Slandering "environmentalists" again
on
Lunar Power
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· Score: 2
Imagine the moon with a bright shiny ring of solar sails all along the left and right edge. If you can't hear every environmentalist and presevationist crying out simultaneously in anger, you are deaf.
NOW, I consider myself more of an armchair ecologist/generalist than an "environmentalist", but I have to kick up a fuss here.
On what grounds do you accuse "environmentalists", who are dedicated to preserving some sort of ecosystem in the face of our population and business growth, of wanting to protect the "environment" of the moon?
The moon doesn't have an ecosystem of which I am informed.
Preservationists, maybe, but not environmentalists. And Lunar Perservationism is not exactly up and running as a PAC. Hell, as an old O'Neill disciple, I'd rather the moon look like industrial New Jersey if it means getting cheap, eternal power for man. Besides, you'd have a really, really hard time picking out those collectors and transmitters with the naked eye. The moon has a pretty good albedo as it is. Shiny panels aren't going to raise it enough to detect without intruments, in my too-lazy-to-check opinion.
One "environmentalist" in the YES column, please. (Tho I'd much, much rather deploy powersats. Does no one read "The High Frontier" anymore?)
Correct me if I'm wrong but Acadian would be like french-canadians in the maritimes, right? Unless the Rock does dress up like Anne of Green Gables and shouts "mange de la merde" as insults, this is not the same ethnic background as the Rock's character. So is the a typical JonKatz f*ckup, or is there some other race with the same name? Some background info on them would be nice too...
Accipiter sayeth:
It's actually Akkadian.
So yes, it's the typical Jon Katz fuck-up.
Jon Katz actually saideth:
It seems oxymoronic to bother with plot lines in a movie like this. The Rock plays an Akkadian assassin named Mathayus
Well, apparently Da Masta and Accipiter, it is actually you who seem to be the fuck-ups. What is this we-hate-Katz thing? What is this, Aint-It-Cool-News? Does he offend your political sensibilities or something?
Actually, the whole point of SF is to create something new under the sun. Never in the history of man did someone create a galaxy-wide war with genetically chosen supermen to fight as proxies for ancient aliens, as in the Lensmen.
Asimov created the concept in the Foundation series of a city so large it enveloped the planet.
Ancient stories do share common threads, but SF, which Lucas gleefully raided, created new paradigms. Thing is, he never credited the authors, and the genres, which game him his Coruscant and Tatooine.
He put skeletons of sandworms in the desert of Tatooine. It was no stretch at all to draw the comparison because Lucas pretty much admitted it by putting a skelton of a 50 foot tall worm in the bloody landscape.
Well, actually, I pay 30 a year for the fact that Salon actually DOES report the obvious truth -- for the first time, someone actually mentions that Coruscant=Trantor, Tatooine=Dune, Force/Dark Side conflict=Lensman series.
Only true SF fans knew about the relationships. Try finding out about it in Time or Newsweek when they review SW Episode 2. Salon had to write about the obvious because no one else did.
ALL space combat sequences in Hollywood movies look like World War II newsreels.
Luke and Han jump into gun blisters, and MANUALLY AIM AND FIRE energy weapons at craft moving at thousands of miles an hour, gyrating through three dimensions as they come at them. What???
The computer on board the ship should lock and fire multiple times per second, annihilating the incoming fighers. Ditto for the enemy fighters -- they should never miss the Millenium Falcon.
And the laser cannon? They fire similarly to machine cannon on a WWII destroyer. The thing is firing shells, it seems like. Why? Why not continuous fire?
Same thing with sidearms and rifles, both in Star Wars, Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, you name it. A hero pulls out his trusty six-shooter energy weapon, aims, and fires -- a round of energy. BANG! BANG!
An energy weapon with the power source of say, a phaser, should be fired thusly: aim in the general direction of the target. A low power infrared or visible light laser paints the target, providing perfect aim. Then, the weapon discharges for several seconds, until the target is gone. Or, open fire, and simply fan the beam around the targets, causing massive damage.
Westerns and WWII movies will dominate how people think of SF combat, until the day real energy weapons are deployed in battle. Those weapons will redefine combat, because cover will be useless, aim will be near perfect, and the kill almost guaranteed.
