Well, many countries were in the Coalition of the Looting that invaded Iraq, but it seems that it was all about the USA now, don't it? Microsoft is old in the game of gathering small fry to make their initiatives look like anything but what they are -- the usual takeover and squatting game.
Asimov commented that he never thought of the underground New York as a dystopia. He grew up in the city -- he liked the Caves of Steel milieu. He was later surprised to find others were aghast at the idea.
Philip Jose Farmer coined the name "battacitor" for the device in his "Riverboat" SF series of books. He got there first, as so many of the grand masters did.
'Cause we ideologically are incapable of financing these new technologies with government money, as we used to. The private investment market is not capable of long range tech development. So we stagnate, and as you say, all these lovely technologies are found and discarded for lack of investor interest. We are dying of free market ideology.
5-10 years if you wait for a private investor to make a monopoly product from scratch.
Hell. This is "war", they keep telling me. Perhaps we as a government should simply pour a few billions into the hands of engineers with orders to mass produce these batacitors in two years, tops. E-car batteries, cell phones, ebooks, the works. If we are at "war", then the old rules about private enterprise and the market should be tossed out and we should just make the damned batteries. If we can finance roads, we can finance a way out of the oil "war" scenario.
We don't have an energy supply crisis as much as we have an energy distribution crisis. Give people batteries cheap enough and good enough, and they can install their own energy generating devices.
Please do remember that the United States and the "coalition" killed over a hundred thousand civilians in Iraq under the "shock and awe" doctrine of blowing everything and everyone up who were in our way.
Iraq had thirty million people. One tenth the US population. So to keep the perspective correct here, it would be as though Iraq had invaded the US and killed a million people. A. Million. People.
We've no moral cover. No place of dignity. We committed an act of terrorism that killed over a hundred thousand outright and have killed many tens of thousands more, destroyed their economy, stole whatever assets were worth anything, imprisoned and even tortured thousands more for looking at us funny, and wave the flag of righteous war against the 19 pipsqueaks armed with Home Depot box cutters. And it was all for a lie, the lie that the possessor of all that Asian-bound oil was somehow involved in the 9-11 crime. And they STILL tell the lie.
Our terrorism still goes on as the former peaceful nation devolves into the island of the Lord of the Flies as we look on, spitting on their unstable 'religious insanity' as though we had nothing to do with letting the demons of the mind loose on an innocent people. Any nation tortured to death as the Iraqis have been will devolve into savagery. And we did it.
Yes, the earth has been dumping ancient bacteria into the ocean during meltoffs before. But not all of the ice at once, if you understand a few decades as being really REALLY quick. And we weren't here at the time. That last bit bears repetition and emphasis. WE. Modern humans flying around the world on planes every day with new bugs, were not present in our current numbers and surface coverage during previous big meltoffs. This is a different ball game. And scientists are by nature and nurture non-alarmists, so demurring about the threat is normal for a scientist. (And conversely, tens of thousands of scientists screaming "THE WORLD IS ON FIRE" at the same time should therefore scare the living piss down your pants).
Lyme disease was released into the greater habitat by us humans cutting down wooded areas to build homes in the 20th century. More problems than we can count have been caused by simple population expansion. Diseases released by invasion of previously untouched wilderness, warming, famine, dustbowls, desertification, poisoned watersheds, massive flooding, all those things were caused by us, that would be me and thee and all the other hairless apes running about. This is truth. The Earth is warming, bad stuff will happen, and it doesn't hurt to anticipate the obvious.
Son, or daughter, damned near EVERY adult male gets a boner about underage sex. You can spot the really obsessive ones, because they are in the vanguard of every sexual repression movement for teenagers. You can also find them slinking around the pedophile monitoring programs. Where do you think an underage sex afficianado would be, but skimming through hard drives full of teeny bikini pics confiscated from some schmoe? Find a pedo buster, find a pedo.
Witches are rarely burned at the stake. You will, however, find them amongst those lighting the pyres.
