculating (as in many business-type jobs).
Mass insanity, really, that's getting just a bit silly.
First of all, to shamelessly quote the anthropologist A. I. Hallowell (note 1), It is normal to share the delusions traditionally accepted by one's society. Abnormality involves the development of of a delusional system the culture does not sanction. Consider, for example, the many Americans who saw nothing wrong with Titanic getting all those Oscars, or the many Britons who consider broad beans to be food.
Next off, a few tidbits from the article:
By 2020, depression will likely be the second leading cause of death and lost productivity, right behind cardiovascular disease. Cardiovascular disease? that disease the affects people who get too much to eat? Surely, in most of the world, there is no time for insanity - most of one's daily activities surround not starving to death (note 2)
Gregory Stock... believes medical science will soon allow people to live to be 200 or older... One possible solution-- promoting a certain kind of mental well-being with psychoactive drugs such as Prozac-- heads into uncharted waters
Sorry, that's just too good. In an age when no drug company in the whole world is willing to make, let alone research drugs to treat sleeping sickness, a massive killer in many tropical countries, because the profit margin is too low (read: not enough rich people get bitten by tsetse flies)(note 3), and zillions of dollars are poured into treating diseases that claim people who have money to burn on cigarettes, over-processed foods, and a sedentary life! And here we're positing that in a mere twenty or thirty years, most of the earth's population will be blowing obscene sums on drugs to treat unhappiness! Arhgh!
notes
1 - This is not a made up guy, or quotation, but notice this - his name can be further abbreviated to A.I. Hal. Spooky or what?
2 - I'm just one a them socialist Canadians, I can't help it
3 - don't read this one if you're queasy, but... The current treatment for sleeping sickness is so caustic that you have to inject it from a glass syringe - it will eat right through a plastic one. The effects of injecting it intravenously are what one might expect. And no company will put any money into researching a better treatment.
I'm guessing you're talking about VNC (virtual network computing). That's some pretty scary stuff - it is really insecure.
We were using it for a while at work, so we could restart server processes without getting up off out arses and walking over to the server. (Incidentally, I guess that tells you we aren't using UNIX) Anyway, I was working one day, and noticed that the mouse was moving around on ther server, and the only person who should have been on VNC was me. Freaked me right out... Upshot of it is, we don't use it anymore
A friend of mine was getting this sort of call for a while, about one a day for a while. This would have been from Bell Canada, since by default everyone around here has SaskTel for both local and long distance calls.
He kept saying, essentially, "No, and don't call again.", but it didn't do any good.
Finally, he got fed up, did a call lookup (or maybe he had call display, I forget), and then reported the number to the cops. When they called the next day, he just said, "I've reported your number to the police, and if I ever get another call from you, I will have you charged with harassment."
He got profuse apologies from the operator, and then a manager came on the line and apologized to him some more. Hasn't gotten a call since.
Seems there isn't any legal requirement that they respect your request that they stop calling, but if you keep telling them not to call, and they keep calling back, harassment charges have a real chance of sticking. After a couple of harassment convictions, the operation would likely just be shut down.
As I'm sure you know, choice of photos is one of the major ways that newspapers (etc.) influence the impression people get of a person they're covering.
First of all, no matter how bad the picture is, they can't get hit for libel - "cameras don't lie"
Next off, they even get to control the impression they give of someone in an article like this one, where there is no written content.
Whoever modded you offtopic was out to lunch - the photo (which, if you ask me, looks a bit too thuggish for Rowan Atkinson) is a perfect demonstration of what CNN is trying to do to Emmanuel Goldstein's image. Incidentally, does anyone have any idea which mega-media-internet-conglomerate CNN is part of?
Wow, I'd heard "American politics don't have a left wing, just right wingtip, and right elbow."
I'd never realized it was that true though. Man, that's so scary, I'm even starting to get some respect for the Canadian federal Liberal Party. (so called)
Sure, I was beat down, and have a few black marks on my school record, but I stuck to my principals.
Good call! follow them around, stick to them, and eventually they'll give in...
Seriously though, prayer at school sports has never quite made sense to me - in the U.S., where there is constitutionally guranteed separation of church and state (I'm right there, aren't I?). Compared to Canada, where there is no such guarantee in the constitution, but there would be no question of prayer at a public event like that being in good taste. Ah well.