I love a good space opera as much as the next guy, but, geez, can they bring the SF level up to 1940 instead of 1927?
What is wrong is that the watermark is there for the corporation's benefit, not the artist's.
And the corporation is immortal, claims eternal ownership of the material, can never be defeated in court by a mere mortal's legal resources, can crush you like a bug, can change the rules at any time, will never reimburse the artist for his/her work, and has no personal liability as an "individual" for legal abuses of consumers to match the "rights" that it claims as an "individual" under our laws.
They want all hardware in the loop -- the PC (sound card, hard drive, processsor, removable media controller), USB, Firewire, speaker wire, stereo components, and yes, the speaker itself, to have digital and analog copy control built in. And any non-complying hardware would be illegal to manufacture.
At first, the implantable chips will be used, just like now, to contain medical info and some identification. And for paranoid parents, living in the safest communities in the history of the human race, it will be used as an anti-milk carton safety device.
The use for medical info is silly. Such a chip could be put into a watch, or a bracelet, or an earring, or a pendant.
The use for children will endear the tracker to parents, but think: if the chip responds to a radio signal, than a rather cheap device can be built to find the chip on the child's body. A person sick enough to kidnap a child would have no problem cutting the chip out of the body. They might even think it an extra dollop of fun.
So, I ask, why a chip...
Well, first of all, it's going to make its developers rich, as it becomes more widely used, and eventually, mandatory.
The first effect of the the chip's existence is the acclimatization of people to the idea that a device can be implanted into them which will enable others to track their movements. Our generation will balk, but the next will be okay with it, and the one after won't even question it. Think of urine tests for jobs, and endless civil rights violations commonly committed today in the name of fighting drugs, and now, terrorism.
Next, the chip will be implanted involunarily into former felons, and later into 'lawbreakers' at a judge's discretion. All these uses will be applauded in the name of public safety. Of course, the number of people now regarded as "felons" is swelling, now that the drug laws are being enforced in a draconian fashion. There are probably millions of people qualified today to wear a chip by legislative or judicial decree.
Of course, a real criminal will find a way to circumvent the device, or remove it entirely. Only moderately law-abiding people will continue to carry it.
next up, you guessed it, Businesses! In the name of preventing terrorism, monitoring employee theft of materiel or company time, and just plain convenience, lower level employees (NEVER executives, unless there is a security reason to do so) will find that having the chip implanted is a requirement for employment. At first, we'll see defense-related companies requiring trackers, but after that gains acceptance, then other companies will follow... eventually most of them, or at least the ones that pay well, will require some sort of tracker.
Of course, Schools!! Thinking Of The Children, we will of course require our threatened kinder to wear these devices as a condition of even having an education. It'll start out small, somewhere -- a schoolyeard killing with no way of finding the killer, or a child molestation, crimes that will make a privacy proponent think hard when it comes to protesting. but like metal detectors, drug testing, strip searches, and the like, it'll be accepted. As the majority of the current SCOTUS opines, if you are underage, you have no constitutional rights. And if you protest, you are a DRUGGIE parent who should send your kids to a DRUGGIE school. (I'm not making that last part up. It's staggering.)
Let's see: next up, consumer convenience. A chip, in addition to tracking, can give you e-cash abilities. Buy a coke, pay for it by swiping your hand into a detector. That may be a killer app.
The chip can be used for national ID, eliminating all the birth certificates, social security cards, drivers' licenses, company ID's, resumes, credit histories... endless stuff. People will find this liberating.
But it also means: anyone who wants to, will be able to track your movements for the totality of your life, at least the parts where you interact with society.
It means that, increasingly, to get an education, to get student loans, to enter the country, to get a job, to have a career, to get a passport, you will have to surrender your body to an implant gun. And now since the FDA has so conveniently taken medical people out of the loop, anyone can demand to shove one into you, literally.
And since the U.S. is now forcing other countries to change their constitutions (think Norway, I recall, and the Scientologists) to reflect our laws, there will be increasingly no place to go to get away from this. Hell, the U.S. may be one of the more relaxed implementations.
If any of you think that this is acceptable, then there is nothing I can say that will change your mind. And I will attempt to establish a new country on a Pacific island, I swear.
