It's the heart of the matter. Scio's, top level ones, do not, NOT want the Xenu story spread about. That was what the Swedish case was about: stopping the Xenu story from becoming public. The U.S. mysteriously intervened in the internal affairs of Sweden to prevent the material, now a public court document there, from becoming public.
The Xenu/body thetan arc is the basis of all high-level Scientology, their Genesis. But you have to prove yourself over many years, and pay much money (in cash or time) to get access -- at which point you don't have much critical thought left.
The widespread leakage of the Xenu story is ruining their recruitment efforts and making them the laughing stocks they should have been always, if they had not used trade secret laws to hide the story.
The Scienos were the first attackers of internet freedoms, claiming defamation and copyright violations at every opportunity to shut critics the hell up. But every time they squeeze, the just make a bigger mess...
The Fishman Affidavit was always suspect. Take it with a grain of salt. Interesting reading tho. I'd rather hear about the McPherson Trust or the Mark Bunker case in Chicago; those stories have honest-to-Xenu day by day really real harrassment by the Sci organization which would make the most paranoid Slashdotter's toes curl.
It ain't a religion, it's a floor wax.. no, it's a dairy topping...
Microsoft was one of Iridium's initial investors. Bill G. paid squillions. They wouldn't be able to buy back their own company, as it were, for fractions of a penny on the dollar.
Tell that to Manuel Noriega. We seem to have killed hundreds/thousands of foreign nationals to get him, too. Oh, and has he ever been tried for a crime yet, or is he still in limbo?
Delta Clipper didn't crash and burn. What happened was a tech forgot to reconnect a hydraulic line to one of the landing struts. DC simply tipped over on landing. A horrible, horrible waste. BTW: the 33/34 programs were an utter waste of time and money... the DC concept was workable and CHEAP. But it had no wings, didn't cost hundreds of billions, and made the reusable winged vehicles look silly and overpriced.
Mayhap, then, simpler software? Back-to-Basics? Do we really nead all the overhead Windows requires? And... maybe a processor would be simple, but what if you made *banks* of them? What if you could roll them off on a plastic tape, as many as you needed?
Even if Florescent Multilayer Disks can be produced cheaply (and they can), or a way found to make terabytes of holographic storage affordable on a consumer level, the introduction of such technologies would devastate existing investments in all sorts of technologies.
Hundreds of billions of dollars in market value of very large companies would be wiped out in months.
It is not in the free market's best interest to change things too quickly. Think of light bulbs that last ten years, or the still expensive and hard to find nickle-metal-hydride consumer batteries.
Cheap 'n easy holo storage probably could have been achieved long before now; I've read about such research for almost twenty years. But investment is in hard drive R&D and manufacture now, and it's doing well for everyone.
Sometimes the market giveth, and sometime it holdeth back, not maliciously, but because it is in an industry's interest to keep things as they are. The tech will be rolled out on a schedule to suit the industry's bottom line. It can't really do it any other way. The market would demand terabyte cheap storage, but the impetus will be to keep current tech until at least depreciation on plant runs out for hard drive manufacturing.
Worry, damnit, worry. They can get the Koreans to comply. Don't ya'all get it? They will do whatever is necessary to copy control every video. audio, and book device. Fair Use is dying. And Nero keeps playing his video games.
Rights we have taken for granted for years, such as time-shifting, ownership of copied media for non-commercial purposes, even the simple act of lending a book/tape/cart to a friend, are going bye-bye.
The free market cannot save us from this, because it is the free market creating the copy control in the first place! Markets are not by nature free; they need constant monitoring to keep them from becoming immortal monopolies.
It was never illegal. They simply don't want them in government jobs, because the Scienos tend to plant honest-to-god spies in key positions around the world when they can. History and court records show they think they are fighting a covert war against psychiatrists and taxmen, among MANY other things. The majority of converts don't do such things, but the official organization does it all the time.
Back to the point, it was never illegal. But it is generally thought of as a public mental health danger and a fraud.
If you wish to practice Scientology, stay away from Germany.
The Scientologists in Germany aren't practicing: they're really good at it, which is why they are prohibited from government jobs.
Germany overall, not being chicken#%$& like the U.S., has decided that the Scientologists aren't a religion, but a business dedicated to converting the gullible, and obtaining as much money from them as possible. They operate under hundreds of false corporate fronts, and are dedicated to the eradication of mental health professions, since such were ElRon's biggest nightmare.
