You want people to stop being selfish, solve all the world's problems, and in general, become angels.
Since this will never happen, your goal will insure that we will never pollute the universe with our evil selves.
Here's a point: the very things that make us "evil", such as greed, lust, territoriality, warlike tendency, aggresssion -- all of that -- are precisely the qualities that make a species dominant over others in the evolutionary sense. And given that, if we do go to the stars, and meet others, I'd guarantee that those others will be selfish, paranoid, violent and warlike. A species without those traits would not have survived the test of time. If we go to the stars as Zen Buddhist monks, those colonists will be annihilated by the locals - even if the locals are bloody non-sapient crytals. Life is hungry and pitiless.
As for a great future for humanity among the stars: by your logic, Europeans should never have left their continent. Instead, they should have stayed home and perfected their societies.
Well, think of this. If there had been no Canada or United States, what do you think would have happened to world civilization after World War I or II? The Western Hemisphere was critical - CRITICAL - in defeating a thousand years of twisted nationalism, and in rebuilding the shattered nations in the aftermath. If Europeans had not left their homes and travelled to the New World, the Old World would have shattered into a new iron age, and would not have recovered for centuries -- if ever. New worlds create opportunity for those who would want to leave, and create resources that can be used to shore up those left behind, even heal them and advance them.
The fallacy is the basic Zero-Sum game. The idea that there is a finite ulimate prize to human endeavor will concentrate human social toxins, and ultimately kill us all. We need the IDEA of new horizons, even if we don't have them yet.
Re:Spying infrastructures are a BAD idea.
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David Brin on Privacy
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· Score: 3, Insightful
I think a *truly* awful government (I suppose we should define what that is) cannot be elected in a country with a strong free press.
The U.S. has lost a good deal of that strong free press in the last decade as enormous corporate entities have bought entire outlets, replaced their management with new blood more amenable to corporate goals, and overall have created monolithic conservative institutions. We can witness CNN falling to this effect at the moment as "liberal" voices are replaced with moderate conservatives posing as such.
I think power by coup can only occur in countries that lack respect for the rule of law.
I think you both miss the point. A coup did occur in 2000, and the free press you speak of no longer existed to point out the madness in the Supreme Court's ruling, nor the riot in the Dade Count recount office, nor to to intelligently analyze the recount audit released late last year. Our press has become a herd of sheep. The most frightening development I have ever seen.
The constant terror of nuclear bombs I witnessed twenty years ago should pale in comparison to the collapse of a critical press when the current administration seized power. But sadly, the voices that used to shout the alarm have been muzzled.
We are never going to see what the Bush adminstration is doing, not now, not ever. Nor Reagan's, nor Papa Bush's, nor Jeb Bush's.
By fiat, Bush has declared his record as governor of Texas sealed, his dad's sealed, and of course, Reagan's -- a lot of his staff are Reagan's people, and it could be very distressing to read the Iran-Contra records.
Somehow, Jeb Bush got his records sealed, a neat deal since he is violating the state of Florida's sunshine laws.
What the Bush admin wants, and corporations want, and the spooks want, and federal cops want, is access to OUR lives, for snooping, marketing, tracking, occasional blackmail, who knows?
What they do not want is their activities to be shown in the light of day. Ever.
Brin's nuts if he thinks we get a transparent government in trade for us stripping naked on a Homeland Security Monitor's command. We will get a fascist dictatorship beyong the dreams of any Austrian paperhanger.
And ten years from now, a pony nuke will detonate in front of the Statue of Liberty, and won't we all look like goddam idiots.
Not a single thing that the constitution's rewriters are proposing will stop a determined attack. They will get through, and we will respond by becoming even more psychotic.
There is NO correlation with privacy and vulnerability. Singapore, a nation which posts goverment monitors at apartment buildings to monitor the citizenry, was recently amazed when the CIA told their authorities that they had three, THREE Al Queda cells operating in their Perfect, Safe, Orderly World. Their Homeland Security, probably the most insane in the world, was totally flummoxed.
I imagine their response will be more instrusive monitoring of all citizens.
Insanity on more insanity. We discover a fire in our house, and we try to douse it with gasoline. Since that doesn't work, obviously we need more gasoline; and shout down that man over there if he unpatriotically points out that it won't work.
Total transparency for us; total privacy for power
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David Brin on Privacy
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Here's the fallacies I can pop off the top off my head:
Make every transaction, every movement traceable! Use scanners and biochips to make sure no one can perform a terraist [sic: Texan] act.
