Re:Will we ever have *real* AI?
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AI Going Nowhere?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
"The problem with that is that no one really *knows* how the brain works beyond a very, very basic and limited understanding. No one has ever been able to satisfactorily create/reproduce one. There's more going on than just synapses in there, that much most scientists can agree on. What they don't agree on is *what* else is going on in there."
That's what Minsky is getting at. Few people are working on that problem.
Research talent in universities seem to be striving for business solutions. But IMO, such research should be primarily done by businesses, not AI labs. Universities should create new science.
Minsky isn't angry that his AI "theories" aren't panning out. He's angry that AI researchers aren't making an attempt to think upnew AI theories that aren't glorified vaccuum cleaners.
He's right. Theoretical work has ground to a halt in the U.S. Universities have succcumbed to business-oriented research to make money -- although, given all that cash, it's amazing that tuition keeps skyrocketing.
Government is now pretty much owned by corporate people, and they aren't metering out grant money to loing-haired theory about AI. Grant-driven University research is no pretty much a free source of corporate R&D.
Minsky's right: AI as science has died, not because it was impossible to improve the theories, but because it wasn't making any money.
This seems like an organized attack against people who disagree with Microsoft. Do I hear the ninja-like footsteps of Microsoft Munchkins infitrating Slashdot?
Been done many times before. Dvorak called them "Munchkins" years ago.
What about the POINT he was making? That Microsoft was being intentionally vague about whther or not users could opt out of Palladium without hosing their PC's?
Instead, ad hominem BS. MS is learning from the radical right, it seems. Attack, attack, attack! Ignore the message, kill the messenger!
Heavens to FoxNews! This is the answer to every piece of opinion you disagree with? Fire the writer? Can the reporter?
This way of thinking is infecting the U.S. It's nothing less than making an example of reporters you disagree with by destroying their jobs, with the happy additional effect of intimidating other reporters with similar viewpoints from speaking up.
Why doesn't anyone ask these geniuses what the hell their schemes would have done on 9/11 to stop forty or so nearly unarmed men from crashing those airliners?
What is the use of all these expensive, intrusive systems, other than to watch US?
As another poster pointed out, the U.S. mortgage interest deduction has the side effect of inflating the market value of homes. So in the end, after inflation is factored in, we're no better off in the U.S., because the houses cost so much more -- because the deduction makes them worth more.
It's all about perception. There is no such thing as a free lunch.
Re:This is scary, or is it just over-reaction?
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Brain Privacy
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· Score: 1
"They won't be depriving you of life, liberty or property, just depriving you of employment. "
Unless they care to pick up a phone and call the law on you. What's to stop them?
As for the rest of your point, we have government to govern businesses as well as private citizens. Corporations and businesses exist because we, through our representatives, license them to do so.
Businesses should be reined in like mad horses when they go too far. We don't have to "deal with it". We're in charge. They are not.
I will not live in a corporate feudal system. If businesses demand that I pull my pants down and get inspected for spots on my butt, I say we tell our representatives to stop them. If a woman has to date her boss to keep her job, we tell the government to pass a law to criminalize the act.
We don't have to "deal with it" just because they wear suits. They can "deal" with the government regulating their asses, or move to some other country wherein they can rape employees or shove needles into people at will. Not here, though.
Re:Got a whole lotta hype
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Brain Privacy
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· Score: 1
A drug screen is meant to pick up illegal activity which poses a tangible safety and liability issue to a potential employer. There's nothing illegal about thinking anything (at least in the developed democracies), so I don't see brain scans becoming accepted practice during my lifetime (knock on wood).
The screen for certain drugs checks for drugs that have been declared illegal relatively recently.
What is legal and what is not? Is that the real question?
Anything can be declared illegal, including resistance to tests that are meaningless or invasive. The mere act of refusing to take a drug test carries criminal penalties, not to mention the down-to-earth penalty of remaining unemployed or imprisoned.
Drugs don't technically hurt anyone except the user -- with the exceptions of psychoactive drugs used during activities such as driving. But how often have you seen a report of a pot-addled driver killing a crowd of kids? How often have you heard the same kind of report when the person driving is drunk? Yet alcohol is legal to drink.
An activity can be made illegal by marketing lies and fear. The examples are so legion that I won't bother lising any.
A half-assed report linking a certain brain reading to child molestation, or thievery, or murder, or being a Democrat, will drum up a panic that will, within a few years, make brain scanning mandatory for job applicants, drivers, jobs involving children, national security, you name it.
