...tell me your local cable company won't start metering your internet access once your computer is replaced with a - déjà vu - dumb terminal. They'll have you by the short curlies, once you cannot do diddly-squat without a connection.
And once that happens, it will spiral out of control. If you believe otherwise, perhaps you might consider the possibility of some genius with a greedy streak at Verizon/Comcast/Time Warner/on Wall Street thinking "Hey, since we have metered access now, then why can't I create a market for blocks of time?".
And then consider how gasoline prices respond to speculation.
The elites that control governments - in my opinion - want the developing nations to industrialize rapidly - and without any profit-inhibiting regulations involving the environment and worker or consumer safety. They do so from afar, away from the immediate risks of rampant pollution and dangerous production techniques, and care not if local populations see their cancer rates spiral upwards - which they will - and life expectancy spiral downwards - which they will.
You seem to think that my stance is that I want the elites to block the developing world from industrialization. That is not true.
What I don't want is the profit motive killing local populations and, since the planet is a closed system, eventually me and mine. What I don't want is the world's resources - to include energy - used up rapidly and wastefully, to the later detriment of billions of future humans.
Pollution, you see, is usually a sign of waste. Compounds that could be used safely and productively elsewhere are vented into the land, sea, and air because it is cheaper to let that happen rather than to reclaim them for later use. And when humans are exposed to those compounds, they are often toxic: Carcinogens, mutagens, and outright poisons.
Is trading the future away for a little more today a wise investment? And sometimes that bleak future is not so far off...remember Bhopal?
And you propose a solution whereby only the government elites get to maximize their individual wealth, at the expense of the productive members of society.
To the contrary...I think that if you look at the inequality curve of any nation, you will see that the elites who control government (an important difference in the phrasing) are in fact accumulating wealth at a rate never before seen in history because they have exported the lie that national self-sufficiency is passé and all must have the wealth that accompanies industrialization, and that they attempt to spread the story you just emitted to ensure that rate of wealth accumulation is not affected by the peoples of individual nations looking to the survival of themselves and their descendants.
The problem as I see it is that heavy industrialization consumes too much of the planet's finite reserves of resources too quickly, and additionally is putting an incredible tonnage of pollutants into the air, land, and sea - again at a rate that has never been seen before in human history.
Do you think that this planet can long provide resources at even current consumption rates, when ever more nations are striving to outproduce - to out consume - each other? Do you think the planet can absorb the soaring amounts of pollution being emitted? So much pollution that it is coming back to haunt even those nations whose elites are exploiting the cheap labor of the evolving "third world"?
Whether you die tilling a field or surrounded by cell phones, computers, and big screen TVs, you're still dead. The question is why hasten that event - for everybody, to include your own? What is wealth, without life?
I quit paying attention to the arguments that invoke the settling of Greenland when I noted that although they used that short-cycle migration as proof that global warming would be a piece of cake to survive, they never scale it up into terms that accommodate global population growth.
Without the appropriate scaling, using the Greenland migration as an analogy for the impact of global warming is the equivalent of saying that since it is easy to evacuate a ranch house that has no elevators in the event of an earthquake, it will be easy to evacuate a 1000-story office building that has no elevators in the event of an earthquake, too.
An interesting thought exercise is picturing the third world - the entire world, for that matter - should global warming be real and its negative effects upon the growing of food intensify about the same time as the downward slope of peak oil picks up speed.
And then throw in the fact that any factory can be repurposed (as was well and thoroughly demonstrated in WWII), the fact that the apparent goal is to ensure that everybody has plenty of factories, the fact that another goal appears to be increasing global human population to a density that at least matches the planet's carrying capacity under ideal conditions, and the fact that the archaeological record is littered with the evidence of populations transforming themselves into mobile armies when resource scarcity drives them to that point.
Yet people still insist on their individual right to maximize their individual wealth in the here and now, even if there is significant evidence that their pursuit of wealth and their insistence that they are entitled to take a "least cost" approach to wealth accumulation will cause the redefinition of both "ideal conditions" and "carrying capacity"?