And how would this have stopped the men from threatening the passengers of the planes with boxcutters? The idea of a suicidal attack is that the attacker dies. What the hell use is the post-mortem activity of a dead man? The ability to throw every semite he knew into jail for the rest of their lives?
If we all lead transparent lives, then we can all live in peace --
Stop there.
The Bush administration has put ALL of its records into a vault, effectively for all time. And Reagan's. And Bush the First's. And Jeb's. Cheney is leading the way to establishing a totally opaque ruling junta. They are building walls around themselves. Hell, we don't even know where the Vice President is!!!
Guess which president's records are being selectively released, juiciest scandal-provoking one's first, by the administration? Oh, guess, guess!! Of course, all surrounding records that may show the releases are out-of-context have been sealed. Why? National security, of course.
Point? Privacy is sacrosanct -- for this administration, and all future Republican administrations. And their corporate friends.
Think of it: you ever read the minutes of ANY meeting of ANY corporation such as Enron? EVER?
Their privacy is sacred. And will remain so.
The only thing we will get from "total transparency" is the loss of common rights of privacy for suspiciously arabic foreigners, all non-corporate Americans, and anyone who pisses off the future right-wing administrations, such as popular former Democratic presidents and near-presidents, and journalists who don't agree with the adminstration.
Why in the hell do sane men suddenly get Royalty on the brain whenever a right-wing adminstration comes into power, but want armed citizens ready for revolt when a non-right wing president holds office?
The current power structure has shown what it will do with "transparency": nail its enemies and reward its friends.
No, I think I'll stay with my freedom, if it's all the same to you.
Make it 802.11 capable, then build generic keyboards and screens that use that work through RF. Bluetooth, if it ever works, would fill the bill nicely if it ever gets cheap enough.
Storage? Firewire enabled hard drives in at your office or home, or connect to your data bank in your house via modem, broadband, or RF.
And hard drives are shrinking. And MRAM is coming in a few years, which means solid state non-volatile storage.
The PC is dead, long live the PC! The world is changing again. I think modular 802.11 micro-micros with commodity peripherals are the next wave.
Al Queda could do the same thing to us from the comfort of an operator's La-Z-Boy.
Careful what we wish for...
Definition of intelligence - it's most basic form.
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Arguing A.I.
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Let's define intelligence.
Ability to perceive oneself as part of the universe? Animals have it.
Self-awareness? Dogs seem to have it. Chimpanzees, elephants, cetaceans certainly seem to know that they are individuals. Dolphins even recognize their own reflections in mirrors.
Tool use? Chimps use sticks to dig with. They can stack boxes to reach high places, which is borderline engineering for most humans.
Language? Chimps have one. So do gorillas. Dolphins and other cetaceans have great capacity for communication underwater.
Now, machine intelligence. Turing test? Simple programs passed limited tests years ago. The more complex ones to come will be far more capable of fooling people into believing they are speaking to a human.
Play chess? Limited, but the best can beat our best.
In the future, the AI's will be able to speak, emote, manipulate items and use tools, even be able to design their own descendents. Give tools, the AI's could even build their successors.
But, will they ever be regarded as intelligent by humans?
Nope.
Most europeans and americans for centuries considered blacks and American Indians as sort of half-people, using great logic and rigor that was totally idiotic looking back from our time.
Many tests for animal intelligence and self-awareness has shown that the subjects can indeed show the traits necessary to be considered sapient. But, after each hurdle, the bar gets raised another notch philosophically.
If I were a suspicious type, and I am, I would say that humans simply don't want to recognize intelligence in other species, much less animals, because it threatens us enormously. Our pride in ourselves, our domination of the planet, and our cruelty towards other species are all shaken if the animal looking back at us in the treetops is actually a thinking being, tho a bit furry.
Religion has more than a little to do with it as well.
Down to my definition of intelligent life:
If it fights back, and wins, it is intelligent. All other players are dead meat.
I had the same question myself over the years. Especially recently, as memory prices dropped through the floor.
Linux has the option of loading itself into a ramdrive, and that's great. But why not Windows 98 or ME? Is it because it was technically hard, or was it instead tht the concept was too alien to the developers? (One ALWAYS uses disk! Don't bother me!)
RAM is faster -- always. I realize you that you can't live off of RAM alone, but at the very least the swap file shouldn't be on disk. I've spent too much time in the past ten years listening to hard drives slice meat as I waited for Windows to move pages off of and into RAM.