Just stop this! This was a survey. A s-u-r-v-e-y. What dumbelino teenager sits down and admits to anyone what pot he's smoked, how many guys she's had sex with, how many times they had illegal sex with an adult? This is science only if we are considering how many lie to an allegedly anonymous pollster. This is a metric of nothing. These "statistics" about sex and drug use amongst young people are absolute garbage. What the polls really highlight are the prejudices of the adults who are interpreting them.
I'm thinking bullet-proof, completely armored helmet, with pinhole cameras feeding visual to the interior via a hi-res OLED, one for each eye for depth perception. Unlike the viewscreen in Star Trek TOS, it won't feed your retinas blinding light. Shoot it, zap it, try to blind it, hit it with a club, the protestor's friend takes a lickin' and keeps on tickin'. Slated to become illegal within one week of introduction, 'cause it's ILLEGAL to not feel agony on your lords' and masters' demand. Kneel, slave.
Why do will we need ISPs? For some things, anyway?
We can string backbones using standard ethernet, at these speeds. We can use radio to bridge gaps. As I understand it, using copper across open outdoor spaces is electrically mad, so optical cabling is necessary, but the cost is dropping. We can run our own naming system. As for file sharing piggies, they can be screened out. We need a simple communication system that isn't under the boot.
Let's face it, the corporations and the moral police have taken over the old internet. Time for the ad hoc, mobile, difficult to pin down, constantly adapting citizen's net.
And no, I don't care about the "pedophiles" or the old men dating younger girls. As for the pedos, all this "knowledge" about their presence is garbage. If you know where to find underage stuff, YOU are a pedo; if you haven't looked for it, you couldn't possibly speak to the subject. Everyone is making the problem up, citing each other as sources. Witchcraft, satanism, terrorists and commies, oh my. We always need a reason to break down the doors, don't we? Otherwise why would we need all these expensive, newly militarized police we've acquired? We've the safest, wealthiest society that's ever existed, so we wouldn't need all that surveillance and LED blinders and tasers and strip searches and drug tests and armed guards in schools if we didn't constantly find new threats, even if they don't, strictly speaking, actually exist, as compared to, say hurricanes making landfall.
A dark night is coming, and we are exporting the darkness to others around the world at gun- and market-point. A network cloud that is relatively immune to corporate and government shutdown and surveillance is essential to keep mankind free. No exaggeration.
Imagine millions of high powered (you can get IDs for dozens of yards, if pump enough power) RFID scanners at gas stations, train depots, all the buses, commuter trains, gangplanks to cruise ships, airport boarding areas, and overhead highway arches. All the supermarkets, all the government buildings, cop houses, major intersections, bike paths, and nature trails. Especially imagine them blanketing the borders to Canada and Mexico, eventually. All the harbors.
It doesn't take long to deploy such electronics. Cameras were almost nonexistent 15 years ago in public places. Now you can't spit without hitting one.
What we will be then is a giant prison. This isn't a prediction, this is reality.
There is a massive split now between people who claim to hate government and yet love private corporate power, and on the other people who believe in democratic government and despise private ultragovernmental power. One side is about control, the other freedom, but one side doesn't have its semantic act together and thinks it IS the side of freedom. But it is only freedom for the lords, not for the serfs. We as the people, we the government, we who believe we are the government, don't want private powers not answerable to us controlling us to the point where we are require to be tagged like cattle to earn a living or find a place to live. And no mistake, that is what we are talking about here. Like drug testing, yes one could refuse. Sure. And starve, and not get health insurance -- the list is endless once you get branded like a slab of meat in a supermarket - apt analogy, that. You become a tagged slab of meat for the market. There is no freedom if there are no alternatives. And corporate power is all about removing your alternatives.