Yes, the Dean Drive was a fraud. One of many that Astounding's editor John W. Campbell fell for during the Fifties. Well, "fell" might be a little strong. He defended and supported the "alternative" science crowd a lot more than a real scientist would.
The other was a little thing called "Dianetics", a "science of the mind" one of his authors cobbled together. Campbell gave it star billing as a new scientific theory in a 1950 issue -- a strange thing for a fiction magazine author to do. Campbell was sucked into Hubbard's new business for quite a while until he became disillusioned with the "religion" angle Hubbard rolled out: Scientology. All of this is my opinion, of course, but it's pretty much common knowledge. No one likes to talk about it, because the you-know-who's were as rabidly defensive then as they are now, perhaps even more so. There's a story about L. Sprague de Camp, a critical article he wrote about the dangers of the Hubbard Church Militant, a defamation campaign against him, and a gag agreement he allegedly signed, that I wish de Camp would have told before he passed on.
The early science fiction fen community was mightily fractured on the validity of Dean Drives and Dianetics in the fifties, as well as other notions that I can't remember after all this time. Campbell lost much of his reputation because he had a mind that was just a little too open.
Issac Asimov's autobiography told a little of the story. The rest can be picked up here and there.
And the magazine was "Astounding" until Ben Bova rechristened it "Analog" in the sixties, I think.
Well, it might have been silly, but they did have a lot of fun back then, didn't they?
"I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country.... corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed."
Abraham Lincoln, Nov. 21, 1864 (Letter to Col. William F. Elkins)
You are right. Think of this. One of the reasons why people haven't raised this concern about the new way of looking at the world, symbolized by Scalia and Kennedy (I think), doesn't have a name. It's not "right-wing" or "conservative", words which I have used frequently of late, but only because there isn't a neologism to replace them yet.
It IS a fascism. Business fascism is not quite right. Corporate fascism? How about American fascism? How about neofascism? Should Bush lend his name to it, since it is blooming on his watch?
This is a serious concern of mine. If you can't give a unique, powerful name to a new thing, it gets confused with other unrelated concepts.
Picture this: the church of Scientology decides to nail you, for whatever reason.
They set up a court case, timing the service of process for some time you are not available, and would be unaware of the matter.
After not finding you in person, they serve up an e-summons to an email account you don't use much. Stipulated in the summons: if you don't respond, you automatically lose your case.
After a set period of time, you are informed that you have lost your house, your car, and maybe even your job, depending on many fake charges they managed to pile on you, because the judge automatically ruled you guilty of whatever BS they thought up.
My family, long ago, lost a civil case because the bailiff mispronounced our last name so badly that we didn't approach the judge. The plaintiff, although he knew we were there, swifty told the judge we were absent, and we lost the case by default.
Agreed. And still, no one remembers this. After all, it would require getting the news from someone other than Jay Leno.
The big lies keep alive because people are too lazy, frankly, to pay attention. And unscrupulous men and women use this failing to promulgate amazing BS and gain power.
For truly amazing lies that achieve Truth, you can look at Vince Foster, Whitewater, the last election's "victory", the need for a Drug War, the imminent possibility that the communists were going to take us over any second now... sigh. How about UFO's? Most Americans believe they are alien spacecraft, and that the government, who in other cases can't be trusted to regulate commerce, is somehow ultragood at covering up ET.
The captain may have been drunk, or just drinking -- there is a difference.
But he was not on the bridge when the tanker hit. He was off-duty. His possible drunkeness had nothing to do with the disaster.
In the classic captain-is-responsible-even-when-he's-asleep sense, he was blamed, but he was a fall guy. That classic theory gets his bosses off the hook.
Exxon, to save money, had not installed up-to-date navigational subsystems. One of the richest companies on Earth was cheaping it. Hence the hit, hence the breach, hence the still polluted coastline.
Don't blame the poor bastard. Exxon's greed smashed his ship.
Castration doesn't prevent rape. A castrated attacker just won't be able to get you pregnant.
Rape is NOT A SEXUAL RESPONSE. It is about domination, and sadism, and inflicting pain on someone that cannot fight back. Rape is about breaking a spirit. It is about humiliation. Agony. Suffering.
