You reckon? Look at the guys investing in it. On the one hand, we've got Jeff Bezos who wouldn't know a profit if it smacked him in the face (and that's bcos there's no profit at Amazon to smack anyone with - not even enough to tread on their toes;-). And on the other hand we've got Steve Jobs, king of the "Marketing Campaign Without Substance" known as the iMac, a range of computers sold on their pretty colours rather than any inherent good features of the computer itself. Oh, and then there's the venture capitalist who's been plugging money blindly at dot-coms which haven't a hope of making money, but wasn't smart enough to realise that none of them would make money.
Is it just me, or does anyone else think this trio aren't exactly the ppl to trust when it comes to finding good ideas?
Well, that's why my "spam account" (which I use for signing up to this stuff) is on Hotmail. I don't really care how much it clogs up Hotmail's servers...:->
Nice to see that selecting "no" is an error!:-) What's next then? Maybe they'll have a "no" option in the sign-up, but when you click "Submit", it'll come up with "Error - you failed to fully sign up for mailbox-clogging shite. Please try again."
What d'you need a computer for? Play cards or Monopoly or Risk instead - there's gameplay for you if you don't need flashy graphics.;-)
Sure, there's nothing new in the world - nearly everything copies something. Hell, if you want you could say that Q3 is just Space Invaders with a flashier front end. These days though, top-notch graphics are a de-facto part of the game, so much so almost that the customer expects them to be there. Consider a car - would you be slightly disappointed if you bought a new car and found it didn't have a starter motor and you had to hand-crank it? The car may handle brilliantly, but the step between what you expect and what you get on the user-interface is likely to put you off.
Grab.
Re:Why is the war still raging?
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"Traffic"
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· Score: 1
The USA is spending money on it bcos the majority of US citizens agree that drugs are a Bad Thing. Whether you believe that the government is acting to enforce the will of the ppl, or whether you believe that the government is merely doing it to try to curry votes, is immaterial.
Cross-reference to Prohibition, brought in bcos the majority of US citizens believed that alcohol was a Bad Thing - for this they even had a referendum, so we know absolutely that a majority agreed with it.
Grab.
Re:Pioneers, NOT tourists!
on
Space Tourism
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· Score: 1
Scuse me, are you human?;-) Cos humans have a long and dignified history of doing stuff just for the hell of it, not just to meet long-term goals. Where d'you think Our Favourite Operating System (tm) came from? cos it certainly wasn't a long-term goal. Ditto sendmail and zillions of other projects.
Anyway, the way this will pay off is to get investment in space research. Take the example of the early car - it was slower than a carriage (and _much_ slower than a post-coach) and broke down often, but the ultra-rich bought them as toys. 10 years on (1900s) they were about fast enough to match a horse. 20 years on from that (1920s), and everyone down to the lower-middle-class could afford them. 30 years on from that (1950s), and anyone could afford one.
Is this irrelevant? Well, the continuing development of petrol (and diesel) engines brought a whole new way of doing things to the construction, mining and farming industries. None of this development was paid for by those industries, it was adapted from technology used to build cars for consumers, and the consumers buying those cars were therefore funding the technology improvements which were passed on to those industries.
Now consider space. ATM there's not much investment. Companies are starting to look at space, but there's so much investment required that they're (quite rightly) not prepared to divert funds to it. But a company set up to supply the ultra-rich with space flights for fun ("toys") could produce an achievable first-draft space travel service - and likely produce it cost-effectively since they aren't beholden to air force types who want the glamour of a Space Shuttle over the practicality of a rocket, for example. They'll find out stuff from the first few trips and produce better versions and cheaper ways to power it, and the cost will come down - as an example, the reason it's so expensive to get up there is that you have to carry all your fuel, so there's already research being done on powering a first-stage boost from the ground where energy's cheaper. Meantime, the technology improvements will make possible cheaper expeditions to do your space-mining in the same way that the Benz three-wheeler made the tractor and the JCB possible.