Those who have read Aesop's fables should recognize the grasshopper in those who refuse to take reasonable, rational precautions in the area of global warming. Aesop was a smart guy, but I'm afraid that he never thought of a situation where individual grasshoppers could jeopardize themselves as well as all other grasshoppers - and the ants, too.
Something that endlessly amuses me is the global warming skeptics who effectively say "So some areas become uninhabitable or can no longer grow crops. Other areas will obviously get warmer..." as if those other areas would suddenly become as fecund as the abandoned areas had been.
As if eons of planet forming by volcanic action, glaciers, wind, and water had not built soil from rock in some places and moved soil from some areas to put it into regions now known as "bread baskets" for their fecundity...as if, in fact, all areas of the planet have the same depth and richness of soil, all just awaiting the right climatic conditions to burst into bloom...
Either that, or the very people who claim that global warming cannot be anthropogenic in nature because the systems in play are just too big to be affected by puny little man are assuming that if they are wrong mankind can replicate the geological forces of natural terraforming and will have and can expend both the time and the energy required to move trillions of cubic miles of soil to areas now favored by massive climatic shift driven by global warming...
Glad to see I got marked troll. If I hadn't, I would have suspected that the Oil boyz had diverted all of their own troll dollars towards advertising for the upcoming 2010 U.S. elections, both leaving a not insignificant number of slashdotters unemployed and guaranteeing mediocre TV interspersed with horrendous lies on all seven dozen or so of my channels for the foreseeable future. API's efforts are burgeoning, as it is, and those are nasty enough.
Attempting to put individual humans in opposition to abstract humanity is the rhetorical tool of petty tyrants, and is in that respect quite useful, because as soon as someone does it you know they do not care about human life or well-being, but only about their own rapacious quest for power.
Interesting argument to use when attempting to justify the individual's quest not for survival, but for wealth.
When nations have nuclear weapons, any credible large-scale threat to a nation's population - such as the disappearance of all of its remaining arable land due to climatic shift - carries with it the threat of mass extinction. What limits would bind you, if the choice was death by starvation, or conquering the arable lands of others? History says that all-out war is not just within the realm of possibility, but a veritable certainty.
The cost of being wrong, aside from setting society back a few decades, is to keep another generation or two of third worlders in severe poverty.
Given the difficulty that a lot of third-worlders have in feeding themselves now I suspect that a climatic shift, rather than keep them in poverty, would move them into the next world. Even if not, one conclusion is inescapable: The consequences of such a climatic shift upon what are today marginally arable lands would give great power to those nations that still had arable land. Or, perhaps, to those multinationals who controlled food?
Not that they would require climatic change to bring that about; it seems that nations often trade their self-sufficiency - their ability to feed themselves - for industrialization.
lolll...how I could attempt to invoke the gamble involved, and forget the word "risk" is beyond me. Make that:
The question is really whether the human race is willing to risk its potentially infinite future to satiate the greed of a few during their comparatively insignificant lifespans.
It only makes sense to take precautions so as to avoid any chance of eliminating your own species. If you're wrong, you spent some money unnecessarily. Just like when you pay for homeowner's insurance, and your house fails to do you the courtesy of burning itself down before you die.
The question is really whether the human race is willing to its potentially infinite future to satiate the greed of a few during their comparatively insignificant lifespans.
The guy must know his stuff; I'd dearly love to know how he made emails originating from the whitehouse.gov domain disappear not only after they hit the RNC's servers, but after they were stored to tape.
If we did get the U.S. of A. sufficiently hardened - to include all internet users in the nation ('cuz who knows what super-secret intelligence a g'ment worker would put on his or her home system), then three things would happen:
People who think like the participants in this exercise would demand that everybody have a "backdoor" so the g'ment can still eavesdrop,
All of the bad guys in the world would soon have a copy of said backdoor, its operating manual, and a reverse-engineered solution for both opening the back door and negating its effectiveness. Why? 'Cuz people who think like the neocons in the exercise would have offshored the backdoor's manufacture so they could make higher profits. That is what neocons do: Scream for America's security while they try to divert as much of the American people's wealth as they can to themselves.