You can cut a man's balls off, or chemically neuter him. That man can still rape you with a broom handle, or his hands. He can make you service him in any number of ways even if he can't get an erection.
What you'd get in your castrato wing would be what I described, plus beatings and intimidation.
Castration makes people feel safer, but that's it. Nothing would change. The problem is that men in a cage, and women too, get feral, especially when there is no supervision, or the guards participate by ignoring calls for help.
The sick thing is that Americans watch shows like Oz and actually think prison rape is cool. It's joked about. Used as a threat by prosecutors . It's hardly an open secret that America lets rape happen in its prison as a sort of titillating bonus punishment.
Sigh. Yes, you can sign away your human rights. 1st amendment, 4th amendment. You can sign away your children, legally, if you try hard enough. Same for rights protecting you from unreasonable search and seizure. Free speech.
People who have been sued by a rather famous litigious SF cult, for instance, have frequently had to sign agreements stating that they can never write, speak, or complain about their legal tormenters for the rest of their lives. And at that, some of those same people were still hounded by the nutballs -- but could not sue or even discuss the matter with other people. Because to do so would be a breach of contract that could get them punitively fined, or imprisoned. A contract can say anything.
Justice Scalia of the Supreme Court, just this last Tuesday likened public school to a prison: a student has no constitutional rights if the parents or school board so desire. That case, the suit of a former high school student who is trying to challenge mandatory drug tests as a prerequisite to participation in off-hour school activities, is doomed to be tossed out by a court majority who literally snarled at the concept of constitution rights applying to "druggies" infesting the schools. Just a step away is the tying of waiver of one's constitution rights as a prerequisite to attend school at all -- or later, to be employed.
If a citizen demands their rights, the only option left to them might be to live in a forest subsisting on nuts and termites.
Rights are useless if ideologues in both business and governement tie the ability to get an education and a job to your surrender of those rights.
I'm beginning to think that, broadly, a new judiciary that does not recognize Jeffersonian rights of man has been intermittently installed since '80. They recognize sweeping powers for the right to do business -- yes -- but the old standbys of speech and security in home and person are, as another justice said Tuesday, part of the past, not applicable to the new world we live in.
The pendulum has swung far too far away from classical constitutional thinking. The present atmosphere is not "conservative". It's something else entirely, something new and hostile to ideals we've held for over 225 years.
"Although no one believes that the iMac price increase is due to manufacturing costs..."
I do. The LCD production has not kept up with the demand (because people love the iMac, you see), so the manufacturer raised the cost of the LCDs. Ergo, price of iMac went up.
It's not exactly a secret.
The price will go down eventually, when supply meets demand. It happened with LCD displays for cell phones a few years back.
The is no royalty fee on 1394
on
Serial ATA Coming
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· Score: 3, Informative
NO, it does not have $1/PC patent royalties per chip. Apple waived that years ago.
So there is not a price problem caused by Apple.
It's expensive because it's expensive. Because Intel invented USB, and Apple invented 1394, Intel has doggedly refused, even up to the present day, to support the standard on its own mobos. Intel FUD took care of the rest. So it has taken years to reduce the price of the chipsets -- but not because of the licensing fees. It's a matter of unit cost. Since Intel was actively hostile to the (superior) tech, it retarded the acceptance of 1394 and kept production costs artificially high. Chicken and egg...
But thanks to Apple, and common sense, people realized that Firewire was simply superior to USB in every way but price. Just compare an iPod to a standard USB MP3 player - transfer speed enormously faster, and Firewire also charges the iPod's batteries during the process.
So the prices came down despite determined opposition -- the market actually worked, sort of.
Firewired external CD-RW drives and hard drives work fine, and speedily. Putting the drive into the PC itself seems obvious.
The fly in this soup: 1394 developers seem determined to insert copy control into the cable/controller hardware. If there will be a choice between mediocre USB with no DRM, and 1394 with DRM, I'd throw the 1394/DRM equipment into the garbage, even if it were free!
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NOW, I consider myself more of an armchair ecologist/generalist than an "environmentalist", but I have to kick up a fuss here.
On what grounds do you accuse "environmentalists", who are dedicated to preserving some sort of ecosystem in the face of our population and business growth, of wanting to protect the "environment" of the moon?