Interesting stuff. Makes me wonder whatever happened to our school newspaper - it vanished about halfway through my grade ten year. Of course, the people writing for it seldom had much intelligent to say, much less anything worth censoring...
I believe the `halogen' lights keep a special gas at a lower pressure that lets it evaporate but then redeposits it back onto the filament.
That's right, they have a halogen gas. Halogens are the column one (? ) from the right edge of the periodic table (I don't have one in front of me)- flourine, chlorine, iodine, etc.
I don't know about their efficiency, but the gas lets you run the filament much hotter, so you get a brighter, whiter light out of them. In really powerful halogen bulbs (eg. the ones in theatre lights), the glass will get so hot it will expand to a couple of times its 'cool' size. You have to be careful seating those, because if the glass expands and then hits something cool, boom.
The only thing I know of that's hotter & brighter than that is a sodium lamp, which is basically an arc welder with some lenses in front of it. Those suckers will give you a sunburn if you're not careful.
I have seen devices advertised that claimed to generate exactly opposite tones to what was reaching your ears, and so create nodal points exactly at your eardrums, so you really wouldn't be hearing anything.
Not so sure I believe in them, but that's another matter, I suppose
It would be nice if they would only use them. But people who put their subwoofers in the trunk aren't that interested in not disturbing people.
Re:Hmmmm some interesting fallout from that...
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I wonder if it could also be used as a weapon. Stun people with an amplified blast long enough to subdue them.
It already is in stores. Turn up the sound system, and people are too stunned to consider their purchases, and realize how shoddy the workmanship is, or how outrageous the price. The advantage here is that you could keep the customers numb, without stupifying your clerks.
I'm serious. I worked at a department store for a while, where they kept the "background" music loud enough that it took the foreground, and the merchandise was basically in the background. There were lots of people who worked there who were intelligent, interesting people outside (we had lunch in the park across the street). Inside the store, we all turned into idiots though, employees, managers, and customers, because it was too loud to think.
Communism is a total flop in almost any country that uses it.
Can you name a country that has/had a communist economy and a democratic sytem of gevernment? Likely not. Perhaps what you're noticing is not the failure of communism, but that of despotism. No one seems to use Indonesia as proof of the failure of capitalism.
Few people know this, perhaps especially not in the U.S.A., but between the Viet Min ousting the French from Vietnam and the Viet Cong uprising/N. Vietnamese invasion, there was a free election held in South Vietnam. In that election, The communist party won.
The Commies looked like they were going to respect democracy - there was no reason to think there wouldn't be another equally free election in four or five years' time. You might have thought this would be seen as a good thing, or at least not as terrible as a despotic communist system, in the States. Not so.
In fact, the potential that the world was about to see that capitalists didn't have the monopoly on democracy and free elections scared them silly. The democratically elected communist government was almost immediately overthrown by the U.S. army and replaced by an utterly corrupt puppet regime. Had this not happened, there would have been no violent revolution, and the U.S. would not have been involved in Vietnam's affairs in the first place.
There were plenty of autocratic/despotic communist systems around for them to overthrow, but the one they were worried about was the one that was democratic. Perhaps this has something to do with why everyone says "Communism has proved itself a failure the world over." The U.S. was careful to interfere whenever communism looked to be in danger of working.
So, what we have here is an elite of politicians and super-wealthy lobbyist types, manipulating world politics, plunging millions of people (who don't matter because their skin is yellow) into misery and oppression, so that their own subjects (hey, there's that darn vocabulary of oppression again) won't realize that communism does not necessarily entail oppression. I guess that birngs us back to the original point - Information is crucial to waging war; the class war is no exception.
Re:"Laboratory supermarkets" do this kind of thing
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This is why I shop only in small markets-- only there will you find a respect for the dignity of human life in this modern world of impersonal, eploitative Albertson's stores.
The smaller stores don't do the research, but that doesn't mean they ignore the findings of the research.