Well, if XP provides the option, fine. But I won't use XP. Don't like subscription OSes. Maybe the 2K version permits it. I'll try.
Defacing a website does less damage than spraypainting a wall, but under our lovely new laws, it's up there with murder when it comes to punishment.
Something's wrong here, when such a silly action brings the entire FBI down on you. I think it had something more to do with how someone decided to nail the pinko than with website defacement.
I note a few posts here from people who say that the kid needed to be taken down because he advocated overthrowing the goverment.
I seem to recall a group of screaming white men outside a recount office in Dade county who could reasonably be described as violently intimidating election officials with the purpose of installing their man into power, votes or no votes.
They didn't run websites, or provide information about subjects readily available at Amazon.
They raided a recount office and intimidated them with threat of riot into stopping the recount.
I don't seem to recall FBI agents raiding their homes. No arrests. Why?
If this kid and his fellow ideologues had stormed the Bush campaign, exactly how many bullets would have been pumped into them?
What is going on here? Selective law enforcement based on the DOJ/FBI's in-house ideological bias.
It amazes me that purported highly-educated people, such as Slashdotters, can conceive of the idea that torture by anal rape is a wonderful idea!
A kid wants to speak out against an administration that has little respect for the constitution? Find a "bomb" threat. Arrest him. Shut his site down. That'll show anyone else who has similar ideas how easily they can be removed.
And prison! Hot damn, right-wingers say, as they eagerly imagine the kid being held down and anally ripped for years on end. Serves him right for not thinking the correct thoughts, huh?
Have you wingnuts, at long last, no decency?
Prison rape is only a problem for the poor slobs who offend the government, in this case, or have lousy representation, being poor or unlucky, or have an unreasonable prosecutor who wants that notch on the reelection gun, or for those who indeed did something wrong. Doing something wrong while wearing a suit or uniform and carrying a briefcase doesn't count. Those types get country club jails and when they get out, radio talk shows.
But here's a point: over half the people in prison are there for drug offenses. And are being raped. This kid mayhap linked or showed information on how to make explosives -- just like Amazon.com.
Which leads me to my next point. The executives at Amazon, eve if hauled into court and convicted on exactly the same charge, would never see the inside of our country's beloved, and highly profitable, rape-torture factories.
Think of this: the top Enron officials stole, and that's the word, at least hundreds of millions of dollars in a corporate mugging of the market and their workers.
A thousand street thieves working for a hundred years would not even approach the astronomical amounts that these well-connected established businessmen stole with their eyes open over months under the cover of 9-11. Anderson shredded documents for weeks to cover the crimes.
Will any of these men see prison? Probably a few, and they'll wear orange jumpsuits, play tennis, do laundry, and eventually get out and, if they do not have millions tucked away in the Caymans, will be hired by their old friends, and make millions. Some will work in future Republican administrations, and no one will bring up their past on TV talk shows. They will never see rape in their country club prisons; they will have lawyers and well-paid and efficient guards who won't look the other way while men are ruining their souls on the floor of their cells.
When I hear "that's what they deserve" from the mouths of leering white males, I feel sick for my culture. We're supposed to be the leaders of the world, so our selected President says, yet we gleefully condemn someone to horror for the crime of saying things someone else doesn't want to hear.
I don't see, by the way, any militia people going to prison en masse for their amassing of guns, explosives, and ammo, or for their advocation of the overthrow of the government. Why is that? Let me answer for you: they are part of the same political scene that elected Bush -- the defenders of Koresh, who think the law is Nazi-like for trying to arrest his army, but have applause for an anarchist getting raped in prison.
And here's a kicker: would you boys be so eager to favor rape as a punishment if this kid was a girl? How's your imagination at thinking of a 18 year old college girl raped for ten years? Gets you all happy, like the thought of this guy's torture?
It doesn't? Why not? It's the SAME SICK THING.
I observe here that an immense part of male aggression seems to dwell on sodomizing male opponents. This seems to be a primal urge, and stems from the repressed homosexuality of American males, I'd wager. Why, O why, does it make all these supposedly well-educated and moral men snigger to think of some kid getting his?
Isn't it the very essence of evil, reducing people to things?
I think I'm on the side of the librarians. What is the interest of a corporation in a library? Selling something, getting present and future customers.
A library is a neutral site. The "Exxon Library of St. Louis"... does this ring anyone's alarm bells?
A corporate takeover of media is in progress, and this administration is about to eliminate all rules regarding corporate ownership of... well, everything with words, sounds or video.