The moon doesn't have an ecosystem of which I am informed.
Preservationists, maybe, but not environmentalists. And Lunar Perservationism is not exactly up and running as a PAC. Hell, as an old O'Neill disciple, I'd rather the moon look like industrial New Jersey if it means getting cheap, eternal power for man. Besides, you'd have a really, really hard time picking out those collectors and transmitters with the naked eye. The moon has a pretty good albedo as it is. Shiny panels aren't going to raise it enough to detect without intruments, in my too-lazy-to-check opinion.
One "environmentalist" in the YES column, please. (Tho I'd much, much rather deploy powersats. Does no one read "The High Frontier" anymore?)
Accipiter sayeth:
Jon Katz actually saideth:
Well, apparently Da Masta and Accipiter, it is actually you who seem to be the fuck-ups. What is this we-hate-Katz thing? What is this, Aint-It-Cool-News? Does he offend your political sensibilities or something?
Ad hominem, it ain't just for Clinton anymore!
Actually, the whole point of SF is to create something new under the sun. Never in the history of man did someone create a galaxy-wide war with genetically chosen supermen to fight as proxies for ancient aliens, as in the Lensmen.
Asimov created the concept in the Foundation series of a city so large it enveloped the planet.
Ancient stories do share common threads, but SF, which Lucas gleefully raided, created new paradigms. Thing is, he never credited the authors, and the genres, which game him his Coruscant and Tatooine.
He put skeletons of sandworms in the desert of Tatooine. It was no stretch at all to draw the comparison because Lucas pretty much admitted it by putting a skelton of a 50 foot tall worm in the bloody landscape.
Lucas read SF; he knew what he was doing.
Well, actually, I pay 30 a year for the fact that Salon actually DOES report the obvious truth -- for the first time, someone actually mentions that Coruscant=Trantor, Tatooine=Dune, Force/Dark Side conflict=Lensman series.
Only true SF fans knew about the relationships. Try finding out about it in Time or Newsweek when they review SW Episode 2. Salon had to write about the obvious because no one else did.
ALL space combat sequences in Hollywood movies look like World War II newsreels.
Luke and Han jump into gun blisters, and MANUALLY AIM AND FIRE energy weapons at craft moving at thousands of miles an hour, gyrating through three dimensions as they come at them. What???
The computer on board the ship should lock and fire multiple times per second, annihilating the incoming fighers. Ditto for the enemy fighters -- they should never miss the Millenium Falcon.
And the laser cannon? They fire similarly to machine cannon on a WWII destroyer. The thing is firing shells, it seems like. Why? Why not continuous fire?
Same thing with sidearms and rifles, both in Star Wars, Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, you name it. A hero pulls out his trusty six-shooter energy weapon, aims, and fires -- a round of energy. BANG! BANG!
An energy weapon with the power source of say, a phaser, should be fired thusly: aim in the general direction of the target. A low power infrared or visible light laser paints the target, providing perfect aim. Then, the weapon discharges for several seconds, until the target is gone. Or, open fire, and simply fan the beam around the targets, causing massive damage.
Westerns and WWII movies will dominate how people think of SF combat, until the day real energy weapons are deployed in battle. Those weapons will redefine combat, because cover will be useless, aim will be near perfect, and the kill almost guaranteed.
I love a good space opera as much as the next guy, but, geez, can they bring the SF level up to 1940 instead of 1927?
John W. Campbell, not R. He was an author as well as an editor, but his editorship at Astounding Science Fiction defined literary SF for all time.
Why not? They're just a host. And they sure as hell don't shut down often.
MOF, I seem to have ten meg sitting out there unused on my ancient AOL account. Thanks for reminding me!
What is wrong is that the watermark is there for the corporation's benefit, not the artist's.
And the corporation is immortal, claims eternal ownership of the material, can never be defeated in court by a mere mortal's legal resources, can crush you like a bug, can change the rules at any time, will never reimburse the artist for his/her work, and has no personal liability as an "individual" for legal abuses of consumers to match the "rights" that it claims as an "individual" under our laws.
OK?
They are trying to "outlaw" speakers.
They want all hardware in the loop -- the PC (sound card, hard drive, processsor, removable media controller), USB, Firewire, speaker wire, stereo components, and yes, the speaker itself, to have digital and analog copy control built in. And any non-complying hardware would be illegal to manufacture.