Hear the funny thing Cheney said? He said that since his job straddles the Executive (VP) and the Legislative (presides over the Senate), he therefore is not in the Executive branch of the government exclusively and therefore not subject to the oversight of the Executive by congress. I assume that he will soon say the reverse keeps him from being subject to oversight by congress in his capacity in the Senate. Since I doubt he is in the Judicial branch, Cheney is, for all law enforcement purposes, not a member of the US federal government. I assume therefore he is the Grand Vizier to the throne. He doesn't say what he thinks he is, in his secret lair with his secret and continually purged communications systems. Perhaps he is just extragovernmental. Ultra dires. Not subject to international or American laws. Fu Manchu? A man-god, perhaps? Only in a country this stupid and uninformed can a vice president declare himself above his own country's laws -- and the news presents it as a "Democratic partisans vs. The Vice President" argument that one shouldn't take sides on. A silly little tiff; the VP says he can't be investigated. Democrats make a fuss, as usual, news at 11. Can you IMAGINE VP Al Gore saying something like that and getting away with it clean??
Well, it merits investigation by the RIAA, at any rate. Laws MAY have been broken. So, the twins can get a little letter asking them to pay three grand or so to keep the case out of court, just like the rest of us, and they'll pay the extortion, 'cause of course they can't afford good legal representation or know anyone who can make a call or two explaining why continued good health depends on leaving the girls alone for all of time.
No, he was making a solid point. The wealthy and connected twins publicly "violated the law" by copying music, in spirit if not in technique to other kids who are being sued to bankruptcy, if they are even allowed to file under the new laws. But no one noticed, no one pointed, and sure as hell the FBI and RIAA will never utter a peep. because they are the offspring of the upper untouchable class. I'm sure even the RIAA would blanche at going up against Jim Baker, family lawyer of the Bushes, who damned near single handedly stopped an American presidential election. In Texas, the Bush family is a legend -- you simply do not fuck with them. They will track you down and run you over. Twice. And your dog.
But, but... all those things like cassettes and LPs and VHS tapes were pre-computer! therefore it doesn't count 'cause they were analog. Right? That is the whole argument about copying CDs.. it's different 'cause they are digital... say it three times while spinning in place...
"People who should know tell me that fucking with the Bush family is much like asking Scientology to sue me and to kiss my ass at the same time. Unrewarding. And I'm also given to understand that unlike the Scientologists, the Bush family is mean. I hereby call myself a fool and pray to Saint Reagan, patron of feckless leaders, that the IRS and Homeland Security aren't having a race to see which will get to ruin my life first. I never really liked flying or foreign travel much anyway. Please don't hurt me.
The "hanging chad" problem didn't happen. In a manual recount, you simply look at the card. if the vote was cast, the punch is apparent. Counting it is as easy as putting a pencil in your pocket.
In 2000, the Republicans wanted that recount to stop, so they pushed every "issue" they could find to invalidate the concept of a manual recount. The newly neutered and boss-friendly news networks went along with it; high salaries tend to dumb down reporting, as reporters have so much more to lose now by bucking the herd.
I recall vividly, and can google it down eventually, the remarks being made by the Baker squad after the election. If the vote had gone Gore's way, they would have demanded recount after recount well into Gore's term of office, and they had sworn a mighty oath that they would never let up on the talking point that he had not won the election fairly. Since Gore lost, they would never let up on the talking point that recounts were worthless and subjective.
Recounts were performed in at least once western state that swung the election to Bush; Baker's squad never once mentioned invalidating those recounts. "Chads" or not.
In the media-sponsored recount done for months after the election, in which they simply counted the votes cast, including the votes where "Gore" was written in AND punched (overvotes) which were tossed in the real election, Gore won by around 80 votes. By all other methods of counting that just counted votes instead of finding items to disqualify the vote, Gore won. This isn't an opinion, it is a fact. We can no longer recount that election, of course, because almost immediately after the election the election records were destroyed.
If Gore had won, we would have seen that super-recount over and over again. Since he did not, recounts are silly and hanging chads invalidate votes.
I was simplifying, but okay, sure, you're right. Never c; it would take infinite energy, and time would stand still in your frame, thus screwing up the itinerary. Long before you would reach the impossible c, the universe outside would die of old age...
Slashdot Mirror
Well, many countries were in the Coalition of the Looting that invaded Iraq, but it seems that it was all about the USA now, don't it? Microsoft is old in the game of gathering small fry to make their initiatives look like anything but what they are -- the usual takeover and squatting game.