What has been the result so far of this wonderful corporate experiment?
CNN and MS-NBC are racing neck and neck to become Fox News. Middle-of-the-road political views have been relabeled "liberal/left" and have disappeared from everything, from Politically Incorrect to CBS News. Or at least are set up to be minimalized by careful selection of viewpoints and reportage. Evidently the head of GE leaned on the NBC election coverage staff to call the election for Bush. Limbaughites have spread out through executive positions throughout the corporate media world, and have performed well -- Bush gets no criticism for outrageous actions. look what he just did for Haliburton! Saved his VP's company from Enroning yesterday by changing the liability laws!
After the complete conquest of the media world, the next step to finish is the rightification of the schools, and the libraries, and the universities...
So, if the librarians are resistant to a right-wing, well, let's call it what it is, takeover of the free libraries by corporate partnerships, it may be because they are highly intelligent people who know a shotgun when it is pointed at their heads. Corporate "sponsorship" has changed PBS and NPR dramatically, and I'd guess that the corps holding the purse strings of libraries would have no problem "balancing" the views expressed on the shelves, or enforcing new ideas about copyright and fair use.
At a past client, e-mail servers were torn down monthly, had replacement hard drives installed, and had the server software reinstalled from scratch - importing in e-mail that is less than 30 days old. The old hard drives were shipped off to a destruction facility (managed by the client). All old servers had all media removed and shipped to the same facility. Any server or PC that was repurposed also had media replaced - again, the old media shipped off for destruction.
What in the hell for, if not to hide illegal practices? Okay, in case a competitor gets a hand on a hard drive -- but why wouldn't the competitor just copy the files?
Harrison Ford reprised the Indy role ONCE in the Young Indiana Jones series. And the time and place were, I recall, 1956, on an Indian reservation.
Indy still had both eyes, tho he was looking grizzled and bearded. TRES cool; perhaps when I get my SooperPC built I'll extract that old VHS footage and post it through Gnutella.
Oh, it wasn't the whole show. He was the sandwich story, much like the old Indy's little snippets.
Harrison was gracious to do that little job, and I never forget that. He could have been a prima donna and refused to do TV, but he did it for Lucas and for the fans. And I guess because it was fun.
AOL is not a monopoly abusing it's marketshare power to destroy competitors. It's a simple-in-concept online community that got so rich it bought everything it liked. But at least it doesn't dictate terms to Dell about online services included on the desktop.
And, well, we just don't like Microsoft, I guess. They're nasty wankers, mate.
I have to agree with your last point. Despite all the panic, hackers really aren't doing all that much damage. There aren't enough of them, I think, of the proper idiotic mindset.
The internet existed for years as a network of trusted participants, exposed to attack, but somehow it never was inconvenienced much by such things.
Let's try building the Alternet, and see what happens. As you say, nothing much so far.
PEOPLE OVER THE AGE OF 32 ARE NOT GERIATRIC. THEY DO NOT ALL NEED ADULT DIAPERS AND VIAGRA.
That screamed, let's further observe that Harrison has been going through life's meat grinder of late. He isn't looking old -- he's looking tired, as anyone does after helping his kid deal with cancer.
The lines on his face aren't all from age. They show experience. The real stuff, not the business kind.
A hero, also, cannot truly be a hero until the story of his ending is told. Now, if the "Young Indiana Jones" series is taken as canon, Jones survives until the early nineties, one-eyed, cranky, and unbelieved by those he talks to if he starts spouting the tall tales of which he's so fond.
Robin Hood fired an arrow into the sky; Arthur gave his sword back to the Lady of the Lake. William Wallace died at the hands of his enemies... point is, a hero's life needs an arc, and Harrison could finish it the way it needs. Let Indiana be old, be tired. It takes more courage for a 59 yo man to fight a mob than a 35 yo. Let's see him fight time itself...
Speaking as a future old guy, I have to say this: being 59 does not make you incapable of kicking the ass of a younger man. You just have to be more devious.
Indy can't swing across a canyon on a vine, but he could be a deadly bastard nonetheless. I'd like to see how they pull it off.
Not to mention, I'd like to see the story about how he lost his eye.
Slashdot Mirror
Besides, they could carry ova and sperm from hundreds of thousands of people with them. Not a problem.
What you are asking for is impossible.
You want people to stop being selfish, solve all the world's problems, and in general, become angels.