I thought I was the only one who had thought of the brain-scanning angle, but I guess the cat's out of the bag. It is possible to posit ever-increasing machine ability to read the gist of a human brain's thoughts. It's a matter of system analysis to figure out what's happening in the brain, and enough computer processing power to actually make the judgement.
Of course, like lie detector use, the accuracy of the equipment is irrelevant to the faith people will have in the equipment. So, in the future you may be up against a "mind-scanner" that you know has no scientific validity -- but the employer/parent/HomeLand Security gestapo agent across the table won't care about your "liberal" sentiments.
This is getting bad. The only option is to resist this fucking idiocy at every turn. Don't knock on wood -- it's pressboard anyway. Fight.
"What are you talking about? After the the reds siezed power, they executed a large number of people they felt were enemies of their new state. And let's not for get Stalin. He'd have to rule a hell of a long time to kill millions of people one at a time. "
You are intentionally missing the point. A common tactic.
The point is that things start small, with fascism such as we are experiencing. Every "victory" over the 20th century that Ashcroft scores emboldens and justifies what he will do next.
Pointing out the horrors of an unrelated social movement is another diversionary tactic. Yes, the Soviet Union was bad, wicked bad. It is also dead. The Mongols were bad. Nazis were bad. McVeigh was bad.
But the present bad, the Fascist takeover of the U.S., is something we can do something about. They are, as someone mentioned, repealing the 20th century in its entirety -- civil rights, control over corporate power, ecologically sane policies... Racism and religious hate has become de rigeur as a not-so hidden justification for what we are doing now. Father Coughlin would be applauding.
Just because we have not killed millions -- yet -- does not mean we will not. Remember (or rather we DON'T) that the U.S. killed two million in Vietnam. We do have a record of ideologically justified slaughter. We just butchered thousands of soldiers in Iraq based on a set of outright lies created outright by Bush's Project for a New American Century thinktankers.
It just depends on who's getting killed. And who cares about them. If a white man from a nice town blows up a Federal building, the members of his ideological movement (militias, christian and otherwise) are not arrested en masse and sent to Cuba. Nothing happens to those loons at all.
But if members of a brown people worshipping a different god blow up a building, the Constitution is ignored, due process is shut down, and we invade countries ('cause they LOOK like the bad guys, all brown, mustached, and worshipping Satan). And we cheer this on, 'cause we must trust our leaders, who have out best interests at heart.
Unless they are a Democrat. Then, during wartime, say when the President is trying to find and destroy the enemy with no friendly media coverage, the Governent is EVIL, and the President can be harrassed with lawsuits, calls for his assassination (shout out to G. Gordon) are ignored by the FBI, and an impeachment can be ginned up on a denial-of-blowjob charge.
Back to point. Big evils can start small, and this, what Ashcroft is doing, is evil on a scale that can compare with any fascist takeover in history, from Caesar to Mussolini. The manner of the change is completely different from case to case. History never repeats itself.
But methodologies do repeat. What we have is, in no particular order:
- identification of an exterior enemy. whether the threat is real or faked up is irrelevant.
- the insistence that previously held rights be surrendered for the safety of all. logic has no sway -- fear is the trigger. well-fanned fear.
- identification of the leader with the heroism of the armed forces.
- elimination of any oversight over the actions of the executive.
- elimination of all public records of the actions of the executive.
- insistence on obediance in the smallest things from members of the elected legislature.
- establishment of government control of the major media. in the present case, it isn't necessary, because the rightist press has become loudspeakers for the executive.
- elimination by whatever means of alternative press, by physical or other means. marketing is one of those means. disinformation is another.
- demonizing foreign countries, pandering to common hates and ignorance (yes, France, Germany, etc).
- commingling the exective government with corporate business power. This was Mussolini's fascism: he at first called it "corporatism", amazingly enough.
Oh yeah, what a huge disaster! That's more important than anything else in the country! Sure, they did a pretty good job of preventing civilian casualties, but the museum got looted! Get some fucking priorities!
False Dilemma fallacy. You describe the situation as presenting two choices:
1. Protect the civilians, and ignore the museum. 2. Protect the museum, and the civilians die.
A BS argument. Two Marines and a tank, as one person said, could have saved the artifacts of ten thousand years of civilization.
Also, I've some lovely pictures of Marines posing on the sign for the Iraqi Oil Ministry. They're on permanent station there. Apparently, we could "kill civilians" by securing that complex, not to mention all the oil fields as well.