Asimov commented that he never thought of the underground New York as a dystopia. He grew up in the city -- he liked the Caves of Steel milieu. He was later surprised to find others were aghast at the idea.
Philip Jose Farmer coined the name "battacitor" for the device in his "Riverboat" SF series of books. He got there first, as so many of the grand masters did.
'Cause we ideologically are incapable of financing these new technologies with government money, as we used to. The private investment market is not capable of long range tech development. So we stagnate, and as you say, all these lovely technologies are found and discarded for lack of investor interest. We are dying of free market ideology.
5-10 years if you wait for a private investor to make a monopoly product from scratch.
Hell. This is "war", they keep telling me. Perhaps we as a government should simply pour a few billions into the hands of engineers with orders to mass produce these batacitors in two years, tops. E-car batteries, cell phones, ebooks, the works. If we are at "war", then the old rules about private enterprise and the market should be tossed out and we should just make the damned batteries. If we can finance roads, we can finance a way out of the oil "war" scenario.
We don't have an energy supply crisis as much as we have an energy distribution crisis. Give people batteries cheap enough and good enough, and they can install their own energy generating devices.
Toxic as compared to, say, breathing near a car's tail pipe?
Please do remember that the United States and the "coalition" killed over a hundred thousand civilians in Iraq under the "shock and awe" doctrine of blowing everything and everyone up who were in our way.
Iraq had thirty million people. One tenth the US population. So to keep the perspective correct here, it would be as though Iraq had invaded the US and killed a million people. A. Million. People.
We've no moral cover. No place of dignity. We committed an act of terrorism that killed over a hundred thousand outright and have killed many tens of thousands more, destroyed their economy, stole whatever assets were worth anything, imprisoned and even tortured thousands more for looking at us funny, and wave the flag of righteous war against the 19 pipsqueaks armed with Home Depot box cutters. And it was all for a lie, the lie that the possessor of all that Asian-bound oil was somehow involved in the 9-11 crime. And they STILL tell the lie.
Our terrorism still goes on as the former peaceful nation devolves into the island of the Lord of the Flies as we look on, spitting on their unstable 'religious insanity' as though we had nothing to do with letting the demons of the mind loose on an innocent people. Any nation tortured to death as the Iraqis have been will devolve into savagery. And we did it.
Yes, the earth has been dumping ancient bacteria into the ocean during meltoffs before. But not all of the ice at once, if you understand a few decades as being really REALLY quick. And we weren't here at the time. That last bit bears repetition and emphasis. WE. Modern humans flying around the world on planes every day with new bugs, were not present in our current numbers and surface coverage during previous big meltoffs. This is a different ball game. And scientists are by nature and nurture non-alarmists, so demurring about the threat is normal for a scientist. (And conversely, tens of thousands of scientists screaming "THE WORLD IS ON FIRE" at the same time should therefore scare the living piss down your pants).
Lyme disease was released into the greater habitat by us humans cutting down wooded areas to build homes in the 20th century. More problems than we can count have been caused by simple population expansion. Diseases released by invasion of previously untouched wilderness, warming, famine, dustbowls, desertification, poisoned watersheds, massive flooding, all those things were caused by us, that would be me and thee and all the other hairless apes running about. This is truth. The Earth is warming, bad stuff will happen, and it doesn't hurt to anticipate the obvious.
Son, or daughter, damned near EVERY adult male gets a boner about underage sex. You can spot the really obsessive ones, because they are in the vanguard of every sexual repression movement for teenagers. You can also find them slinking around the pedophile monitoring programs. Where do you think an underage sex afficianado would be, but skimming through hard drives full of teeny bikini pics confiscated from some schmoe? Find a pedo buster, find a pedo.
Witches are rarely burned at the stake. You will, however, find them amongst those lighting the pyres.