Ask him what the difference is between swiping CDs off the shelf at HMV, and downloading the same stuff off Napster. And ask him why copyright law needs changing. Basically, if he insists that the law needs changing, then try to get him to explain why. After all, you're just supporting the status quo. Chances are, he'll dig himself enough holes that you won't need to do much!:-) And don't get put off by his volume - over the radio, the volume is evened out and someone who just starts shouting comes across as a bit of a sad failure.
Sure, record companies make obscene profits, and very little of that gets back to the artist. But it's the artist's choice to sign to the record company (no-one holds a gun to their head). Just using the price of CDs as an argument isn't justified. He does _not_ have a god-given right to listen to anything he chooses - the price of listening to a band is paying for entry to a concert or paying for a CD. He has a choice of whether he pays or not, but that's it. Maybe Napster has encouraged him to buy more CDs, but in plenty of other cases ppl are using Napster instead of buying CDs, especially since CD-writers are now so easily available. I have friends doing this (and I've done a bit myself) so I know of what I speak!
Where music-sharing scores is in allowing small bands to promote themselves, bands you'd never usually have heard of. But this isn't what Napster users are after - they want music by famous bands without paying for it. Their current site is into promoting new artists, but this only happened after the lawsuit. Before the lawsuit, the blurb said something about "Tired of searching through lists of bands you've never heard of? Napster has songs by all your favourite bands", and the law-suit turned up memos by the Napster founders that they were expecting ppl to put pirate copies on the system, and wanted to let them do it. A good bit of searching should turn up a news article with the exact wording.
If he shifts it to MyMP3.com, that action was more dubious since it's more like fair use - you only get to hear music that you've uploaded.
Grab.
Re:The only way this could be done. . .
on
Nazis on Napster
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· Score: 1
As you say, Wagner didn't have any choice over who listened to his music after he died.:-)
But how about Carl Orff? It's debatable whether he was a Nazi or not, but certainly his work was used as a conteporary example for German musicians. And Leni Riefenstahl's films.
If it comes to that, should we also be opposing Stalinism? No more Prokofiev, or Eisenstein films.
Dude, this is self-limiting. He quits his job to play for no reward, he runs out of money, he can't pay the phone bills, end of story. If he quits his job to play and build up a char which someone else is fool enough to buy though, then more power to him. The rule is that anything is worth what someone is prepared to pay for it, so if he makes money off it then great. At one time some quite smart folks were saying that software wasn't really worth anything ("what's the inherent value in a floppy disk?") but M$ still got billions in spite of them, and even quite recently website design was a hobby rather than a job.
And why should this be wrong? Some guys devote months or years on end to writing software without ever knowing if anyone'll use it. Many work more than 12 hours a day (whether that be work at a company, or work on a private project at home) and have little contact with other ppl. Some other guys devote themselves to playing music, or to sport (how much d'you reckon a professional sportsperson or musician sees their family?). How's this different?
The difference isn't in the time you spend on it, or in the usefulness of the result. The difference is merely that they're doing something non-traditional.
Who needed orbital surveillance for Waco anyway, when anyone who fancied could fly a helicopter over the site?
As for how the FBI decides who to target - well, if you stand up in public and shout "Unbelievers are evil and must be killed", then expect to get some attention!
Either Troll City, or Looneysville. One or t'other...
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Re:I don't quite get this....
on
Gifts For Geeks
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· Score: 1
Well Vaseline and Kleenex will sort out the problem in his sig anyway...
A point here. The books don't have them flapping all the the time - IIRC, ornithopters were jet-powered fixed-wings at speed, and only used the ornithopter principle for low speeds and hovering (mainly taking off and landing, plus as a weapons platform).
Incidentally, you don't need to be able to flap to use thermals - gliders do it all the time. But it's not a quick way of getting about - the very best glider pilots average a few hundred miles a day on good days, compared to the few hundred miles an hour of a jet aircraft which is required for cross-planet transport in a reasonable time (747's, etc).