Thought you should know.
At first, the implantable chips will be used, just like now, to contain medical info and some identification. And for paranoid parents, living in the safest communities in the history of the human race, it will be used as an anti-milk carton safety device.
The use for medical info is silly. Such a chip could be put into a watch, or a bracelet, or an earring, or a pendant.
The use for children will endear the tracker to parents, but think: if the chip responds to a radio signal, than a rather cheap device can be built to find the chip on the child's body. A person sick enough to kidnap a child would have no problem cutting the chip out of the body. They might even think it an extra dollop of fun.
So, I ask, why a chip...
Well, first of all, it's going to make its developers rich, as it becomes more widely used, and eventually, mandatory.
The first effect of the the chip's existence is the acclimatization of people to the idea that a device can be implanted into them which will enable others to track their movements. Our generation will balk, but the next will be okay with it, and the one after won't even question it. Think of urine tests for jobs, and endless civil rights violations commonly committed today in the name of fighting drugs, and now, terrorism.
Next, the chip will be implanted involunarily into former felons, and later into 'lawbreakers' at a judge's discretion. All these uses will be applauded in the name of public safety. Of course, the number of people now regarded as "felons" is swelling, now that the drug laws are being enforced in a draconian fashion. There are probably millions of people qualified today to wear a chip by legislative or judicial decree.
Of course, a real criminal will find a way to circumvent the device, or remove it entirely. Only moderately law-abiding people will continue to carry it.
next up, you guessed it, Businesses! In the name of preventing terrorism, monitoring employee theft of materiel or company time, and just plain convenience, lower level employees (NEVER executives, unless there is a security reason to do so) will find that having the chip implanted is a requirement for employment. At first, we'll see defense-related companies requiring trackers, but after that gains acceptance, then other companies will follow... eventually most of them, or at least the ones that pay well, will require some sort of tracker.
Of course, Schools!! Thinking Of The Children, we will of course require our threatened kinder to wear these devices as a condition of even having an education. It'll start out small, somewhere -- a schoolyeard killing with no way of finding the killer, or a child molestation, crimes that will make a privacy proponent think hard when it comes to protesting. but like metal detectors, drug testing, strip searches, and the like, it'll be accepted. As the majority of the current SCOTUS opines, if you are underage, you have no constitutional rights. And if you protest, you are a DRUGGIE parent who should send your kids to a DRUGGIE school. (I'm not making that last part up. It's staggering.)
Let's see: next up, consumer convenience. A chip, in addition to tracking, can give you e-cash abilities. Buy a coke, pay for it by swiping your hand into a detector. That may be a killer app.
The chip can be used for national ID, eliminating all the birth certificates, social security cards, drivers' licenses, company ID's, resumes, credit histories... endless stuff. People will find this liberating.
But it also means: anyone who wants to, will be able to track your movements for the totality of your life, at least the parts where you interact with society.
It means that, increasingly, to get an education, to get student loans, to enter the country, to get a job, to have a career, to get a passport, you will have to surrender your body to an implant gun. And now since the FDA has so conveniently taken medical people out of the loop, anyone can demand to shove one into you, literally.
And since the U.S. is now forcing other countries to change their constitutions (think Norway, I recall, and the Scientologists) to reflect our laws, there will be increasingly no place to go to get away from this. Hell, the U.S. may be one of the more relaxed implementations.
If any of you think that this is acceptable, then there is nothing I can say that will change your mind. And I will attempt to establish a new country on a Pacific island, I swear.
You could wear a braclet with the chip embedded, or your fingerprint could be matched to a database, or your DNA, or your retinal pattern.
The chip is a device to monitor movement. All other uses are an obfuscation of this fact.
Yes, the Dean Drive was a fraud. One of many that Astounding's editor John W. Campbell fell for during the Fifties. Well, "fell" might be a little strong. He defended and supported the "alternative" science crowd a lot more than a real scientist would.