That was more important "than anything else in the country", as you present your False Dilemma.
Why do you think they invented Saturday morning cartoons? It ain't for the kiddies!
You see Saturday morning lately? The networks killed the cartoon lineups years ago in favor of high-profit talk-shows and tabloid news. Something about deregulation.
Nick and Cartoon Network will work, I guess. But, how do the kids live without 2 fps talking dog cartoons?
Oh, anime.
Re:Props to Linus
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Linus on DRM
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· Score: 2, Insightful
"Is it then poor civil hygiene to install technologies that could someday be used to circumvent laws? "
What laws? You mean, laws that we have to assume will someday exist because the MPAA and RIAA want them to exist? Or Homeland Security?
And, install what technology? Stallman wants Linus to NOT install technology. It has nothing to do with creating technology to "circumvent laws".
BTW, when was it anyone's responsibilty to make the world safe for copyright owners -- who now own the copyrights for all eternity?
Bad laws, especially ones that don't even exist yet, should not be accomodated. "The Law is the Law" is a crackpot notion used by prosecutors who play fast and loose with logic. A person who is convicted of sharing music files will go to prison to get his regular once-a-day rape with white bread and bologna, but Ken Lay, who engineered the theft of BILLIONS, will be on late-night talk shows and never see the wrong side of a police car's door.
Laws can be bad, and disobeyed. Lay and Cheney apparently think this is so, with a vengeance.
But creating hooks in an OS (not really the subject here, as Linus is tralking about signed binaries not part of the OS) to facilitate the enforcement of laws not yet created?
I can assure you I've not, and am rather happy with the fact.
So, basically, you make shit up?
So much easier than knowing anything. A true Know-Nothing. Amazing. I just posted about that in this thread.
Immune to facts or reality, you just spouted off ideologically, accusing someone (Stallman) of being a zealot, when you are in fact the ideologic zealot posting fantasies about what someone else thinks or says.
Illustrative of the whole radical right movement.
Re:Props to Linus
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Linus on DRM
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· Score: 3, Troll
"Too academic and pedantic" is American for "too smart." Smartness is not a virtue in the U.S. Read Tom Sawyer sometime: the smart kid was in for a hell of a rough time.
Bush and his ideonauts ride high on the idea that liberals think they're too smart for real Americans. Bush expresses ideas that are dumbed-down, patronizingly so, for people with faulty education in history, economics, politics, etc. He's the President Who Says What's True, even tho what he says is demonstrably false to fact on almost every level. He's a Know-Nothing for Know-Nothings, for the people who think that Saddam bombed New York, that foreign aid eats up 25% of the Federal budget, that public education is destroying America, that tax cuts boost income.
Liberals too smart? I guess so. But not smart enough to hire advertising agencies and take over radio and television networks. You can be as smart as you like, but if your microphone is retracted into the floor, you are helpless agaisnt those who own thousands of transmitters and millions of microphones.
I don't see a way out, other than over the border.
NPR is centrist, not "biased". Congress made their funding contingent on letting super-corporations advertise on the network, not to mention letting in a large number of right to far-right journalists.
What you hear on NPR is FACTS. Backed up by journalists with sources, just like the old days of the '90's.
Limbaugh has no research staff. His fact-checker reads comic books. Limbaugh makes stuff up on the cuff, crudged together from Republican National Committee blast-faxes. His show has no transcript available, so it is very hard to catch up with his volume of innuendo and character assassination, if you are trying to contest his lying.
NPR is news. Limbaugh is a radical right-wing liar in the direct mold of Father John Coughlin of Chicago radio in the 1930's. Like Coughlin, he panders to the basest prejudices of the most ignorant mobs, telling them that they are right to hate whom they hate.
I think that what Limbaugh, Hannity, and the rest of the Know-Nothings really are about is hate. They fan it, they bathe in it.
One suspects that PATRIOT 1 was lying around someone's office for a longggg time, and Ashcroft just got to be lucky enough to rubber stamp it and pass it on up to Congress.
You are so right. That massive document was drawn up in two weeks?? Horsecrap. It was drawn up during a period of years, lovingly detailed and polished.
Someone in law enforcement or politics wanted that law badly, and was ready to shove it in during our nation's shock.
WHO WROTE THAT EVIL THING? Why can't we get any answers anymore?
The Supreme Court just keeps us from having to have a civil war everytime election results are contested.