Filming flapping objects is a real problem though, if you don't want it to look like a Harryhausen stop-motion thing. Even the BBC's "Walking with Dinosaurs" with a pretty serious budget fluffed the flying sequences - the gliding ones were OK, but anything that flapped just moved wrong.
On this subject... I find the whole thing of trying to justify the author with physical science a little bizarre. We're talking fantasy here, folks. He wrote it this way, in his universe it works, and suspension of disbelief means that for the duration of the book we're happy to accept that it works this way. If you feel the need to speculate about the underlying technologies required for each, you're looking so deep at the tree bark that you're missing the forest.
Mmm. Genuinely believing you are a Jedi is a worrying state of affairs! It's a film, man! It's fiction! As are spells, demons, etc.
The point of the Hellmouth series is that folks doing recreational stuff like listening to goth music, roleplaying, maybe getting gothed-up a party, were and are getting a raw deal from other kids who thought they were taking this seriously when in fact it's just a bit of fun. But when you DO take it seriously - well, it definitely is time to call in the shrinks.
Oh, and a quick tip for any parents whose kids are being bullied - send them to learn karate, or taekwondo, or any other martial art. In a disciplined environment (and martial arts classes are disciplined, unlike schools), they can learn how to defend themselves effectively. This is a great confidence booster, and it also teaches restraint, ie. only using it when needed, so the kid doesn't turn into a bully themselves. Of course, if the bullies are themselves going to the same class then you make sure you get a different class! Eventually someone's going to try something, the kid'll flip out, and the bully will be in a world of hurt (been there, done that). It does tend to discourage the others!
Get a life. You've been reading too much Heinlein and ESR. A government has restraints bcos if they don't do what the ppl want, they'll be out of office next time around.
You want examples of what you're talking about? Look at any South American banana republic, or several Central/East African nations. Where the government has an armed uprising to contend with, the result is CIVIL WAR. And whilst only a minority of the country may be involved in the uprising, the majority will be affected due to looting, murder, starvation, etc.
There's 2 ways that a country can be ruled, and only 2. Either you allow democracy, in which case ppl are voted into office and voted out of office; or you accept the rule of "might is right" and if you get in the way you get killed or disappeared. You want to allow ppl the right to shoot whoever they choose, then fine - just don't expect sympathy when it's your kids that are murdered.
Armed uprising sounds all fine and dandy to your average hormonal teenager who's not seen too much of the outside world, and learned everything he knows playing Quake. Grown-ups, particularly those with spouses, children and other loved ones, have a rather different view of arbitrary violence.
"Profit"? Mike is a _prophet_ of beatnik pseudo-mysticism. However, you're dead right - what Heinlein made out of the book could quite accurately be called a "profit of beatnik pseudo-mysticism"!;-)
I'm reminded of Monty Python: "That's no basis for a system of government!"
If your voting restriction is on intelligence, then you get an intellectual elite running the country - this may be no bad thing, incidentally, since we'd get the leaders we want instead of the ones we deserve, and stuff might get run right! If your voting restriction is on a test against empathy, you'll get a government run for the benefit of the ppl to the exclusion of defence and other things. These just as a couple of examples.
But if your voting restriction is on those dumb enough to put their necks on the line - well hey, we've got ourselves a government of macho assholes. If any poor dumb sod can join the army as a grunt, that poor dumb sod has a chance of coming out the other side any having a say in politics, so you'll find the politicians catering to the lowest common denominator, ie. that dumb grunt.
Think it ain't so? Well American politics already goes for the lowest common denominator of the WWF viewer - how many TV ads gave any reason to vote for a candidate other than spurious ones? "Candidate X is bad for the environment" when candidate Y is busy setting up chemical factories in his backyard. "Candidate Y is going to tax you more" when candidate X is preparing for fantasy budget predictions. For God's sake, even the news channels are the same - the most in-depth questions were being asked on the talk show interviews, and that's a scarey concept if you believe in unbiased and accurate reporting!