Less stridently, I can say that Germany's basic stand is that they violate the German constitution's prohibitions against anti-democratic institutions. Scientology's official goal is to, essentially, rule the planet. The organization's present and past history in Germany showed them to be less than quiet religionists. They pull the same sue-and-harrass -from-cover nonsense there they do here in the U.S.
A year or so ago, I recall that some Scientologist German national claimed and received asylum in the U.S. for religious persecution. Ah, but it turned out later it was an utter fraud. The Germans don't like the organization because it only a "religion" in name, but a ur-corporate amoral monster in reality.
They are courageously fighting a beast our lax laws have foisted on the world. They will probably lose, much like our I.R.S. did, after enough of their officials get sued, harrassed, blackmailed, or discredited somehow. But at least they know what they are up against, and are actively fighting.
Those clauses aren't there to be enforced, they are there to promise you that you will be drained of your money in court should you choose to challenge Sprint.
Of course Sprint would (maybe!) lose in court. That won't bother them, because they probably won't be challenged -- a customer that disagreed with the TOS wouldn't choose Sprint in the first place. Those who will, won't care, and won't take it court. And even if Sprint bounced them for TOS violations, such customers will simply go to another provider.
And here's the beauty part: even if a customer took Sprint to court, it's not a slam dunk that Sprint would lose. They might find a judge that would let them have contract rights heretofor undreamed of! And who knows what appeals or Supremes might do. There's that whole non-activist don't-joggle-businesses' rights screed that is the basis of the judicial system now, and most certainly will be predominant after Bush seeds the federal system in the next few years.
Re:J. Storrs-Hall's space ramp
on
Going Up?
·
· Score: 1
Um, it's actually Clarke's idea, fleshed out hugely in Heinlein's "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress", and developed by actual trained engineers in the early seventies during the L5 era. I forget what Clarke called it, but Heinlein called it a catapult, and the Princeton group called it a mass-driver.
It's a great idea. It works fine in test models. We could probably build it, especially with the recent developments in workable maglev. But without a nation that understands science, or space, or why it's important to go, it's not happening for decades. If ever.
The U.S. will never build a space-based civilization. We're too fat and self-absorbed. We don't understand math, we hate science, and we distrust brainiacs. We'll spend the next 50-100 years debating theology's place in government, and refighting the civil war in endless ways.(if you don't think Bush's election was a victory for the New Confederacy, think again.)
Less negaitively, I think that space may be eventually be colonized by smaller nations, who have less investment in history and more hope for change in the future. Look to them for interesting projects.
Sigh... the "military" votes were invalid because they had no postmark. The Democrats did not "try to get them invalidated".
One of the most important aspects of valid absentee ballots is the postmark. Why? Because if it isn't postmarked, it could have been submitted after the election was over. In other words, the absentee voters who didn't submit a vote, upon hearing their man was in trouble and that they were the swing vote, could have sent in hundreds of unpostmarked ballots to swing the election.
To suggest that rejecting undated absentee ballots is some sort of trick is madness. It is what one does to such ballots.
"Starship Troopers" was intended to be a juvenile, the last one in that series. But the publisher took issue with the intense political demagoguery, and it was eventualy classified as an adult book.
"Puppet Masters" was an adult book; it had sex of a sort in it. Revolt in 2100 was a story commissioned by John Campbell, and was an adult story, not one of the Schribner's juveniles (of which there were 12).
As for moronic, think of anime, the SF version of bad comics for the slow. The collective SF imagination is eroding into the sludge of derivative book series, TV and movie science fiction with NO science, and badly dubbed wish-fulfillment fantasies dubbed from the Japanese. Who reads books anymore?
Actually, there are forty percent efficent solar cells in the labs, and better ones to come.
And do the math, you don't have to cover the U.S. to get the juice. A few thousand square miles of Nevada would do it. A square 100 miles to a side should handle a good chunk of the west US. It wouldn't even have to be opaque; they could be mounted on an angle, letting the rain water come through.
Arizona, Utah, Nevada, any good dry desert could charge the entire country. Transmission losses be damned -- build capacity to compensate.
But we'll never do it. We are pretty much owned by the oil companies, and Bush is not exactly an alternative-to-oil man, so kiss all these tax subsidies for the current alternative vehicles good-bye.
You are assuming that gasoline engines are high efficency. They are not. Most of the energy is wasted as heat, no?
Gasoline engines in hybrids are more efficient because they run at a constant velocity, and are tuned for that speed. (True if the engine is simply charging the battery pack).