Next time you go to your favourite small market, pay attention to how many left turns you make versus how many right turns. You'll likely find the store is set up to encourage you to walk around the store counterclockwise. That's because one of the findings of these laboratory supermarkets is that people are more comfortable if they make a lot more left turns than right turns.
Also, the snack foods, chips and stuff they want you to buy on impulse, tend to be placed along the leftmost aisle, so you come to it last and have less time to reconsider and put it back.
Don't ask me why this is, but it's one a them thangs. I wonder if the opposite holds true for left handed people...
Put this setup in theatres. They claim you can make sound "come from" anywhere you want with those things! With one sound system, you can get sounds coming from anywhere onstage, from the audience, or let different parts of the audience hear different things! The possibilities are endless. Most reasonably well equipped theatres now have something like a six or eight speaker system to place sounds where they want, but this could do all of that and way way more.
I meant acting theatres, not movie theatres, but I suppose both could get the same sort of use out of them...
Not to mention, I don't give this too long before enterprising rave promoters start using these things. Right now there's a lot of use of stereo tricks in different sorts of techno, but I can hardly imagine what you could do with this sort of setup.
Of course, it'll likely be a while before speakers like these are made with the sort of power you'd need for it to be practical in a rave.
Or, how about hands-free phones that don't even need headsets - they just project the sound to the area around your head only.
Slashdot Mirror
As for whether it should be up to the court to decide, I know that customs agents have discretion in decidind whether something is obscene. Another poster mentioned the "Little Sisters vs. Big Brother" case. There a lesbian bookstore was regularly having all their shipments seized at the border over things that decidedly were not obscene under Canadian law. Apparently the procedure you have to go through to get anything back that was wrongly seized is ridiculous.
Day scares me; he seems to honestly, earnestly believe in just about everything I hold abhorrent. I think that to the bottom of his soul he is a good man who wants to do things I consider evil.
Chretien, on the other hand, just disgusts me. I consider him not to have a soul at all. I don't think he believes in anything - he might as well be a publicly traded corporation for all the principle he shows.
If I voted for the party I liked, it would be the NDP - not that I think McDonough would make a great PM, but there's no chance of that this year. I do think that having NDPers in opposition could inject some conscience into the whole process, though. Oh, and in response to the above posting - I think about as much of the BC NDP as you do, but I think the Saskatchewan NDP are great. The federal ones, I put somewhere in between.
So, I'm in the terible position of having to worry about weakening the Liberals - come one, the Chretien Liberals! Under a different leader, it might not be so bad, but this guy shows his contempt for democracy every time he opens his mouth.
I guess I'm just waiting for the day they introduce None Of The Above legislation in Canada
Also, IIRC, to be a 'recognized' pacifist, you had to be able to quote the pacifist philosophers that had influenced your pacifism. In other words, they weren't looking for the dedicated pacifists, so much as the well-read ones. That's why Muhammad Ali went to jail for his pacifism - his justification famously started "No Viet Cong ever called me nigger.", not "After extensive reading of Tolstoy, Hegel, and (insert big names in philosophy from the 60's and 70's)..."
Personally, I can see how it would take as much courage to dodge the draft by leaving the country as it would to go fight when you're called up. Leaving the country, you were basically giving up the right to see your family, your friends, your home forever.
Incidentally, when was amnesty granted to draft dodgers who escaped to other countries? (It was granted, right? )
You wouldn't happen to have any statistics on what happens to their rates of single victim shootings, would you? Or on what proportion of overall shootings is represented by multiple victim shootings both in states with and without such laws?
Just as a general response to the people who are saying "pollution tax" will never work: It won't work on you personally, because you have souls, and behave according to them. It has a good chance to work on corporations, since they have money at their "souls", and behave according to it. Sure, I'm willing to spend $20 for a $5 bottle of liquor, when mouthwash has just as much ethanol, because my actions are not purely economic. But if you make pollution economically impractical, companies will do what is economically practical.
In Germany, there is a law, whereby any company selling a product is charged, in advance, by the government, the cost of its future disposal. The government is not "micromanaging" anything, it's simply refusing to provide a free service to these companies. Because that's what free garbage disposal is, a subsidy of companies that produce waste, with the cost borne evenly by those that are and those that aren't wasteful.