People who (again) think like the participants in this exercise would eventually also succeed in getting the eavesdropping function itself "privatized", and would promptly offshore that work to within reach of whoever wants in.
The moral of the story is one of:
You can't have security even as you demand the ability to spy
What is the point of having security if your intention is to sell the American people out anyway?
Jeepers...talk about paranoia. Those splitters weren't put in for spying on U.S. citizens; they're only there to intercept the results from electronic voting machines and modify them according to specifications from a@#$$$R6a54@##
010331125024 3-Critical H501.4 HFC: LOST TRC SYNC- trying to recover
the most common way to lose it would be involve bittorrent...
Oh, I don't know - for some reason I think that posting complaints about Microsoft stuff like
Thank you for using My.live.com. On March 15, 2010, My.live.com will be discontinued and all users redirected to My MSN. Please note that your settings, feeds and gadgets will not be migrated to MyMSN. To make MyMSN your homepage today, click here.
Very insightful, I totally missed that Clinton was a Republican.
Then you probably missed the part about how Mrs. Clinton was on Wal*Mart's board for six years...and failed to link that fact, the Clintons' political successes in Wal*Mart's home state - Arkansas - and how much Wal*Mart benefited from Clinton's granting China MFN and being a champion of inequitable free trade.
And I bet you didn't consider how the additives in some cigars can make you eager to sign deregulation bills so as to buy Republican silence, either?
lolll...I bet you missed how Mrs. Clinton's Senate campaign was greatly aided by free rides on Vinod Gupta's (a significant beneficiary of inequitable free trade) jets, too?
My point being that you don't have to be an inanimate object to violate truth in labeling laws.
Funnier than American programmers writing code for their old colonial master's warships?
Oh, far funnier. It only took we Americans a decade or so to shake off imperialism; the Indians suffered and fought for two centuries. Thus, I'm sure their sense of humor is more highly...developed.
Slashdot Mirror
I forsee neither of these going away anytime soon. As in, Ever.
I don't see 'em going away, either - not when we have power-hungry groups who have been including the Internet in their thinking for some time.
...that didn't like having its web sites cached...awkward, when people used cached content to say "But that isn't what you were saying back...".
I cannot seem to remember the name of that news corporation...but as I recall, it has a presence in England, America, and Australia.
...tell me your local cable company won't start metering your internet access once your computer is replaced with a - déjà vu - dumb terminal. They'll have you by the short curlies, once you cannot do diddly-squat without a connection.
And once that happens, it will spiral out of control. If you believe otherwise, perhaps you might consider the possibility of some genius with a greedy streak at Verizon/Comcast/Time Warner/on Wall Street thinking "Hey, since we have metered access now, then why can't I create a market for blocks of time?".
And then consider how gasoline prices respond to speculation.
I searched "non farmers novice newbie fertilizer forum -game" and got 6,590 hits on google.
That online access to manuals may save trees, but a computer makes a lousy pillow compared to a FM 12-6.
The elites that control governments - in my opinion - want the developing nations to industrialize rapidly - and without any profit-inhibiting regulations involving the environment and worker or consumer safety. They do so from afar, away from the immediate risks of rampant pollution and dangerous production techniques, and care not if local populations see their cancer rates spiral upwards - which they will - and life expectancy spiral downwards - which they will.
You seem to think that my stance is that I want the elites to block the developing world from industrialization. That is not true.
What I don't want is the profit motive killing local populations and, since the planet is a closed system, eventually me and mine. What I don't want is the world's resources - to include energy - used up rapidly and wastefully, to the later detriment of billions of future humans.
Pollution, you see, is usually a sign of waste. Compounds that could be used safely and productively elsewhere are vented into the land, sea, and air because it is cheaper to let that happen rather than to reclaim them for later use. And when humans are exposed to those compounds, they are often toxic: Carcinogens, mutagens, and outright poisons.
Is trading the future away for a little more today a wise investment? And sometimes that bleak future is not so far off...remember Bhopal?
And you propose a solution whereby only the government elites get to maximize their individual wealth, at the expense of the productive members of society.