1. There was no civil war in 2000. There was just a recount, as established in Florida law. What happened was a massive and wel-financed campaign in both the courts and the cable news networks to shut down the recount.
2. The recount was FINALLY proceeding according to law when the Supreme Court stepped in to stop it, citing (privately and vehemently) the necessity of stopping the Democrats on the Florida Supreme Court from enabling the recount.
3. In a decision condemned by nearly a totality of constitutional law professors, Scalia stopped the election because the results of the recount might cast doubt on the legitimacy of Bush's election. Scalia also incredibly stated that their decision could not be a precedent for any other cases.
4. If Gore had been the called winner before recounts had begun, there truly would have been a civil war, the radical right vs. the US. For the last 27 months, infinite lawsuits would have been filed, the RW press would have screamed about Gore's illegitimacy day and night, Gore wouldhave been accused of crime after crime, and the American people would be convinced that Gore stole the 2000 election. There would have been unremitting war against Gore.
Notice that, in contrast, railing against Bush's legitimacy gets one's microphone taken away, metaphorically and really.
5. Election results have been contested thousands of times inthe nation's history without civil war. That's the purpose of elections -- to prevent civil war. The Supremee Court unbelieveably shut down an election to bring closure wihout the messy bit about actually counting the votes, in order to put their ideological copatriot in power.
6. In the media consortium sponsored recount, Gore won. Amazingly, the NYT headline declared Bush the winner, and the incredible results were swept into the dustbin.
7. As a result of the Supremes declaring Bush the winner to "avoid a civil war", the Bill of Rights have been shut down. Bush's people ignored Clinton's anti-terrorism advisor who beggedthem to make bin-Laden the number one problem. Tax cuts for the very wealthy will destroy the social safety nets in the yearsto come. Foreign investors are withdrawing from the U.S. Treaties have been trashed. Fear and marketing have been used toconvince Americans that Iraq took down the World Trade Center, and that lie has established the Holy American Empire's first conquest in the Middle East. The USA has committed massive war crimes - not that anyone here cares - by invading another nation without provocation.
Sadly, from the comportment of the Scalia Five in the last elecion, and Scalia's recent comments that we have "too many" rights as it is, I doubt much that Scalia/Thomas and whomever Bush rams through wil overturn the current or the future PATRIOT acts.
And civilization could collapse and I could take your food and beat you to death with a stick. There goes your inalienable rights to life and property.
I gather that you don't believe in inalienable rights --ie, natural rights that exist because, well, we believe that they do. That all rights are privileges granted by those with power, and that any other view is fantasy and de facto childishness.
Do you realize that you have disowned Jefferson's view of the rights of man? You've rejected everything that the United States was founded upon. Is this what we're really up against? People who have swung so far to the right that they have disowned the ideals of our country? Might is the only right; we're pricks, we're rich, get used to it?
From what I've seen of the neo-conservatives, I think you exemplify what they stand for, from debt explosion, to treaty abrogation, to the destruction of the tax base, and free schools.. the creation of impossible "property" composed of notes of a song or the ideas in a book.
The rights of man do not really exist. They are not written on an asteroid by the hand of God himself.
The rights of man, which we hold to be self-evident, are a fiction agreed to among civilized people. Since they can be denied with the flick of a pen, or an election, they can only exist if people understand them -- support them -- and die for them. This is what patriotism means.
The artsy-fartsy intellectually dishonest people whom you mock are the real source of the free air you breathe. They maintain the big lie -- that you have the right to a constitution that guarantees certain rights to the individual. We, the intellectually dishonest, have for over 225 years fought the "realistic" people who point out that our rights can be taken away with a club. Or a gun. Or a secret arrest and imprisonment at the President's mercy (0).
No gun, no army, no flag can guarantee the rights in the U.S. Constitution, if a majority of the people of the U.S. don't understand their heritage. The intellectually dishonest hippies are the true conservatives, trying against desperate odds to preserve over two centuries of hard-won rights and beliefs against "intellectual honesty" which basically champions thuggery as the only true reality.
It's your wits, experience, technology exposure, past and present learning appetite, critical mind, well-presented opinions and IT culture that will get you the job.
And the ability to work for US$5,000 - US$10,000 dollars a year. If you can't do that, skill mixes and experience won't count for much. It's the bottom line that counts.