When this was introduced, corps were screaming blue murder, it was going to cripple the German economy, blah blah. Now, taking a look around German supermarkets, you hardly ever see peacock-tail type packaging. (I mean those packages so common in N. America, where the product is tiny, but the box is huge to take up shelf space - basically a big box of air ) You also don't see much of the sort of thing where two plastic bags of chips are packed inside a cardboard box, which is in turn wrapped in plastic.
So, it can work, so there.
Please, buy this kit. Install it. Listen happily to your mp3's Dance about the room with abandon, not looking at your computer's process monitor. Life is too short to worry about such things, music will make you truly happy.
Ecretsay Anadiancay odedcay essagemay: enwhay ouyay ootray eethay umbday Ericansamay, ontday ill-9kay ythingankay atthay ookslay ikely anay usicmay ogrampay
If you doubt this, play a straight audio CD in your computer, and compare to the sound quality from even a pretty low-end CD player-amp setup.
I've never actually heard the sound from one, but the Mac G4 cube is going about it the right way - get digital audio out of the computer box via cable, and do the DTA conversion in a separate, presumably reasonably shielded, amp. I think you're also tied to their little rinky-dink speakers (BOSE or no, there is no way of getting decent bass out of anything that tiny). Still though, that's the way to do it.
Not to mention, having those 128-bit vector registers could hardly hurt for dealing with decompression of audio files, and the lack of fans would mean reasonably little background noise.
In my experience, a good number of ravers, at least the ones who go for the music, not the drugs, can tell the difference between vinyl and CD just by listening. I sure can - whenever a DJ who uses CDs comes on, the fullness of the sound goes down. This is of course assuming that the people who set up the sound had a sniff what they were doing in the first place. If they didn't, the DJ might as well be playing wax cylinder records.
As soon as you encode down to 16K 44.1 kHz, there's some loss right there. And the extreme, rich bass of a lot of techno is one place where that really shows up.
Not at all. There's telnetd running with standard passwords. You crack one, you've cracked them all.
Can you modify the OS from within the OS, or do you have to download the "normal" version onto a computer with a flash writer and overwrite the original installation?
No write protection, and the SanDisk is just a 16 MB IDE drive, looks like a normal HD to the BIOS and OS.
Is there such thing as the superuser in QNX? Does the superuser account exist on iOpeners? Anybody cracked the password yet?
Yes, yes, and oh yeah, didn't take long at all.
Motorolla drops the hot potato beats!
The cinema comment was just meant as a humourous comment on A. I. Hallowell's (already half-joking) statement. I guess it fell flat.
If I haven't totally alienated you, let me make one point though.
Anti-depressants do not make you happy, if they did they'd be used in recreational ways
Well, I don't know much about Prozac or Paxil. I do know however that some psychiatric drugs are used recreationally. Take, for instance, Ritalin. To judge by the press frenzy a few years ago, there must have been more Ritalin going to the streets in some parts of Canada than into people with ADD. (Of course, misdiagnosis of ADD, medical fads, etc., is another topic.) Perhaps the fact that psychiatric drugs aren't used much recreationally has a lot to do with 'good' side effects versus 'bad' ones. As soon as people pick up on a drug's recreational potential (the 'good' outweigh the 'bad'), it gets unfavourable publicity, doctors stop prescribing it, companies stop making it
After all, what was LSD originally used for but psychotherapy? Has its value been diminished since the 50's? Or has it just picked up too much bad publicity, and become a political hot potato? I'm not really qualified to say. Also, take marijuana, which has great medical benefits for people in various situations. Yet it is not used, because people are known to enjoy its effects - side effects are supposed to be 'bad', anything with 'good' side effects must be a narcotic.
Also, as I'm sure you are aware, psychopharmacology is a pretty hit-and-miss business. Someone I know has been on a variety of antidepressants, and the effects they had have varied drastically. Some didn't do a thing for the depression, but added the burden of feeling like a zombie. Others made her so happy it was scary, you'd have sworn she was on meth or cocaine or something. There is a period of some six months she doesn't remember because the stuff they had her on had her so zonked out.
Anyway, after this directionless ramble, what I had originally intended to say (in this reply to your post, that is) was merely that, as you wrote yourself, mental illness is far more of a problem in industrialized wealthy industrialized countries.