Just stop this! This was a survey. A s-u-r-v-e-y. What dumbelino teenager sits down and admits to anyone what pot he's smoked, how many guys she's had sex with, how many times they had illegal sex with an adult? This is science only if we are considering how many lie to an allegedly anonymous pollster. This is a metric of nothing. These "statistics" about sex and drug use amongst young people are absolute garbage. What the polls really highlight are the prejudices of the adults who are interpreting them.
I'm thinking bullet-proof, completely armored helmet, with pinhole cameras feeding visual to the interior via a hi-res OLED, one for each eye for depth perception. Unlike the viewscreen in Star Trek TOS, it won't feed your retinas blinding light. Shoot it, zap it, try to blind it, hit it with a club, the protestor's friend takes a lickin' and keeps on tickin'. Slated to become illegal within one week of introduction, 'cause it's ILLEGAL to not feel agony on your lords' and masters' demand. Kneel, slave.
Why do will we need ISPs? For some things, anyway?
We can string backbones using standard ethernet, at these speeds. We can use radio to bridge gaps. As I understand it, using copper across open outdoor spaces is electrically mad, so optical cabling is necessary, but the cost is dropping. We can run our own naming system. As for file sharing piggies, they can be screened out. We need a simple communication system that isn't under the boot.
Let's face it, the corporations and the moral police have taken over the old internet. Time for the ad hoc, mobile, difficult to pin down, constantly adapting citizen's net.
And no, I don't care about the "pedophiles" or the old men dating younger girls. As for the pedos, all this "knowledge" about their presence is garbage. If you know where to find underage stuff, YOU are a pedo; if you haven't looked for it, you couldn't possibly speak to the subject. Everyone is making the problem up, citing each other as sources. Witchcraft, satanism, terrorists and commies, oh my. We always need a reason to break down the doors, don't we? Otherwise why would we need all these expensive, newly militarized police we've acquired? We've the safest, wealthiest society that's ever existed, so we wouldn't need all that surveillance and LED blinders and tasers and strip searches and drug tests and armed guards in schools if we didn't constantly find new threats, even if they don't, strictly speaking, actually exist, as compared to, say hurricanes making landfall.
A dark night is coming, and we are exporting the darkness to others around the world at gun- and market-point. A network cloud that is relatively immune to corporate and government shutdown and surveillance is essential to keep mankind free. No exaggeration.
:fingers in ears:
didn't happen didn't happen lalalalalalalalalalalalala thereg is commie.
America needs an enema.
What evidence of class differences would you accept?
I'm guessing you're both "Facebook" kind of guys.
Imagine millions of high powered (you can get IDs for dozens of yards, if pump enough power) RFID scanners at gas stations, train depots, all the buses, commuter trains, gangplanks to cruise ships, airport boarding areas, and overhead highway arches. All the supermarkets, all the government buildings, cop houses, major intersections, bike paths, and nature trails. Especially imagine them blanketing the borders to Canada and Mexico, eventually. All the harbors.
It doesn't take long to deploy such electronics. Cameras were almost nonexistent 15 years ago in public places. Now you can't spit without hitting one.
What we will be then is a giant prison. This isn't a prediction, this is reality.
There is a massive split now between people who claim to hate government and yet love private corporate power, and on the other people who believe in democratic government and despise private ultragovernmental power. One side is about control, the other freedom, but one side doesn't have its semantic act together and thinks it IS the side of freedom. But it is only freedom for the lords, not for the serfs. We as the people, we the government, we who believe we are the government, don't want private powers not answerable to us controlling us to the point where we are require to be tagged like cattle to earn a living or find a place to live. And no mistake, that is what we are talking about here. Like drug testing, yes one could refuse. Sure. And starve, and not get health insurance -- the list is endless once you get branded like a slab of meat in a supermarket - apt analogy, that. You become a tagged slab of meat for the market. There is no freedom if there are no alternatives. And corporate power is all about removing your alternatives.