The other was a little thing called "Dianetics", a "science of the mind" one of his authors cobbled together. Campbell gave it star billing as a new scientific theory in a 1950 issue -- a strange thing for a fiction magazine author to do. Campbell was sucked into Hubbard's new business for quite a while until he became disillusioned with the "religion" angle Hubbard rolled out: Scientology. All of this is my opinion, of course, but it's pretty much common knowledge. No one likes to talk about it, because the you-know-who's were as rabidly defensive then as they are now, perhaps even more so. There's a story about L. Sprague de Camp, a critical article he wrote about the dangers of the Hubbard Church Militant, a defamation campaign against him, and a gag agreement he allegedly signed, that I wish de Camp would have told before he passed on.
The early science fiction fen community was mightily fractured on the validity of Dean Drives and Dianetics in the fifties, as well as other notions that I can't remember after all this time. Campbell lost much of his reputation because he had a mind that was just a little too open.
Issac Asimov's autobiography told a little of the story. The rest can be picked up here and there.
And the magazine was "Astounding" until Ben Bova rechristened it "Analog" in the sixties, I think.
Well, it might have been silly, but they did have a lot of fun back then, didn't they?
"I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes ... corporations have been
me to tremble for the safety of my country.
enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the
money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its
reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is
aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed."
Abraham Lincoln, Nov. 21, 1864 (Letter to Col. William F. Elkins)
You are right. Think of this. One of the reasons why people haven't raised this concern about the new way of looking at the world, symbolized by Scalia and Kennedy (I think), doesn't have a name. It's not "right-wing" or "conservative", words which I have used frequently of late, but only because there isn't a neologism to replace them yet.
It IS a fascism. Business fascism is not quite right. Corporate fascism? How about American fascism? How about neofascism? Should Bush lend his name to it, since it is blooming on his watch?
This is a serious concern of mine. If you can't give a unique, powerful name to a new thing, it gets confused with other unrelated concepts.
Anyone else? Let's kick this around.
Where are all the Scientologists on this thread?
Usually the Office of Special Affairs (intelligence/spies) will drown the offending site in pro-Scio posts. Come on, OSA, where are ya?
Chicken? Thousands of people who know what you really do are waiting. Kind of like walking into the middle of a freeway at rush hour.
Xenu, baby.
But the decision opened the door.
Picture this: the church of Scientology decides to nail you, for whatever reason.
They set up a court case, timing the service of process for some time you are not available, and would be unaware of the matter.
After not finding you in person, they serve up an e-summons to an email account you don't use much. Stipulated in the summons: if you don't respond, you automatically lose your case.
After a set period of time, you are informed that you have lost your house, your car, and maybe even your job, depending on many fake charges they managed to pile on you, because the judge automatically ruled you guilty of whatever BS they thought up.
My family, long ago, lost a civil case because the bailiff mispronounced our last name so badly that we didn't approach the judge. The plaintiff, although he knew we were there, swifty told the judge we were absent, and we lost the case by default.
Wonderful, ain't it?
Republicans just don't do satire well.
Agreed. And still, no one remembers this. After all, it would require getting the news from someone other than Jay Leno.
The big lies keep alive because people are too lazy, frankly, to pay attention. And unscrupulous men and women use this failing to promulgate amazing BS and gain power.
For truly amazing lies that achieve Truth, you can look at Vince Foster, Whitewater, the last election's "victory", the need for a Drug War, the imminent possibility that the communists were going to take us over any second now... sigh. How about UFO's? Most Americans believe they are alien spacecraft, and that the government, who in other cases can't be trusted to regulate commerce, is somehow ultragood at covering up ET.
I want a cookie...
The captain may have been drunk, or just drinking -- there is a difference.
But he was not on the bridge when the tanker hit. He was off-duty. His possible drunkeness had nothing to do with the disaster.
In the classic captain-is-responsible-even-when-he's-asleep sense, he was blamed, but he was a fall guy. That classic theory gets his bosses off the hook.
Exxon, to save money, had not installed up-to-date navigational subsystems. One of the richest companies on Earth was cheaping it. Hence the hit, hence the breach, hence the still polluted coastline.
Don't blame the poor bastard. Exxon's greed smashed his ship.
Castration doesn't prevent rape. A castrated attacker just won't be able to get you pregnant.
Rape is NOT A SEXUAL RESPONSE. It is about domination, and sadism, and inflicting pain on someone that cannot fight back. Rape is about breaking a spirit. It is about humiliation. Agony. Suffering.