To the contrary...I think that if you look at the inequality curve of any nation, you will see that the elites who control government (an important difference in the phrasing) are in fact accumulating wealth at a rate never before seen in history because they have exported the lie that national self-sufficiency is passé and all must have the wealth that accompanies industrialization, and that they attempt to spread the story you just emitted to ensure that rate of wealth accumulation is not affected by the peoples of individual nations looking to the survival of themselves and their descendants.
The problem as I see it is that heavy industrialization consumes too much of the planet's finite reserves of resources too quickly, and additionally is putting an incredible tonnage of pollutants into the air, land, and sea - again at a rate that has never been seen before in human history.
Do you think that this planet can long provide resources at even current consumption rates, when ever more nations are striving to outproduce - to out consume - each other? Do you think the planet can absorb the soaring amounts of pollution being emitted? So much pollution that it is coming back to haunt even those nations whose elites are exploiting the cheap labor of the evolving "third world"?
Whether you die tilling a field or surrounded by cell phones, computers, and big screen TVs, you're still dead. The question is why hasten that event - for everybody, to include your own? What is wealth, without life?
I quit paying attention to the arguments that invoke the settling of Greenland when I noted that although they used that short-cycle migration as proof that global warming would be a piece of cake to survive, they never scale it up into terms that accommodate global population growth.
Without the appropriate scaling, using the Greenland migration as an analogy for the impact of global warming is the equivalent of saying that since it is easy to evacuate a ranch house that has no elevators in the event of an earthquake, it will be easy to evacuate a 1000-story office building that has no elevators in the event of an earthquake, too.
An interesting thought exercise is picturing the third world - the entire world, for that matter - should global warming be real and its negative effects upon the growing of food intensify about the same time as the downward slope of peak oil picks up speed.
And then throw in the fact that any factory can be repurposed (as was well and thoroughly demonstrated in WWII), the fact that the apparent goal is to ensure that everybody has plenty of factories, the fact that another goal appears to be increasing global human population to a density that at least matches the planet's carrying capacity under ideal conditions, and the fact that the archaeological record is littered with the evidence of populations transforming themselves into mobile armies when resource scarcity drives them to that point.
Yet people still insist on their individual right to maximize their individual wealth in the here and now, even if there is significant evidence that their pursuit of wealth and their insistence that they are entitled to take a "least cost" approach to wealth accumulation will cause the redefinition of both "ideal conditions" and "carrying capacity"?
Those who have read Aesop's fables should recognize the grasshopper in those who refuse to take reasonable, rational precautions in the area of global warming. Aesop was a smart guy, but I'm afraid that he never thought of a situation where individual grasshoppers could jeopardize themselves as well as all other grasshoppers - and the ants, too.
Something that endlessly amuses me is the global warming skeptics who effectively say "So some areas become uninhabitable or can no longer grow crops. Other areas will obviously get warmer..." as if those other areas would suddenly become as fecund as the abandoned areas had been.
As if eons of planet forming by volcanic action, glaciers, wind, and water had not built soil from rock in some places and moved soil from some areas to put it into regions now known as "bread baskets" for their fecundity...as if, in fact, all areas of the planet have the same depth and richness of soil, all just awaiting the right climatic conditions to burst into bloom...
Either that, or the very people who claim that global warming cannot be anthropogenic in nature because the systems in play are just too big to be affected by puny little man are assuming that if they are wrong mankind can replicate the geological forces of natural terraforming and will have and can expend both the time and the energy required to move trillions of cubic miles of soil to areas now favored by massive climatic shift driven by global warming...
They're funny, in a deadly kind of way.
Glad to see I got marked troll. If I hadn't, I would have suspected that the Oil boyz had diverted all of their own troll dollars towards advertising for the upcoming 2010 U.S. elections, both leaving a not insignificant number of slashdotters unemployed and guaranteeing mediocre TV interspersed with horrendous lies on all seven dozen or so of my channels for the foreseeable future. API's efforts are burgeoning, as it is, and those are nasty enough.