ST wasn't really much of a parody at the time. But looking at the US now - oh boy!
I'm with you on the "grow once and never again" side, at least until we've got some good evidence of the results - we don't know what might happen.
I'm much less with you (in fact, not at all) about the "frankenfoods" tag. Find other examples of GM crops being harmful. And even finding examples is difficult - over in the UK, first the protesters said they didn't want full-scale growing so they got some field trials (sorry for the pun!), then they decided that growing them in fields was bad so they trashed the crops (causing thousands of pounds worth of damage and delaying testing programs by years), and now they want to ban the research altogether. If this seems like a rational and considered approach to anyone, they should call a psychiatrist immediately.
The problem with "grow once only" is that it imposes yearly costs on the growers. All the GM companies were originally going to do non-reproductive seed, (a) for more money, and (b) bcos we don't know enough about it - admittedly probably more (a) than (b). Then front-page articles in all the papers said "GM companies ripping off poor countries", and editorials were saying that this was blatant exploitation of the poor man, and all the aid organisations said that something must be done. Under huge pressure from governments on the issue, the GM companies had to switch to reproductive grain. Now the editorials are saying "Is this safe?" and "Frankenfoods will pollute our countryside", and they're recommending the exact opposite. So what do you think they should do? Are you recommending that GM companies listen to the public, or are you actually only recommending that they listen to the section of the public which shares your views? And be honest to yourself when you answer that one...
You're part-right about the failure of society - in many countries (particularly Africa) there is starvation due to the effects of wars, particularly civil wars, and the average guys are getting it in the neck. This stuff won't help there - the problem is in the political system, not the agriculture system. Where it will help is in poor countries where the ppl are not dying of hunger but are suffering poor health and premature death due to vitamin deficiencies through living exclusively on a diet of rice or millet without any access to fresh fruit, meat or other essential dietary elements.
Grab.
PS. Jello Biafra isn't exactly my choice of a considered voice of reason and a sound ideological example!:-)
I didn't write the original post - I was merely replying ad-hoc to your post. Sorry! But not I've started, I'll get you an answer.
WARNING: The post below makes reference to the Nazis. This is not a failed debating point, but an essential element if we're going to talk about fascist, and compare ST's society to other Fascist societies. Now that's over with...
The society in ST is fascist by disenfranchising those with a different political viewpoint. If you ain't done your service you can't vote, and you can't form any political opposition to constitutionally reject this system. Other fascist societies (Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia both fit the bill as described in your dictionary entry) worked on a similar basis by making voting conditional on Party membership.
This gives all power to those who join up. And if you've joined up, you believe in it, and you'll refuse power to anyone who doesn't believe in it - or there's social pressure to conform. Hence the social regimentation. Oppression of opposition is almost too easy, since there can't by definition be any political opposition. The assembly is restricted to those who were voted in to do what the "believers" want - think of the decisions made in Britain during the Potato Famine to the benefit of the rich landowners who were the only voters. And hence the state is more powerful than the individual in that it only those individuals who support the state's views can _become_ the state.
The real question is whether Heinlein intended it as a parody of a fascist state, whether he intended to support the principles of the state, or whether he just put the state in as the background to some adolescent fiction. I'm not entirely sure, since his standard of writing isn't 100% there and wobbles significantly. I think he probably did intend it as a loose parody, since his other books are very much like ESR's armed anarchist worldview - the "geeks with guns" theory - but I'm pretty sure that any parody is fairly incidental to the teenage male fantasy fiction. He reused the "earn your vote" theme in another book too IIRC, which was kind of a "Survivor with guns and knives on Mars" - that could have been an interesting idea too but went rapidly downhill.
That's the trouble - lots of writers can come up with interesting ideas, but few can do them justice. Michael Crichton's prone to the same problem, except his just descend into stock thriller territory. For Heinlein, his descend into stock teenage male fantasy. Another poster got it dead right - all Heinlein's main characters are too perfect, which gives them nowhere to develop.