Slashdot Mirror
"The problem with that is that no one really *knows* how the brain works beyond a very, very basic and limited understanding. No one has ever been able to satisfactorily create/reproduce one. There's more going on than just synapses in there, that much most scientists can agree on. What they don't agree on is *what* else is going on in there."
That's what Minsky is getting at. Few people are working on that problem.
Research talent in universities seem to be striving for business solutions. But IMO, such research should be primarily done by businesses, not AI labs. Universities should create new science.
Minsky isn't angry that his AI "theories" aren't panning out. He's angry that AI researchers aren't making an attempt to think upnew AI theories that aren't glorified vaccuum cleaners.
He's right. Theoretical work has ground to a halt in the U.S. Universities have succcumbed to business-oriented research to make money -- although, given all that cash, it's amazing that tuition keeps skyrocketing.
Government is now pretty much owned by corporate people, and they aren't metering out grant money to loing-haired theory about AI. Grant-driven University research is no pretty much a free source of corporate R&D.
Minsky's right: AI as science has died, not because it was impossible to improve the theories, but because it wasn't making any money.
This seems like an organized attack against people who disagree with Microsoft. Do I hear the ninja-like footsteps of Microsoft Munchkins infitrating Slashdot?
Been done many times before. Dvorak called them "Munchkins" years ago.
What about the POINT he was making? That Microsoft was being intentionally vague about whther or not users could opt out of Palladium without hosing their PC's?
Instead, ad hominem BS. MS is learning from the radical right, it seems. Attack, attack, attack! Ignore the message, kill the messenger!
Heavens to FoxNews! This is the answer to every piece of opinion you disagree with? Fire the writer? Can the reporter?
This way of thinking is infecting the U.S. It's nothing less than making an example of reporters you disagree with by destroying their jobs, with the happy additional effect of intimidating other reporters with similar viewpoints from speaking up.
Seems to be working. War good, taxes bad...
Why doesn't anyone ask these geniuses what the hell their schemes would have done on 9/11 to stop forty or so nearly unarmed men from crashing those airliners?
What is the use of all these expensive, intrusive systems, other than to watch US?
As another poster pointed out, the U.S. mortgage interest deduction has the side effect of inflating the market value of homes. So in the end, after inflation is factored in, we're no better off in the U.S., because the houses cost so much more -- because the deduction makes them worth more.
It's all about perception. There is no such thing as a free lunch.
"They won't be depriving you of life, liberty or property, just depriving you of employment. "
Unless they care to pick up a phone and call the law on you. What's to stop them?
As for the rest of your point, we have government to govern businesses as well as private citizens. Corporations and businesses exist because we, through our representatives, license them to do so.
Businesses should be reined in like mad horses when they go too far. We don't have to "deal with it". We're in charge. They are not.
I will not live in a corporate feudal system. If businesses demand that I pull my pants down and get inspected for spots on my butt, I say we tell our representatives to stop them. If a woman has to date her boss to keep her job, we tell the government to pass a law to criminalize the act.
We don't have to "deal with it" just because they wear suits. They can "deal" with the government regulating their asses, or move to some other country wherein they can rape employees or shove needles into people at will. Not here, though.
A drug screen is meant to pick up illegal activity which poses a tangible safety and liability issue to a potential employer. There's nothing illegal about thinking anything (at least in the developed democracies), so I don't see brain scans becoming accepted practice during my lifetime (knock on wood).
The screen for certain drugs checks for drugs that have been declared illegal relatively recently.
What is legal and what is not? Is that the real question?
Anything can be declared illegal, including resistance to tests that are meaningless or invasive. The mere act of refusing to take a drug test carries criminal penalties, not to mention the down-to-earth penalty of remaining unemployed or imprisoned.
Drugs don't technically hurt anyone except the user -- with the exceptions of psychoactive drugs used during activities such as driving. But how often have you seen a report of a pot-addled driver killing a crowd of kids? How often have you heard the same kind of report when the person driving is drunk? Yet alcohol is legal to drink.
An activity can be made illegal by marketing lies and fear. The examples are so legion that I won't bother lising any.
A half-assed report linking a certain brain reading to child molestation, or thievery, or murder, or being a Democrat, will drum up a panic that will, within a few years, make brain scanning mandatory for job applicants, drivers, jobs involving children, national security, you name it.
I thought I was the only one who had thought of the brain-scanning angle, but I guess the cat's out of the bag. It is possible to posit ever-increasing machine ability to read the gist of a human brain's thoughts. It's a matter of system analysis to figure out what's happening in the brain, and enough computer processing power to actually make the judgement.