Hear the funny thing Cheney said? He said that since his job straddles the Executive (VP) and the Legislative (presides over the Senate), he therefore is not in the Executive branch of the government exclusively and therefore not subject to the oversight of the Executive by congress. I assume that he will soon say the reverse keeps him from being subject to oversight by congress in his capacity in the Senate. Since I doubt he is in the Judicial branch, Cheney is, for all law enforcement purposes, not a member of the US federal government. I assume therefore he is the Grand Vizier to the throne. He doesn't say what he thinks he is, in his secret lair with his secret and continually purged communications systems. Perhaps he is just extragovernmental. Ultra dires. Not subject to international or American laws. Fu Manchu? A man-god, perhaps? Only in a country this stupid and uninformed can a vice president declare himself above his own country's laws -- and the news presents it as a "Democratic partisans vs. The Vice President" argument that one shouldn't take sides on. A silly little tiff; the VP says he can't be investigated. Democrats make a fuss, as usual, news at 11. Can you IMAGINE VP Al Gore saying something like that and getting away with it clean??
Well, it merits investigation by the RIAA, at any rate. Laws MAY have been broken. So, the twins can get a little letter asking them to pay three grand or so to keep the case out of court, just like the rest of us, and they'll pay the extortion, 'cause of course they can't afford good legal representation or know anyone who can make a call or two explaining why continued good health depends on leaving the girls alone for all of time.
No, he was making a solid point. The wealthy and connected twins publicly "violated the law" by copying music, in spirit if not in technique to other kids who are being sued to bankruptcy, if they are even allowed to file under the new laws. But no one noticed, no one pointed, and sure as hell the FBI and RIAA will never utter a peep. because they are the offspring of the upper untouchable class. I'm sure even the RIAA would blanche at going up against Jim Baker, family lawyer of the Bushes, who damned near single handedly stopped an American presidential election. In Texas, the Bush family is a legend -- you simply do not fuck with them. They will track you down and run you over. Twice. And your dog.
But, but... all those things like cassettes and LPs and VHS tapes were pre-computer! therefore it doesn't count 'cause they were analog. Right? That is the whole argument about copying CDs.. it's different 'cause they are digital... say it three times while spinning in place...
It would be, if anyone were doing what you're fantasizing they are doing.
Let me rephrase that retraction:
"People who should know tell me that fucking with the Bush family is much like asking Scientology to sue me and to kiss my ass at the same time. Unrewarding. And I'm also given to understand that unlike the Scientologists, the Bush family is mean. I hereby call myself a fool and pray to Saint Reagan, patron of feckless leaders, that the IRS and Homeland Security aren't having a race to see which will get to ruin my life first. I never really liked flying or foreign travel much anyway. Please don't hurt me.
The "hanging chad" problem didn't happen. In a manual recount, you simply look at the card. if the vote was cast, the punch is apparent. Counting it is as easy as putting a pencil in your pocket.
In 2000, the Republicans wanted that recount to stop, so they pushed every "issue" they could find to invalidate the concept of a manual recount. The newly neutered and boss-friendly news networks went along with it; high salaries tend to dumb down reporting, as reporters have so much more to lose now by bucking the herd.
I recall vividly, and can google it down eventually, the remarks being made by the Baker squad after the election. If the vote had gone Gore's way, they would have demanded recount after recount well into Gore's term of office, and they had sworn a mighty oath that they would never let up on the talking point that he had not won the election fairly. Since Gore lost, they would never let up on the talking point that recounts were worthless and subjective.
Recounts were performed in at least once western state that swung the election to Bush; Baker's squad never once mentioned invalidating those recounts. "Chads" or not.
In the media-sponsored recount done for months after the election, in which they simply counted the votes cast, including the votes where "Gore" was written in AND punched (overvotes) which were tossed in the real election, Gore won by around 80 votes. By all other methods of counting that just counted votes instead of finding items to disqualify the vote, Gore won. This isn't an opinion, it is a fact. We can no longer recount that election, of course, because almost immediately after the election the election records were destroyed.
If Gore had won, we would have seen that super-recount over and over again. Since he did not, recounts are silly and hanging chads invalidate votes.
I was simplifying, but okay, sure, you're right. Never c; it would take infinite energy, and time would stand still in your frame, thus screwing up the itinerary. Long before you would reach the impossible c, the universe outside would die of old age...