Asimov and Heinlein may have respected each other, but that doesn't mean that they believed the same things. You can be friends with someone without subscribing to their beliefs, and without necessarily having much of an opinion of their work (although Asimov was quite eclectic in his choice of what he liked, so he may have).
Oh, and reading 3 of his books does not qualify as excessive. I've read a good half-dozen (and own a couple; the rest were library copies), but I'm not dead keen. If you read a book a year, 3 books may seem a lot. If you get through a typical paperback in an afternoon, as I do, 3 books is a rainy day with nothing better to do, or a week's worth of reading before bed. And I'd not want to make a judgement on whether the guy was a good or bad writer until I'd read several of his books - everyone can have a bad day, after all.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
You reckon? Look at the guys investing in it. On the one hand, we've got Jeff Bezos who wouldn't know a profit if it smacked him in the face (and that's bcos there's no profit at Amazon to smack anyone with - not even enough to tread on their toes ;-). And on the other hand we've got Steve Jobs, king of the "Marketing Campaign Without Substance" known as the iMac, a range of computers sold on their pretty colours rather than any inherent good features of the computer itself. Oh, and then there's the venture capitalist who's been plugging money blindly at dot-coms which haven't a hope of making money, but wasn't smart enough to realise that none of them would make money.
Is it just me, or does anyone else think this trio aren't exactly the ppl to trust when it comes to finding good ideas?
Grab.
You _can_ buy a hoverboard. Unfortunately it's more like a ride-on Flymo than a lean mean street machine, but anyway...
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Well, that's why my "spam account" (which I use for signing up to this stuff) is on Hotmail. I don't really care how much it clogs up Hotmail's servers... :->
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Nice to see that selecting "no" is an error! :-) What's next then? Maybe they'll have a "no" option in the sign-up, but when you click "Submit", it'll come up with "Error - you failed to fully sign up for mailbox-clogging shite. Please try again."
Grab.
What d'you need a computer for? Play cards or Monopoly or Risk instead - there's gameplay for you if you don't need flashy graphics. ;-)
Sure, there's nothing new in the world - nearly everything copies something. Hell, if you want you could say that Q3 is just Space Invaders with a flashier front end. These days though, top-notch graphics are a de-facto part of the game, so much so almost that the customer expects them to be there. Consider a car - would you be slightly disappointed if you bought a new car and found it didn't have a starter motor and you had to hand-crank it? The car may handle brilliantly, but the step between what you expect and what you get on the user-interface is likely to put you off.
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The USA is spending money on it bcos the majority of US citizens agree that drugs are a Bad Thing. Whether you believe that the government is acting to enforce the will of the ppl, or whether you believe that the government is merely doing it to try to curry votes, is immaterial.
Cross-reference to Prohibition, brought in bcos the majority of US citizens believed that alcohol was a Bad Thing - for this they even had a referendum, so we know absolutely that a majority agreed with it.
Grab.
Scuse me, are you human? ;-) Cos humans have a long and dignified history of doing stuff just for the hell of it, not just to meet long-term goals. Where d'you think Our Favourite Operating System (tm) came from? cos it certainly wasn't a long-term goal. Ditto sendmail and zillions of other projects.
Anyway, the way this will pay off is to get investment in space research. Take the example of the early car - it was slower than a carriage (and _much_ slower than a post-coach) and broke down often, but the ultra-rich bought them as toys. 10 years on (1900s) they were about fast enough to match a horse. 20 years on from that (1920s), and everyone down to the lower-middle-class could afford them. 30 years on from that (1950s), and anyone could afford one.
Is this irrelevant? Well, the continuing development of petrol (and diesel) engines brought a whole new way of doing things to the construction, mining and farming industries. None of this development was paid for by those industries, it was adapted from technology used to build cars for consumers, and the consumers buying those cars were therefore funding the technology improvements which were passed on to those industries.