Since this will never happen, your goal will insure that we will never pollute the universe with our evil selves.
Here's a point: the very things that make us "evil", such as greed, lust, territoriality, warlike tendency, aggresssion -- all of that -- are precisely the qualities that make a species dominant over others in the evolutionary sense. And given that, if we do go to the stars, and meet others, I'd guarantee that those others will be selfish, paranoid, violent and warlike. A species without those traits would not have survived the test of time. If we go to the stars as Zen Buddhist monks, those colonists will be annihilated by the locals - even if the locals are bloody non-sapient crytals. Life is hungry and pitiless.
As for a great future for humanity among the stars: by your logic, Europeans should never have left their continent. Instead, they should have stayed home and perfected their societies.
Well, think of this. If there had been no Canada or United States, what do you think would have happened to world civilization after World War I or II? The Western Hemisphere was critical - CRITICAL - in defeating a thousand years of twisted nationalism, and in rebuilding the shattered nations in the aftermath. If Europeans had not left their homes and travelled to the New World, the Old World would have shattered into a new iron age, and would not have recovered for centuries -- if ever. New worlds create opportunity for those who would want to leave, and create resources that can be used to shore up those left behind, even heal them and advance them.
The fallacy is the basic Zero-Sum game. The idea that there is a finite ulimate prize to human endeavor will concentrate human social toxins, and ultimately kill us all. We need the IDEA of new horizons, even if we don't have them yet.
I think a *truly* awful government (I suppose we should define what that is) cannot be elected in a country with a strong free press.
The U.S. has lost a good deal of that strong free press in the last decade as enormous corporate entities have bought entire outlets, replaced their management with new blood more amenable to corporate goals, and overall have created monolithic conservative institutions. We can witness CNN falling to this effect at the moment as "liberal" voices are replaced with moderate conservatives posing as such.
I think power by coup can only occur in countries that lack respect for the rule of law.
I think you both miss the point. A coup did occur in 2000, and the free press you speak of no longer existed to point out the madness in the Supreme Court's ruling, nor the riot in the Dade Count recount office, nor to to intelligently analyze the recount audit released late last year. Our press has become a herd of sheep. The most frightening development I have ever seen.
The constant terror of nuclear bombs I witnessed twenty years ago should pale in comparison to the collapse of a critical press when the current administration seized power. But sadly, the voices that used to shout the alarm have been muzzled.
We are never going to see what the Bush adminstration is doing, not now, not ever. Nor Reagan's, nor Papa Bush's, nor Jeb Bush's.
By fiat, Bush has declared his record as governor of Texas sealed, his dad's sealed, and of course, Reagan's -- a lot of his staff are Reagan's people, and it could be very distressing to read the Iran-Contra records.
Somehow, Jeb Bush got his records sealed, a neat deal since he is violating the state of Florida's sunshine laws.
What the Bush admin wants, and corporations want, and the spooks want, and federal cops want, is access to OUR lives, for snooping, marketing, tracking, occasional blackmail, who knows?
What they do not want is their activities to be shown in the light of day. Ever.
Brin's nuts if he thinks we get a transparent government in trade for us stripping naked on a Homeland Security Monitor's command. We will get a fascist dictatorship beyong the dreams of any Austrian paperhanger.
And ten years from now, a pony nuke will detonate in front of the Statue of Liberty, and won't we all look like goddam idiots.
Not a single thing that the constitution's rewriters are proposing will stop a determined attack. They will get through, and we will respond by becoming even more psychotic.
There is NO correlation with privacy and vulnerability. Singapore, a nation which posts goverment monitors at apartment buildings to monitor the citizenry, was recently amazed when the CIA told their authorities that they had three, THREE Al Queda cells operating in their Perfect, Safe, Orderly World. Their Homeland Security, probably the most insane in the world, was totally flummoxed.
I imagine their response will be more instrusive monitoring of all citizens.
Insanity on more insanity. We discover a fire in our house, and we try to douse it with gasoline. Since that doesn't work, obviously we need more gasoline; and shout down that man over there if he unpatriotically points out that it won't work.
Here's the fallacies I can pop off the top off my head:
Make every transaction, every movement traceable! Use scanners and biochips to make sure no one can perform a terraist [sic: Texan] act.
And how would this have stopped the men from threatening the passengers of the planes with boxcutters? The idea of a suicidal attack is that the attacker dies. What the hell use is the post-mortem activity of a dead man? The ability to throw every semite he knew into jail for the rest of their lives?