Of course, like lie detector use, the accuracy of the equipment is irrelevant to the faith people will have in the equipment. So, in the future you may be up against a "mind-scanner" that you know has no scientific validity -- but the employer/parent/HomeLand Security gestapo agent across the table won't care about your "liberal" sentiments.
This is getting bad. The only option is to resist this fucking idiocy at every turn. Don't knock on wood -- it's pressboard anyway. Fight.
"What are you talking about? After the the reds siezed power, they executed a large number of people they felt were enemies of their new state. And let's not for get Stalin. He'd have to rule a hell of a long time to kill millions of people one at a time. "
You are intentionally missing the point. A common tactic.
The point is that things start small, with fascism such as we are experiencing. Every "victory" over the 20th century that Ashcroft scores emboldens and justifies what he will do next.
Pointing out the horrors of an unrelated social movement is another diversionary tactic. Yes, the Soviet Union was bad, wicked bad. It is also dead. The Mongols were bad. Nazis were bad. McVeigh was bad.
But the present bad, the Fascist takeover of the U.S., is something we can do something about. They are, as someone mentioned, repealing the 20th century in its entirety -- civil rights, control over corporate power, ecologically sane policies... Racism and religious hate has become de rigeur as a not-so hidden justification for what we are doing now. Father Coughlin would be applauding.
Just because we have not killed millions -- yet -- does not mean we will not. Remember (or rather we DON'T) that the U.S. killed two million in Vietnam. We do have a record of ideologically justified slaughter. We just butchered thousands of soldiers in Iraq based on a set of outright lies created outright by Bush's Project for a New American Century thinktankers.
It just depends on who's getting killed. And who cares about them. If a white man from a nice town blows up a Federal building, the members of his ideological movement (militias, christian and otherwise) are not arrested en masse and sent to Cuba. Nothing happens to those loons at all.
But if members of a brown people worshipping a different god blow up a building, the Constitution is ignored, due process is shut down, and we invade countries ('cause they LOOK like the bad guys, all brown, mustached, and worshipping Satan). And we cheer this on, 'cause we must trust our leaders, who have out best interests at heart.
Unless they are a Democrat. Then, during wartime, say when the President is trying to find and destroy the enemy with no friendly media coverage, the Governent is EVIL, and the President can be harrassed with lawsuits, calls for his assassination (shout out to G. Gordon) are ignored by the FBI, and an impeachment can be ginned up on a denial-of-blowjob charge.
Back to point. Big evils can start small, and this, what Ashcroft is doing, is evil on a scale that can compare with any fascist takeover in history, from Caesar to Mussolini. The manner of the change is completely different from case to case. History never repeats itself.
But methodologies do repeat. What we have is, in no particular order:
- identification of an exterior enemy. whether the threat is real or faked up is irrelevant.
- the insistence that previously held rights be surrendered for the safety of all. logic has no sway -- fear is the trigger. well-fanned fear.
- identification of the leader with the heroism of the armed forces.
- elimination of any oversight over the actions of the executive.
- elimination of all public records of the actions of the executive.
- insistence on obediance in the smallest things from members of the elected legislature.
- establishment of government control of the major media. in the present case, it isn't necessary, because the rightist press has become loudspeakers for the executive.
- elimination by whatever means of alternative press, by physical or other means. marketing is one of those means. disinformation is another.
- demonizing foreign countries, pandering to common hates and ignorance (yes, France, Germany, etc).
- commingling the exective government with corporate business power. This was Mussolini's fascism: he at first called it "corporatism", amazingly enough.
- demonizing and
Oh yeah, what a huge disaster! That's more important than anything else in the country! Sure, they did a pretty good job of preventing civilian casualties, but the museum got looted!
Get some fucking priorities!
False Dilemma fallacy. You describe the situation as presenting two choices:
1. Protect the civilians, and ignore the museum.
2. Protect the museum, and the civilians die.
A BS argument. Two Marines and a tank, as one person said, could have saved the artifacts of ten thousand years of civilization.
Also, I've some lovely pictures of Marines posing on the sign for the Iraqi Oil Ministry. They're on permanent station there. Apparently, we could "kill civilians" by securing that complex, not to mention all the oil fields as well.
That was more important "than anything else in the country", as you present your False Dilemma.
Why do you think they invented Saturday morning cartoons? It ain't for the kiddies!
You see Saturday morning lately? The networks killed the cartoon lineups years ago in favor of high-profit talk-shows and tabloid news. Something about deregulation.