Now consider space. ATM there's not much investment. Companies are starting to look at space, but there's so much investment required that they're (quite rightly) not prepared to divert funds to it. But a company set up to supply the ultra-rich with space flights for fun ("toys") could produce an achievable first-draft space travel service - and likely produce it cost-effectively since they aren't beholden to air force types who want the glamour of a Space Shuttle over the practicality of a rocket, for example. They'll find out stuff from the first few trips and produce better versions and cheaper ways to power it, and the cost will come down - as an example, the reason it's so expensive to get up there is that you have to carry all your fuel, so there's already research being done on powering a first-stage boost from the ground where energy's cheaper. Meantime, the technology improvements will make possible cheaper expeditions to do your space-mining in the same way that the Benz three-wheeler made the tractor and the JCB possible.
Grab.
Do the /. editors not read NewScientist? Looks like I'll just have to have a policy of forwarding all NewScientist articles to them.
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Check out the replies to the "Floppy Awards" article, for some folk talking about Napster.
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Ask him what the difference is between swiping CDs off the shelf at HMV, and downloading the same stuff off Napster. And ask him why copyright law needs changing. Basically, if he insists that the law needs changing, then try to get him to explain why. After all, you're just supporting the status quo. Chances are, he'll dig himself enough holes that you won't need to do much! :-) And don't get put off by his volume - over the radio, the volume is evened out and someone who just starts shouting comes across as a bit of a sad failure.
Sure, record companies make obscene profits, and very little of that gets back to the artist. But it's the artist's choice to sign to the record company (no-one holds a gun to their head). Just using the price of CDs as an argument isn't justified. He does _not_ have a god-given right to listen to anything he chooses - the price of listening to a band is paying for entry to a concert or paying for a CD. He has a choice of whether he pays or not, but that's it. Maybe Napster has encouraged him to buy more CDs, but in plenty of other cases ppl are using Napster instead of buying CDs, especially since CD-writers are now so easily available. I have friends doing this (and I've done a bit myself) so I know of what I speak!
Where music-sharing scores is in allowing small bands to promote themselves, bands you'd never usually have heard of. But this isn't what Napster users are after - they want music by famous bands without paying for it. Their current site is into promoting new artists, but this only happened after the lawsuit. Before the lawsuit, the blurb said something about "Tired of searching through lists of bands you've never heard of? Napster has songs by all your favourite bands", and the law-suit turned up memos by the Napster founders that they were expecting ppl to put pirate copies on the system, and wanted to let them do it. A good bit of searching should turn up a news article with the exact wording.
If he shifts it to MyMP3.com, that action was more dubious since it's more like fair use - you only get to hear music that you've uploaded.
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As you say, Wagner didn't have any choice over who listened to his music after he died. :-)
But how about Carl Orff? It's debatable whether he was a Nazi or not, but certainly his work was used as a conteporary example for German musicians. And Leni Riefenstahl's films.
If it comes to that, should we also be opposing Stalinism? No more Prokofiev, or Eisenstein films.
Grab.
Dude, this is self-limiting. He quits his job to play for no reward, he runs out of money, he can't pay the phone bills, end of story. If he quits his job to play and build up a char which someone else is fool enough to buy though, then more power to him. The rule is that anything is worth what someone is prepared to pay for it, so if he makes money off it then great. At one time some quite smart folks were saying that software wasn't really worth anything ("what's the inherent value in a floppy disk?") but M$ still got billions in spite of them, and even quite recently website design was a hobby rather than a job.
And why should this be wrong? Some guys devote months or years on end to writing software without ever knowing if anyone'll use it. Many work more than 12 hours a day (whether that be work at a company, or work on a private project at home) and have little contact with other ppl. Some other guys devote themselves to playing music, or to sport (how much d'you reckon a professional sportsperson or musician sees their family?). How's this different?
The difference isn't in the time you spend on it, or in the usefulness of the result. The difference is merely that they're doing something non-traditional.