If we all lead transparent lives, then we can all live in peace --
Stop there.
The Bush administration has put ALL of its records into a vault, effectively for all time. And Reagan's. And Bush the First's. And Jeb's. Cheney is leading the way to establishing a totally opaque ruling junta. They are building walls around themselves. Hell, we don't even know where the Vice President is!!!
Guess which president's records are being selectively released, juiciest scandal-provoking one's first, by the administration? Oh, guess, guess!! Of course, all surrounding records that may show the releases are out-of-context have been sealed. Why? National security, of course.
Point? Privacy is sacrosanct -- for this administration, and all future Republican administrations. And their corporate friends.
Think of it: you ever read the minutes of ANY meeting of ANY corporation such as Enron? EVER?
Their privacy is sacred. And will remain so.
The only thing we will get from "total transparency" is the loss of common rights of privacy for suspiciously arabic foreigners, all non-corporate Americans, and anyone who pisses off the future right-wing administrations, such as popular former Democratic presidents and near-presidents, and journalists who don't agree with the adminstration.
Why in the hell do sane men suddenly get Royalty on the brain whenever a right-wing adminstration comes into power, but want armed citizens ready for revolt when a non-right wing president holds office?
The current power structure has shown what it will do with "transparency": nail its enemies and reward its friends.
No, I think I'll stay with my freedom, if it's all the same to you.
Actually it was Ars Technica sourcing News.com: IBM's Chameleon Computer
Make it 802.11 capable, then build generic keyboards and screens that use that work through RF. Bluetooth, if it ever works, would fill the bill nicely if it ever gets cheap enough.
Storage? Firewire enabled hard drives in at your office or home, or connect to your data bank in your house via modem, broadband, or RF.
And hard drives are shrinking. And MRAM is coming in a few years, which means solid state non-volatile storage.
The PC is dead, long live the PC! The world is changing again. I think modular 802.11 micro-micros with commodity peripherals are the next wave.
And what a HELL of an e-book reader it could be!
Ow. Barber, a little off the top, I would think.
Al Queda could do the same thing to us from the comfort of an operator's La-Z-Boy.
Careful what we wish for...
Let's define intelligence.
Ability to perceive oneself as part of the universe? Animals have it.
Self-awareness? Dogs seem to have it. Chimpanzees, elephants, cetaceans certainly seem to know that they are individuals. Dolphins even recognize their own reflections in mirrors.
Tool use? Chimps use sticks to dig with. They can stack boxes to reach high places, which is borderline engineering for most humans.
Language? Chimps have one. So do gorillas. Dolphins and other cetaceans have great capacity for communication underwater.
Now, machine intelligence. Turing test? Simple programs passed limited tests years ago. The more complex ones to come will be far more capable of fooling people into believing they are speaking to a human.
Play chess? Limited, but the best can beat our best.
In the future, the AI's will be able to speak, emote, manipulate items and use tools, even be able to design their own descendents. Give tools, the AI's could even build their successors.
But, will they ever be regarded as intelligent by humans?
Nope.
Most europeans and americans for centuries considered blacks and American Indians as sort of half-people, using great logic and rigor that was totally idiotic looking back from our time.
Many tests for animal intelligence and self-awareness has shown that the subjects can indeed show the traits necessary to be considered sapient. But, after each hurdle, the bar gets raised another notch philosophically.
If I were a suspicious type, and I am, I would say that humans simply don't want to recognize intelligence in other species, much less animals, because it threatens us enormously. Our pride in ourselves, our domination of the planet, and our cruelty towards other species are all shaken if the animal looking back at us in the treetops is actually a thinking being, tho a bit furry.
Religion has more than a little to do with it as well.
Down to my definition of intelligent life:
If it fights back, and wins, it is intelligent. All other players are dead meat.
a least completely.
I had the same question myself over the years. Especially recently, as memory prices dropped through the floor.
Linux has the option of loading itself into a ramdrive, and that's great. But why not Windows 98 or ME? Is it because it was technically hard, or was it instead tht the concept was too alien to the developers? (One ALWAYS uses disk! Don't bother me!)
RAM is faster -- always. I realize you that you can't live off of RAM alone, but at the very least the swap file shouldn't be on disk. I've spent too much time in the past ten years listening to hard drives slice meat as I waited for Windows to move pages off of and into RAM.
Well, if XP provides the option, fine. But I won't use XP. Don't like subscription OSes. Maybe the 2K version permits it. I'll try.