Perhaps this has something to do with patterns of work in industrialized countries - instead of being outdoors, moving around, as we evolved to do, we are sitting indoors, carrying out repetitive, unrewarding tasks (as in many factory-type jobs), or else very mentally stressful and competitive calculating (as in many business-type jobs).
First of all, to shamelessly quote the anthropologist A. I. Hallowell (note 1), It is normal to share the delusions traditionally accepted by one's society. Abnormality involves the development of of a delusional system the culture does not sanction. Consider, for example, the many Americans who saw nothing wrong with Titanic getting all those Oscars, or the many Britons who consider broad beans to be food.
Next off, a few tidbits from the article:
By 2020, depression will likely be the second leading cause of death and lost productivity, right behind cardiovascular disease.
Cardiovascular disease? that disease the affects people who get too much to eat? Surely, in most of the world, there is no time for insanity - most of one's daily activities surround not starving to death (note 2)
Gregory Stock ... believes medical science will soon allow people to live to be 200 or older ... One possible solution-- promoting a certain kind of mental well-being with psychoactive drugs such as Prozac-- heads into uncharted waters
Sorry, that's just too good. In an age when no drug company in the whole world is willing to make, let alone research drugs to treat sleeping sickness, a massive killer in many tropical countries, because the profit margin is too low (read: not enough rich people get bitten by tsetse flies)(note 3), and zillions of dollars are poured into treating diseases that claim people who have money to burn on cigarettes, over-processed foods, and a sedentary life! And here we're positing that in a mere twenty or thirty years, most of the earth's population will be blowing obscene sums on drugs to treat unhappiness! Arhgh!
notes
1 - This is not a made up guy, or quotation, but notice this - his name can be further abbreviated to A.I. Hal. Spooky or what?
2 - I'm just one a them socialist Canadians, I can't help it
3 - don't read this one if you're queasy, but... The current treatment for sleeping sickness is so caustic that you have to inject it from a glass syringe - it will eat right through a plastic one. The effects of injecting it intravenously are what one might expect. And no company will put any money into researching a better treatment.
We were using it for a while at work, so we could restart server processes without getting up off out arses and walking over to the server. (Incidentally, I guess that tells you we aren't using UNIX) Anyway, I was working one day, and noticed that the mouse was moving around on ther server, and the only person who should have been on VNC was me. Freaked me right out... Upshot of it is, we don't use it anymore
He kept saying, essentially, "No, and don't call again.", but it didn't do any good.
Finally, he got fed up, did a call lookup (or maybe he had call display, I forget), and then reported the number to the cops. When they called the next day, he just said, "I've reported your number to the police, and if I ever get another call from you, I will have you charged with harassment."
He got profuse apologies from the operator, and then a manager came on the line and apologized to him some more. Hasn't gotten a call since.
Seems there isn't any legal requirement that they respect your request that they stop calling, but if you keep telling them not to call, and they keep calling back, harassment charges have a real chance of sticking. After a couple of harassment convictions, the operation would likely just be shut down.
First of all, no matter how bad the picture is, they can't get hit for libel - "cameras don't lie"
Next off, they even get to control the impression they give of someone in an article like this one, where there is no written content.
Whoever modded you offtopic was out to lunch - the photo (which, if you ask me, looks a bit too thuggish for Rowan Atkinson) is a perfect demonstration of what CNN is trying to do to Emmanuel Goldstein's image. Incidentally, does anyone have any idea which mega-media-internet-conglomerate CNN is part of?
I'd never realized it was that true though. Man, that's so scary, I'm even starting to get some respect for the Canadian federal Liberal Party. (so called)
Good call! follow them around, stick to them, and eventually they'll give in...
Seriously though, prayer at school sports has never quite made sense to me - in the U.S., where there is constitutionally guranteed separation of church and state (I'm right there, aren't I?). Compared to Canada, where there is no such guarantee in the constitution, but there would be no question of prayer at a public event like that being in good taste. Ah well.
Interesting stuff. Makes me wonder whatever happened to our school newspaper - it vanished about halfway through my grade ten year. Of course, the people writing for it seldom had much intelligent to say, much less anything worth censoring...