Nick and Cartoon Network will work, I guess. But, how do the kids live without 2 fps talking dog cartoons?
Oh, anime.
"Is it then poor civil hygiene to install technologies that could someday be used to circumvent laws?
"
What laws? You mean, laws that we have to assume will someday exist because the MPAA and RIAA want them to exist? Or Homeland Security?
And, install what technology? Stallman wants Linus to NOT install technology. It has nothing to do with creating technology to "circumvent laws".
BTW, when was it anyone's responsibilty to make the world safe for copyright owners -- who now own the copyrights for all eternity?
Bad laws, especially ones that don't even exist yet, should not be accomodated. "The Law is the Law" is a crackpot notion used by prosecutors who play fast and loose with logic. A person who is convicted of sharing music files will go to prison to get his regular once-a-day rape with white bread and bologna, but Ken Lay, who engineered the theft of BILLIONS, will be on late-night talk shows and never see the wrong side of a police car's door.
Laws can be bad, and disobeyed. Lay and Cheney apparently think this is so, with a vengeance.
But creating hooks in an OS (not really the subject here, as Linus is tralking about signed binaries not part of the OS) to facilitate the enforcement of laws not yet created?
I can assure you I've not, and am rather happy with the fact.
So, basically, you make shit up?
So much easier than knowing anything. A true Know-Nothing. Amazing. I just posted about that in this thread.
Immune to facts or reality, you just spouted off ideologically, accusing someone (Stallman) of being a zealot, when you are in fact the ideologic zealot posting fantasies about what someone else thinks or says.
Illustrative of the whole radical right movement.
"Too academic and pedantic" is American for "too smart." Smartness is not a virtue in the U.S. Read Tom Sawyer sometime: the smart kid was in for a hell of a rough time.
Bush and his ideonauts ride high on the idea that liberals think they're too smart for real Americans. Bush expresses ideas that are dumbed-down, patronizingly so, for people with faulty education in history, economics, politics, etc. He's the President Who Says What's True, even tho what he says is demonstrably false to fact on almost every level. He's a Know-Nothing for Know-Nothings, for the people who think that Saddam bombed New York, that foreign aid eats up 25% of the Federal budget, that public education is destroying America, that tax cuts boost income.
Liberals too smart? I guess so. But not smart enough to hire advertising agencies and take over radio and television networks. You can be as smart as you like, but if your microphone is retracted into the floor, you are helpless agaisnt those who own thousands of transmitters and millions of microphones.
I don't see a way out, other than over the border.
NPR is centrist, not "biased". Congress made their funding contingent on letting super-corporations advertise on the network, not to mention letting in a large number of right to far-right journalists.
What you hear on NPR is FACTS. Backed up by journalists with sources, just like the old days of the '90's.
Limbaugh has no research staff. His fact-checker reads comic books. Limbaugh makes stuff up on the cuff, crudged together from Republican National Committee blast-faxes. His show has no transcript available, so it is very hard to catch up with his volume of innuendo and character assassination, if you are trying to contest his lying.
NPR is news. Limbaugh is a radical right-wing liar in the direct mold of Father John Coughlin of Chicago radio in the 1930's. Like Coughlin, he panders to the basest prejudices of the most ignorant mobs, telling them that they are right to hate whom they hate.
I think that what Limbaugh, Hannity, and the rest of the Know-Nothings really are about is hate . They fan it, they bathe in it.
Doubt me? Listen to him sometime.
And I doubt that Limbaugh "admits it".
And Hates Our Troops, don't forget.
One suspects that PATRIOT 1 was lying around someone's office for a longggg time, and Ashcroft just got to be lucky enough to rubber stamp it and pass it on up to Congress.
You are so right. That massive document was drawn up in two weeks?? Horsecrap. It was drawn up during a period of years, lovingly detailed and polished.
Someone in law enforcement or politics wanted that law badly, and was ready to shove it in during our nation's shock.
WHO WROTE THAT EVIL THING? Why can't we get any answers anymore?
The Supreme Court just keeps us from having to have a civil war everytime election results are contested.
1. There was no civil war in 2000. There was just a recount, as established in Florida law. What happened was a massive and wel-financed campaign in both the courts and the cable news networks to shut down the recount.
2. The recount was FINALLY proceeding according to law when the Supreme Court stepped in to stop it, citing (privately and vehemently) the necessity of stopping the Democrats on the Florida Supreme Court from enabling the recount.