Wonder how much of computing is just bad habits?
Or W. Bush, passed out drunk on the floor until he was forty?
Defacing a website does less damage than spraypainting a wall, but under our lovely new laws, it's up there with murder when it comes to punishment.
Something's wrong here, when such a silly action brings the entire FBI down on you. I think it had something more to do with how someone decided to nail the pinko than with website defacement.
I note a few posts here from people who say that the kid needed to be taken down because he advocated overthrowing the goverment.
I seem to recall a group of screaming white men outside a recount office in Dade county who could reasonably be described as violently intimidating election officials with the purpose of installing their man into power, votes or no votes.
They didn't run websites, or provide information about subjects readily available at Amazon.
They raided a recount office and intimidated them with threat of riot into stopping the recount.
I don't seem to recall FBI agents raiding their homes. No arrests. Why?
If this kid and his fellow ideologues had stormed the Bush campaign, exactly how many bullets would have been pumped into them?
What is going on here? Selective law enforcement based on the DOJ/FBI's in-house ideological bias.
And here's why.
It amazes me that purported highly-educated people, such as Slashdotters, can conceive of the idea that torture by anal rape is a wonderful idea!
A kid wants to speak out against an administration that has little respect for the constitution? Find a "bomb" threat. Arrest him. Shut his site down. That'll show anyone else who has similar ideas how easily they can be removed.
And prison! Hot damn, right-wingers say, as they eagerly imagine the kid being held down and anally ripped for years on end. Serves him right for not thinking the correct thoughts, huh?
Have you wingnuts, at long last, no decency?
Prison rape is only a problem for the poor slobs who offend the government, in this case, or have lousy representation, being poor or unlucky, or have an unreasonable prosecutor who wants that notch on the reelection gun, or for those who indeed did something wrong. Doing something wrong while wearing a suit or uniform and carrying a briefcase doesn't count. Those types get country club jails and when they get out, radio talk shows.
But here's a point: over half the people in prison are there for drug offenses. And are being raped. This kid mayhap linked or showed information on how to make explosives -- just like Amazon.com.
Which leads me to my next point. The executives at Amazon, eve if hauled into court and convicted on exactly the same charge, would never see the inside of our country's beloved, and highly profitable, rape-torture factories.
Think of this: the top Enron officials stole, and that's the word, at least hundreds of millions of dollars in a corporate mugging of the market and their workers.
A thousand street thieves working for a hundred years would not even approach the astronomical amounts that these well-connected established businessmen stole with their eyes open over months under the cover of 9-11. Anderson shredded documents for weeks to cover the crimes.
Will any of these men see prison? Probably a few, and they'll wear orange jumpsuits, play tennis, do laundry, and eventually get out and, if they do not have millions tucked away in the Caymans, will be hired by their old friends, and make millions. Some will work in future Republican administrations, and no one will bring up their past on TV talk shows. They will never see rape in their country club prisons; they will have lawyers and well-paid and efficient guards who won't look the other way while men are ruining their souls on the floor of their cells.
When I hear "that's what they deserve" from the mouths of leering white males, I feel sick for my culture. We're supposed to be the leaders of the world, so our selected President says, yet we gleefully condemn someone to horror for the crime of saying things someone else doesn't want to hear.
I don't see, by the way, any militia people going to prison en masse for their amassing of guns, explosives, and ammo, or for their advocation of the overthrow of the government. Why is that? Let me answer for you: they are part of the same political scene that elected Bush -- the defenders of Koresh, who think the law is Nazi-like for trying to arrest his army, but have applause for an anarchist getting raped in prison.
And here's a kicker: would you boys be so eager to favor rape as a punishment if this kid was a girl? How's your imagination at thinking of a 18 year old college girl raped for ten years? Gets you all happy, like the thought of this guy's torture?
It doesn't? Why not? It's the SAME SICK THING.
I observe here that an immense part of male aggression seems to dwell on sodomizing male opponents. This seems to be a primal urge, and stems from the repressed homosexuality of American males, I'd wager. Why, O why, does it make all these supposedly well-educated and moral men snigger to think of some kid getting his?
Isn't it the very essence of evil, reducing people to things?
Think about it.
Actually, I remember an interview with Weird Al in which he stated categorically that he thought he had obtained permission.
Coolio insists that he didn't, but I tend to believe Al. Weird Al always gets permission as simple courtesy.
"Now, with the corporate sector moving in,"
I think I'm on the side of the librarians. What is the interest of a corporation in a library? Selling something, getting present and future customers.