You cannot get more energy out than you put in, but the fallacy here is that gasoline engines are more efficient users of fossil fuels than power plants, with their attendant transmission losses. I understand that they are *not*.
If we had not succumbed to hysteria and lawyers, we'd have nuclear power plants charging our cars, and the pollution would have been negligible. Now we are trapped in a coal economy. What a victory for saving the earth.
Gasoline powered transportation is undefendable. We are going to fight more than the First Oil War of '91 in the future. Out future and economic well-being is linked to the most psychotic political climate in the world, and we are shipping our wealth to them daily.
The fuel itself is unstable and explosive; if it did not exist as a fuel souce today, and someone proposed it, it never would be approved.
Electric cars are quiet, and non-polluting *in the area they are driven*, a critical fact if you live in Tokyo or Mexico City or L.A. If they can't do pubtrans, they need to go electric. Population growth will make those cities uninhabitable if they get even more cars.
If Linux does indeed catch on with the desktop crowd, what will stop Microsoft from releasing it's own version? And mayhap release an Office/IE/Outlook port that works wonderfully with the Win side of the network?
Or even a Linux that is incompatible with other Lini... can they be that evil? (yes)
"Pirating music is not a right. You're rights are not being stepped on. "
Actually, it is stepping on my legal right to make non-commercial copies of things I own. It also is legal to make tapes of music you own and give it to someone else, as long as you do not sell it, or know that it will be used commercially. Otherwise, you couldn't tape a TV program.
Scope of the copying has nothing to do with it.
Claims of money lost by RIAA is spurious. That "money" would have not been spent anyway. It's fairy gold.
And the problem here, perhaps, is that we are comfusing Napster the corp and Napster the idea. I care not a bit about Napster, which will probably cut some deal with RIAA in the end; I'm concerned about the attempt to create a precedent that digital copying per se is illegal.
Slashdot Mirror
It's the heart of the matter. Scio's, top level ones, do not, NOT want the Xenu story spread about. That was what the Swedish case was about: stopping the Xenu story from becoming public. The U.S. mysteriously intervened in the internal affairs of Sweden to prevent the material, now a public court document there, from becoming public.
The Xenu/body thetan arc is the basis of all high-level Scientology, their Genesis. But you have to prove yourself over many years, and pay much money (in cash or time) to get access -- at which point you don't have much critical thought left.
The widespread leakage of the Xenu story is ruining their recruitment efforts and making them the laughing stocks they should have been always, if they had not used trade secret laws to hide the story.
The Scienos were the first attackers of internet freedoms, claiming defamation and copyright violations at every opportunity to shut critics the hell up. But every time they squeeze, the just make a bigger mess...
The Fishman Affidavit was always suspect. Take it with a grain of salt. Interesting reading tho. I'd rather hear about the McPherson Trust or the Mark Bunker case in Chicago; those stories have honest-to-Xenu day by day really real harrassment by the Sci organization which would make the most paranoid Slashdotter's toes curl.
It ain't a religion, it's a floor wax.. no, it's a dairy topping...
Microsoft was one of Iridium's initial investors. Bill G. paid squillions. They wouldn't be able to buy back their own company, as it were, for fractions of a penny on the dollar.
Tell that to Manuel Noriega. We seem to have killed hundreds/thousands of foreign nationals to get him, too. Oh, and has he ever been tried for a crime yet, or is he still in limbo?
Delta Clipper didn't crash and burn. What happened was a tech forgot to reconnect a hydraulic line to one of the landing struts. DC simply tipped over on landing. A horrible, horrible waste. BTW: the 33/34 programs were an utter waste of time and money... the DC concept was workable and CHEAP. But it had no wings, didn't cost hundreds of billions, and made the reusable winged vehicles look silly and overpriced.
Mayhap, then, simpler software? Back-to-Basics? Do we really nead all the overhead Windows requires? And... maybe a processor would be simple, but what if you made *banks* of them? What if you could roll them off on a plastic tape, as many as you needed?
Even if Florescent Multilayer Disks can be produced cheaply (and they can), or a way found to make terabytes of holographic storage affordable on a consumer level, the introduction of such technologies would devastate existing investments in all sorts of technologies.
Hundreds of billions of dollars in market value of very large companies would be wiped out in months.
It is not in the free market's best interest to change things too quickly. Think of light bulbs that last ten years, or the still expensive and hard to find nickle-metal-hydride consumer batteries.