3. In a decision condemned by nearly a totality of constitutional law professors, Scalia stopped the election because the results of the recount might cast doubt on the legitimacy of Bush's election. Scalia also incredibly stated that their decision could not be a precedent for any other cases.
4. If Gore had been the called winner before recounts had begun, there truly would have been a civil war, the radical right vs. the US. For the last 27 months, infinite lawsuits would have been filed, the RW press would have screamed about Gore's illegitimacy day and night, Gore wouldhave been accused of crime after crime, and the American people would be convinced that Gore stole the 2000 election. There would have been unremitting war against Gore.
Notice that, in contrast, railing against Bush's legitimacy gets one's microphone taken away, metaphorically and really.
5. Election results have been contested thousands of times inthe nation's history without civil war. That's the purpose of elections -- to prevent civil war. The Supremee Court unbelieveably shut down an election to bring closure wihout the messy bit about actually counting the votes, in order to put their ideological copatriot in power.
6. In the media consortium sponsored recount, Gore won. Amazingly, the NYT headline declared Bush the winner, and the incredible results were swept into the dustbin.
7. As a result of the Supremes declaring Bush the winner to "avoid a civil war", the Bill of Rights have been shut down. Bush's people ignored Clinton's anti-terrorism advisor who beggedthem to make bin-Laden the number one problem. Tax cuts for the very wealthy will destroy the social safety nets in the yearsto come. Foreign investors are withdrawing from the U.S. Treaties have been trashed. Fear and marketing have been used toconvince Americans that Iraq took down the World Trade Center, and that lie has established the Holy American Empire's first conquest in the Middle East. The USA has committed massive war crimes - not that anyone here cares - by invading another nation without provocation.
I'd rather have the civil war.
Sadly, from the comportment of the Scalia Five in the last elecion, and Scalia's recent comments that we have "too many" rights as it is, I doubt much that Scalia/Thomas and whomever Bush rams through wil overturn the current or the future PATRIOT acts.
It's hip to be square.
(cough, taxes)
(cough. cheaper than private enterprise broadband fiber... wait--there is no private fiber)
(cough. Public internet access is cheaper by far than privately rolled out broadband)
And civilization could collapse and I could take your food and beat you to death with a stick. There goes your inalienable rights to life and property.
I gather that you don't believe in inalienable rights --ie, natural rights that exist because, well, we believe that they do. That all rights are privileges granted by those with power, and that any other view is fantasy and de facto childishness.
Do you realize that you have disowned Jefferson's view of the rights of man? You've rejected everything that the United States was founded upon. Is this what we're really up against? People who have swung so far to the right that they have disowned the ideals of our country? Might is the only right; we're pricks, we're rich, get used to it?
From what I've seen of the neo-conservatives, I think you exemplify what they stand for, from debt explosion, to treaty abrogation, to the destruction of the tax base, and free schools.. the creation of impossible "property" composed of notes of a song or the ideas in a book.
The rights of man do not really exist. They are not written on an asteroid by the hand of God himself.
The rights of man, which we hold to be self-evident, are a fiction agreed to among civilized people. Since they can be denied with the flick of a pen, or an election, they can only exist if people understand them -- support them -- and die for them. This is what patriotism means.
The artsy-fartsy intellectually dishonest people whom you mock are the real source of the free air you breathe. They maintain the big lie -- that you have the right to a constitution that guarantees certain rights to the individual. We, the intellectually dishonest, have for over 225 years fought the "realistic" people who point out that our rights can be taken away with a club. Or a gun. Or a secret arrest and imprisonment at the President's mercy (0).
No gun, no army, no flag can guarantee the rights in the U.S. Constitution, if a majority of the people of the U.S. don't understand their heritage. The intellectually dishonest hippies are the true conservatives, trying against desperate odds to preserve over two centuries of hard-won rights and beliefs against "intellectual honesty" which basically champions thuggery as the only true reality.
I am a true conservative. You are a radical.
It's your wits, experience, technology exposure, past and present learning appetite, critical mind, well-presented opinions and IT culture that will get you the job.
And the ability to work for US$5,000 - US$10,000 dollars a year. If you can't do that, skill mixes and experience won't count for much. It's the bottom line that counts.
Is it technically possible to have a Rush Limbaugh Dittohead filter on Slashdot?
Please?
"Hollywood liberals".
Plonk.
Ah, the fat, sweaty smell of Limbaugh...