A library is a neutral site. The "Exxon Library of St. Louis"... does this ring anyone's alarm bells?
A corporate takeover of media is in progress, and this administration is about to eliminate all rules regarding corporate ownership of... well, everything with words, sounds or video.
What has been the result so far of this wonderful corporate experiment?
CNN and MS-NBC are racing neck and neck to become Fox News. Middle-of-the-road political views have been relabeled "liberal/left" and have disappeared from everything, from Politically Incorrect to CBS News. Or at least are set up to be minimalized by careful selection of viewpoints and reportage. Evidently the head of GE leaned on the NBC election coverage staff to call the election for Bush. Limbaughites have spread out through executive positions throughout the corporate media world, and have performed well -- Bush gets no criticism for outrageous actions. look what he just did for Haliburton! Saved his VP's company from Enroning yesterday by changing the liability laws!
After the complete conquest of the media world, the next step to finish is the rightification of the schools, and the libraries, and the universities...
So, if the librarians are resistant to a right-wing, well, let's call it what it is, takeover of the free libraries by corporate partnerships, it may be because they are highly intelligent people who know a shotgun when it is pointed at their heads. Corporate "sponsorship" has changed PBS and NPR dramatically, and I'd guess that the corps holding the purse strings of libraries would have no problem "balancing" the views expressed on the shelves, or enforcing new ideas about copyright and fair use.
Corps don't have consciences, and librarians do.
What in the hell for, if not to hide illegal practices? Okay, in case a competitor gets a hand on a hard drive -- but why wouldn't the competitor just copy the files?
What a waste of hardware!
Little known trivia:
Harrison Ford reprised the Indy role ONCE in the Young Indiana Jones series. And the time and place were, I recall, 1956, on an Indian reservation.
Indy still had both eyes, tho he was looking grizzled and bearded. TRES cool; perhaps when I get my SooperPC built I'll extract that old VHS footage and post it through Gnutella.
Oh, it wasn't the whole show. He was the sandwich story, much like the old Indy's little snippets.
Harrison was gracious to do that little job, and I never forget that. He could have been a prima donna and refused to do TV, but he did it for Lucas and for the fans. And I guess because it was fun.
AOL is not a monopoly abusing it's marketshare power to destroy competitors. It's a simple-in-concept online community that got so rich it bought everything it liked. But at least it doesn't dictate terms to Dell about online services included on the desktop.
And, well, we just don't like Microsoft, I guess. They're nasty wankers, mate.
I have to agree with your last point. Despite all the panic, hackers really aren't doing all that much damage. There aren't enough of them, I think, of the proper idiotic mindset.
The internet existed for years as a network of trusted participants, exposed to attack, but somehow it never was inconvenienced much by such things.
Let's try building the Alternet, and see what happens. As you say, nothing much so far.
A MAN OF FIFTY NINE YEARS IS NOT OLD.
HARRISON IS MIDDLE-AGED.
NOT OLD.
PEOPLE OVER THE AGE OF 32 ARE NOT GERIATRIC. THEY DO NOT ALL NEED ADULT DIAPERS AND VIAGRA.
That screamed, let's further observe that Harrison has been going through life's meat grinder of late. He isn't looking old -- he's looking tired, as anyone does after helping his kid deal with cancer.
The lines on his face aren't all from age. They show experience. The real stuff, not the business kind.
A hero, also, cannot truly be a hero until the story of his ending is told. Now, if the "Young Indiana Jones" series is taken as canon, Jones survives until the early nineties, one-eyed, cranky, and unbelieved by those he talks to if he starts spouting the tall tales of which he's so fond.
Robin Hood fired an arrow into the sky; Arthur gave his sword back to the Lady of the Lake. William Wallace died at the hands of his enemies... point is, a hero's life needs an arc, and Harrison could finish it the way it needs. Let Indiana be old, be tired. It takes more courage for a 59 yo man to fight a mob than a 35 yo. Let's see him fight time itself...
Interview with Spielberg, Kapshaw, and Ford himself.
My advice to the yunguns: take your vitamin supplements now. Taking them when you're 59 ain't gonna help ya much.
Speaking as a future old guy, I have to say this: being 59 does not make you incapable of kicking the ass of a younger man. You just have to be more devious.
Indy can't swing across a canyon on a vine, but he could be a deadly bastard nonetheless. I'd like to see how they pull it off.
Not to mention, I'd like to see the story about how he lost his eye.