Cheap 'n easy holo storage probably could have been achieved long before now; I've read about such research for almost twenty years. But investment is in hard drive R&D and manufacture now, and it's doing well for everyone.
Sometimes the market giveth, and sometime it holdeth back, not maliciously, but because it is in an industry's interest to keep things as they are. The tech will be rolled out on a schedule to suit the industry's bottom line. It can't really do it any other way. The market would demand terabyte cheap storage, but the impetus will be to keep current tech until at least depreciation on plant runs out for hard drive manufacturing.
Worry, damnit, worry. They can get the Koreans to comply. Don't ya'all get it? They will do whatever is necessary to copy control every video. audio, and book device. Fair Use is dying. And Nero keeps playing his video games.
Rights we have taken for granted for years, such as time-shifting, ownership of copied media for non-commercial purposes, even the simple act of lending a book/tape/cart to a friend, are going bye-bye.
The free market cannot save us from this, because it is the free market creating the copy control in the first place! Markets are not by nature free; they need constant monitoring to keep them from becoming immortal monopolies.
It was never illegal. They simply don't want them in government jobs, because the Scienos tend to plant honest-to-god spies in key positions around the world when they can. History and court records show they think they are fighting a covert war against psychiatrists and taxmen, among MANY other things. The majority of converts don't do such things, but the official organization does it all the time.
Back to the point, it was never illegal. But it is generally thought of as a public mental health danger and a fraud.
If you wish to practice Scientology, stay away from Germany.
The Scientologists in Germany aren't practicing: they're really good at it, which is why they are prohibited from government jobs.
Germany overall, not being chicken#%$& like the U.S., has decided that the Scientologists aren't a religion, but a business dedicated to converting the gullible, and obtaining as much money from them as possible. They operate under hundreds of false corporate fronts, and are dedicated to the eradication of mental health professions, since such were ElRon's biggest nightmare.
Less stridently, I can say that Germany's basic stand is that they violate the German constitution's prohibitions against anti-democratic institutions. Scientology's official goal is to, essentially, rule the planet. The organization's present and past history in Germany showed them to be less than quiet religionists. They pull the same sue-and-harrass -from-cover nonsense there they do here in the U.S.
A year or so ago, I recall that some Scientologist German national claimed and received asylum in the U.S. for religious persecution. Ah, but it turned out later it was an utter fraud. The Germans don't like the organization because it only a "religion" in name, but a ur-corporate amoral monster in reality.
They are courageously fighting a beast our lax laws have foisted on the world. They will probably lose, much like our I.R.S. did, after enough of their officials get sued, harrassed, blackmailed, or discredited somehow. But at least they know what they are up against, and are actively fighting.
How lame. An AOL flame.
Those clauses aren't there to be enforced, they are there to promise you that you will be drained of your money in court should you choose to challenge Sprint.
Of course Sprint would (maybe!) lose in court. That won't bother them, because they probably won't be challenged -- a customer that disagreed with the TOS wouldn't choose Sprint in the first place. Those who will, won't care, and won't take it court. And even if Sprint bounced them for TOS violations, such customers will simply go to another provider.
And here's the beauty part: even if a customer took Sprint to court, it's not a slam dunk that Sprint would lose. They might find a judge that would let them have contract rights heretofor undreamed of! And who knows what appeals or Supremes might do. There's that whole non-activist don't-joggle-businesses' rights screed that is the basis of the judicial system now, and most certainly will be predominant after Bush seeds the federal system in the next few years.
Um, it's actually Clarke's idea, fleshed out hugely in Heinlein's "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress", and developed by actual trained engineers in the early seventies during the L5 era. I forget what Clarke called it, but Heinlein called it a catapult, and the Princeton group called it a mass-driver.
It's a great idea. It works fine in test models. We could probably build it, especially with the recent developments in workable maglev. But without a nation that understands science, or space, or why it's important to go, it's not happening for decades. If ever.
The U.S. will never build a space-based civilization. We're too fat and self-absorbed. We don't understand math, we hate science, and we distrust brainiacs. We'll spend the next 50-100 years debating theology's place in government, and refighting the civil war in endless ways.(if you don't think Bush's election was a victory for the New Confederacy, think again.)
Less negaitively, I think that space may be eventually be colonized by smaller nations, who have less investment in history and more hope for change in the future. Look to them for interesting projects.
And we see what the real heart of the Republican party is... the Reconstituted Confederacy.