What? doesn't everyone use 640x480 on their 19" monitors? I don't usually put 800x600 on anything over a 23".
That's right, they have a halogen gas. Halogens are the column one (? ) from the right edge of the periodic table (I don't have one in front of me)- flourine, chlorine, iodine, etc.
I don't know about their efficiency, but the gas lets you run the filament much hotter, so you get a brighter, whiter light out of them. In really powerful halogen bulbs (eg. the ones in theatre lights), the glass will get so hot it will expand to a couple of times its 'cool' size. You have to be careful seating those, because if the glass expands and then hits something cool, boom.
The only thing I know of that's hotter & brighter than that is a sodium lamp, which is basically an arc welder with some lenses in front of it. Those suckers will give you a sunburn if you're not careful.
Not so sure I believe in them, but that's another matter, I suppose
It would be nice if they would only use them. But people who put their subwoofers in the trunk aren't that interested in not disturbing people.
It already is in stores. Turn up the sound system, and people are too stunned to consider their purchases, and realize how shoddy the workmanship is, or how outrageous the price. The advantage here is that you could keep the customers numb, without stupifying your clerks.
I'm serious. I worked at a department store for a while, where they kept the "background" music loud enough that it took the foreground, and the merchandise was basically in the background. There were lots of people who worked there who were intelligent, interesting people outside (we had lunch in the park across the street). Inside the store, we all turned into idiots though, employees, managers, and customers, because it was too loud to think.
Can you name a country that has/had a communist economy and a democratic sytem of gevernment? Likely not. Perhaps what you're noticing is not the failure of communism, but that of despotism. No one seems to use Indonesia as proof of the failure of capitalism.
Few people know this, perhaps especially not in the U.S.A., but between the Viet Min ousting the French from Vietnam and the Viet Cong uprising/N. Vietnamese invasion, there was a free election held in South Vietnam. In that election, The communist party won.
The Commies looked like they were going to respect democracy - there was no reason to think there wouldn't be another equally free election in four or five years' time. You might have thought this would be seen as a good thing, or at least not as terrible as a despotic communist system, in the States. Not so.
In fact, the potential that the world was about to see that capitalists didn't have the monopoly on democracy and free elections scared them silly. The democratically elected communist government was almost immediately overthrown by the U.S. army and replaced by an utterly corrupt puppet regime. Had this not happened, there would have been no violent revolution, and the U.S. would not have been involved in Vietnam's affairs in the first place.
There were plenty of autocratic/despotic communist systems around for them to overthrow, but the one they were worried about was the one that was democratic. Perhaps this has something to do with why everyone says "Communism has proved itself a failure the world over." The U.S. was careful to interfere whenever communism looked to be in danger of working.
So, what we have here is an elite of politicians and super-wealthy lobbyist types, manipulating world politics, plunging millions of people (who don't matter because their skin is yellow) into misery and oppression, so that their own subjects (hey, there's that darn vocabulary of oppression again) won't realize that communism does not necessarily entail oppression. I guess that birngs us back to the original point - Information is crucial to waging war; the class war is no exception.
The smaller stores don't do the research, but that doesn't mean they ignore the findings of the research.
Next time you go to your favourite small market, pay attention to how many left turns you make versus how many right turns. You'll likely find the store is set up to encourage you to walk around the store counterclockwise. That's because one of the findings of these laboratory supermarkets is that people are more comfortable if they make a lot more left turns than right turns.
Also, the snack foods, chips and stuff they want you to buy on impulse, tend to be placed along the leftmost aisle, so you come to it last and have less time to reconsider and put it back.
Don't ask me why this is, but it's one a them thangs. I wonder if the opposite holds true for left handed people...
I meant acting theatres, not movie theatres, but I suppose both could get the same sort of use out of them...
Not to mention, I don't give this too long before enterprising rave promoters start using these things. Right now there's a lot of use of stereo tricks in different sorts of techno, but I can hardly imagine what you could do with this sort of setup.
Of course, it'll likely be a while before speakers like these are made with the sort of power you'd need for it to be practical in a rave.
Or, how about hands-free phones that don't even need headsets - they just project the sound to the area around your head only.