Attempting to put individual humans in opposition to abstract humanity is the rhetorical tool of petty tyrants, and is in that respect quite useful, because as soon as someone does it you know they do not care about human life or well-being, but only about their own rapacious quest for power.
Interesting argument to use when attempting to justify the individual's quest not for survival, but for wealth.
When nations have nuclear weapons, any credible large-scale threat to a nation's population - such as the disappearance of all of its remaining arable land due to climatic shift - carries with it the threat of mass extinction. What limits would bind you, if the choice was death by starvation, or conquering the arable lands of others? History says that all-out war is not just within the realm of possibility, but a veritable certainty.
The cost of being wrong, aside from setting society back a few decades, is to keep another generation or two of third worlders in severe poverty.
Given the difficulty that a lot of third-worlders have in feeding themselves now I suspect that a climatic shift, rather than keep them in poverty, would move them into the next world. Even if not, one conclusion is inescapable: The consequences of such a climatic shift upon what are today marginally arable lands would give great power to those nations that still had arable land. Or, perhaps, to those multinationals who controlled food?
Not that they would require climatic change to bring that about; it seems that nations often trade their self-sufficiency - their ability to feed themselves - for industrialization.
The question is really whether the human race is willing to risk its potentially infinite future to satiate the greed of a few during their comparatively insignificant lifespans.
It only makes sense to take precautions so as to avoid any chance of eliminating your own species. If you're wrong, you spent some money unnecessarily. Just like when you pay for homeowner's insurance, and your house fails to do you the courtesy of burning itself down before you die.
The question is really whether the human race is willing to its potentially infinite future to satiate the greed of a few during their comparatively insignificant lifespans.
Who are you, when compared to humanity?
The guy must know his stuff; I'd dearly love to know how he made emails originating from the whitehouse.gov domain disappear not only after they hit the RNC's servers, but after they were stored to tape.
Is it true that Schrodinger's cat was feeding upon the remains?
I agree; my initial impression upon reading the list of participants was that it was a neocon reunion.
Besides, they're sorta-kinda fibbing (ok, they're lying).
If we did get the U.S. of A. sufficiently hardened - to include all internet users in the nation ('cuz who knows what super-secret intelligence a g'ment worker would put on his or her home system), then three things would happen:
The moral of the story is one of:
Or maybe both.
Jeepers...talk about paranoia. Those splitters weren't put in for spying on U.S. citizens; they're only there to intercept the results from electronic voting machines and modify them according to specifications from a@#$$$R6a54@##
the most common way to lose it would be involve bittorrent...
Oh, I don't know - for some reason I think that posting complaints about Microsoft stuff like
Thank you for using My.live.com. On March 15, 2010, My.live.com will be discontinued and all users redirected to My MSN. Please note that your settings, feeds and gadgets will not be migrated to MyMSN. To make MyMSN your homepage today, click here.
would be right up there, too.
Won't fly; sounds too much like common sense, and in this day and age anything "common" is equated to plebeian.
We never should have recognized Red China.
Nixon's revenge...out of the grave.
Very insightful, I totally missed that Clinton was a Republican.
Then you probably missed the part about how Mrs. Clinton was on Wal*Mart's board for six years...and failed to link that fact, the Clintons' political successes in Wal*Mart's home state - Arkansas - and how much Wal*Mart benefited from Clinton's granting China MFN and being a champion of inequitable free trade.
And I bet you didn't consider how the additives in some cigars can make you eager to sign deregulation bills so as to buy Republican silence, either?
lolll...I bet you missed how Mrs. Clinton's Senate campaign was greatly aided by free rides on Vinod Gupta's (a significant beneficiary of inequitable free trade) jets, too?
My point being that you don't have to be an inanimate object to violate truth in labeling laws.
So the fact that China is ending up with all manufacturing is shocking...not. lolll...thank heavens they have an open government.
Funnier than American programmers writing code for their old colonial master's warships?
Oh, far funnier. It only took we Americans a decade or so to shake off imperialism; the Indians suffered and fought for two centuries. Thus, I'm sure their sense of humor is more highly...developed.