You can cut a man's balls off, or chemically neuter him. That man can still rape you with a broom handle, or his hands. He can make you service him in any number of ways even if he can't get an erection.
What you'd get in your castrato wing would be what I described, plus beatings and intimidation.
Castration makes people feel safer, but that's it. Nothing would change. The problem is that men in a cage, and women too, get feral, especially when there is no supervision, or the guards participate by ignoring calls for help.
The sick thing is that Americans watch shows like Oz and actually think prison rape is cool. It's joked about. Used as a threat by prosecutors . It's hardly an open secret that America lets rape happen in its prison as a sort of titillating bonus punishment.
Sigh. Yes, you can sign away your human rights. 1st amendment, 4th amendment. You can sign away your children, legally, if you try hard enough. Same for rights protecting you from unreasonable search and seizure. Free speech.
People who have been sued by a rather famous litigious SF cult, for instance, have frequently had to sign agreements stating that they can never write, speak, or complain about their legal tormenters for the rest of their lives. And at that, some of those same people were still hounded by the nutballs -- but could not sue or even discuss the matter with other people. Because to do so would be a breach of contract that could get them punitively fined, or imprisoned. A contract can say anything.
Justice Scalia of the Supreme Court, just this last Tuesday likened public school to a prison: a student has no constitutional rights if the parents or school board so desire. That case, the suit of a former high school student who is trying to challenge mandatory drug tests as a prerequisite to participation in off-hour school activities, is doomed to be tossed out by a court majority who literally snarled at the concept of constitution rights applying to "druggies" infesting the schools. Just a step away is the tying of waiver of one's constitution rights as a prerequisite to attend school at all -- or later, to be employed.
If a citizen demands their rights, the only option left to them might be to live in a forest subsisting on nuts and termites.
Rights are useless if ideologues in both business and governement tie the ability to get an education and a job to your surrender of those rights.
I'm beginning to think that, broadly, a new judiciary that does not recognize Jeffersonian rights of man has been intermittently installed since '80. They recognize sweeping powers for the right to do business -- yes -- but the old standbys of speech and security in home and person are, as another justice said Tuesday, part of the past, not applicable to the new world we live in.
The pendulum has swung far too far away from classical constitutional thinking. The present atmosphere is not "conservative". It's something else entirely, something new and hostile to ideals we've held for over 225 years.
"Although no one believes that the iMac price increase is due to manufacturing costs..."
I do. The LCD production has not kept up with the demand (because people love the iMac, you see), so the manufacturer raised the cost of the LCDs. Ergo, price of iMac went up.
It's not exactly a secret.
The price will go down eventually, when supply meets demand. It happened with LCD displays for cell phones a few years back.
NO, it does not have $1/PC patent royalties per chip. Apple waived that years ago.
So there is not a price problem caused by Apple.
It's expensive because it's expensive. Because Intel invented USB, and Apple invented 1394, Intel has doggedly refused, even up to the present day, to support the standard on its own mobos. Intel FUD took care of the rest. So it has taken years to reduce the price of the chipsets -- but not because of the licensing fees. It's a matter of unit cost. Since Intel was actively hostile to the (superior) tech, it retarded the acceptance of 1394 and kept production costs artificially high. Chicken and egg...
But thanks to Apple, and common sense, people realized that Firewire was simply superior to USB in every way but price. Just compare an iPod to a standard USB MP3 player - transfer speed enormously faster, and Firewire also charges the iPod's batteries during the process.
So the prices came down despite determined opposition -- the market actually worked, sort of.
Firewired external CD-RW drives and hard drives work fine, and speedily. Putting the drive into the PC itself seems obvious.
The fly in this soup: 1394 developers seem determined to insert copy control into the cable/controller hardware. If there will be a choice between mediocre USB with no DRM, and 1394 with DRM, I'd throw the 1394/DRM equipment into the garbage, even if it were free!
Not better than Firewire 2 devices, which will be out at about the same time as USB 2 devices. You have to compare apples:apples.
And Firewire supports up to 64 devices, daisy-chained, even on the day it was introduced: USB did not.
USB is still limited by being CPU-centric, while 1394 can move data without connection to a CPU.