The New Confederacy never forgave the Democrats for giving African Americans the vote. "States rights" my tired left butt cheek.
Sigh... the "military" votes were invalid because they had no postmark. The Democrats did not "try to get them invalidated".
One of the most important aspects of valid absentee ballots is the postmark. Why? Because if it isn't postmarked, it could have been submitted after the election was over. In other words, the absentee voters who didn't submit a vote, upon hearing their man was in trouble and that they were the swing vote, could have sent in hundreds of unpostmarked ballots to swing the election.
To suggest that rejecting undated absentee ballots is some sort of trick is madness. It is what one does to such ballots.
Yes, it will.
"Starship Troopers" was intended to be a juvenile, the last one in that series. But the publisher took issue with the intense political demagoguery, and it was eventualy classified as an adult book.
"Puppet Masters" was an adult book; it had sex of a sort in it. Revolt in 2100 was a story commissioned by John Campbell, and was an adult story, not one of the Schribner's juveniles (of which there were 12).
As for moronic, think of anime, the SF version of bad comics for the slow. The collective SF imagination is eroding into the sludge of derivative book series, TV and movie science fiction with NO science, and badly dubbed wish-fulfillment fantasies dubbed from the Japanese. Who reads books anymore?
Nope. Asimov just loved limericks. He had total recall, and entertained cons with his wit and memory for dirty jokes and puns.
No, Heinlein had an imagination, unlike the current crop of anime-lovin' brain damaged "sci-fi" fans of today.
He took issue with Conservative America's prudism, and apparently irks people to this day. Not bad for a octagenarian Naval officer.
Actually, there are forty percent efficent solar cells in the labs, and better ones to come.
And do the math, you don't have to cover the U.S. to get the juice. A few thousand square miles of Nevada would do it. A square 100 miles to a side should handle a good chunk of the west US. It wouldn't even have to be opaque; they could be mounted on an angle, letting the rain water come through.
Arizona, Utah, Nevada, any good dry desert could charge the entire country. Transmission losses be damned -- build capacity to compensate.
But we'll never do it. We are pretty much owned by the oil companies, and Bush is not exactly an alternative-to-oil man, so kiss all these tax subsidies for the current alternative vehicles good-bye.
You are assuming that gasoline engines are high efficency. They are not. Most of the energy is wasted as heat, no? Gasoline engines in hybrids are more efficient because they run at a constant velocity, and are tuned for that speed. (True if the engine is simply charging the battery pack).
You cannot get more energy out than you put in, but the fallacy here is that gasoline engines are more efficient users of fossil fuels than power plants, with their attendant transmission losses. I understand that they are *not*.
If we had not succumbed to hysteria and lawyers, we'd have nuclear power plants charging our cars, and the pollution would have been negligible. Now we are trapped in a coal economy. What a victory for saving the earth.
Gasoline powered transportation is undefendable. We are going to fight more than the First Oil War of '91 in the future. Out future and economic well-being is linked to the most psychotic political climate in the world, and we are shipping our wealth to them daily.
The fuel itself is unstable and explosive; if it did not exist as a fuel souce today, and someone proposed it, it never would be approved.
Electric cars are quiet, and non-polluting *in the area they are driven*, a critical fact if you live in Tokyo or Mexico City or L.A. If they can't do pubtrans, they need to go electric. Population growth will make those cities uninhabitable if they get even more cars.
Will Rogers, not Roy.
If Linux does indeed catch on with the desktop crowd, what will stop Microsoft from releasing it's own version? And mayhap release an Office/IE/Outlook port that works wonderfully with the Win side of the network?
Or even a Linux that is incompatible with other Lini... can they be that evil? (yes)
They are, they are. The relecom industries, IP companies, hell, cults are dictating laws. Literally dictating.
"Pirating music is not a right. You're rights are not being stepped on. "
Actually, it is stepping on my legal right to make non-commercial copies of things I own. It also is legal to make tapes of music you own and give it to someone else, as long as you do not sell it, or know that it will be used commercially. Otherwise, you couldn't tape a TV program.
Scope of the copying has nothing to do with it.
Claims of money lost by RIAA is spurious. That "money" would have not been spent anyway. It's fairy gold.
And the problem here, perhaps, is that we are comfusing Napster the corp and Napster the idea. I care not a bit about Napster, which will probably cut some deal with RIAA in the end; I'm concerned about the attempt to create a precedent that digital copying per se is illegal.