Grab.
Who needed orbital surveillance for Waco anyway, when anyone who fancied could fly a helicopter over the site?
As for how the FBI decides who to target - well, if you stand up in public and shout "Unbelievers are evil and must be killed", then expect to get some attention!
Either Troll City, or Looneysville. One or t'other...
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Well Vaseline and Kleenex will sort out the problem in his sig anyway...
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While we're at it, there was the Latin girl in Commando, too (whose name escapes me).
Grab.
A point here. The books don't have them flapping all the the time - IIRC, ornithopters were jet-powered fixed-wings at speed, and only used the ornithopter principle for low speeds and hovering (mainly taking off and landing, plus as a weapons platform).
Incidentally, you don't need to be able to flap to use thermals - gliders do it all the time. But it's not a quick way of getting about - the very best glider pilots average a few hundred miles a day on good days, compared to the few hundred miles an hour of a jet aircraft which is required for cross-planet transport in a reasonable time (747's, etc).
Filming flapping objects is a real problem though, if you don't want it to look like a Harryhausen stop-motion thing. Even the BBC's "Walking with Dinosaurs" with a pretty serious budget fluffed the flying sequences - the gliding ones were OK, but anything that flapped just moved wrong.
On this subject... I find the whole thing of trying to justify the author with physical science a little bizarre. We're talking fantasy here, folks. He wrote it this way, in his universe it works, and suspension of disbelief means that for the duration of the book we're happy to accept that it works this way. If you feel the need to speculate about the underlying technologies required for each, you're looking so deep at the tree bark that you're missing the forest.
Grab.
And what if some hacker taps into the laser, causing it to magnify its power a zillion times and drill straight through their head? Muhahahaha!!!
Back in real life, ppl work this stuff out so that it doesn't burn out retinas.
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Mmm. Genuinely believing you are a Jedi is a worrying state of affairs! It's a film, man! It's fiction! As are spells, demons, etc.
The point of the Hellmouth series is that folks doing recreational stuff like listening to goth music, roleplaying, maybe getting gothed-up a party, were and are getting a raw deal from other kids who thought they were taking this seriously when in fact it's just a bit of fun. But when you DO take it seriously - well, it definitely is time to call in the shrinks.
Oh, and a quick tip for any parents whose kids are being bullied - send them to learn karate, or taekwondo, or any other martial art. In a disciplined environment (and martial arts classes are disciplined, unlike schools), they can learn how to defend themselves effectively. This is a great confidence booster, and it also teaches restraint, ie. only using it when needed, so the kid doesn't turn into a bully themselves. Of course, if the bullies are themselves going to the same class then you make sure you get a different class! Eventually someone's going to try something, the kid'll flip out, and the bully will be in a world of hurt (been there, done that). It does tend to discourage the others!
Grab.
Get a life. You've been reading too much Heinlein and ESR. A government has restraints bcos if they don't do what the ppl want, they'll be out of office next time around.
You want examples of what you're talking about? Look at any South American banana republic, or several Central/East African nations. Where the government has an armed uprising to contend with, the result is CIVIL WAR. And whilst only a minority of the country may be involved in the uprising, the majority will be affected due to looting, murder, starvation, etc.
There's 2 ways that a country can be ruled, and only 2. Either you allow democracy, in which case ppl are voted into office and voted out of office; or you accept the rule of "might is right" and if you get in the way you get killed or disappeared. You want to allow ppl the right to shoot whoever they choose, then fine - just don't expect sympathy when it's your kids that are murdered.
Armed uprising sounds all fine and dandy to your average hormonal teenager who's not seen too much of the outside world, and learned everything he knows playing Quake. Grown-ups, particularly those with spouses, children and other loved ones, have a rather different view of arbitrary violence.
Grab.
"Profit"? Mike is a _prophet_ of beatnik pseudo-mysticism. However, you're dead right - what Heinlein made out of the book could quite accurately be called a "profit of beatnik pseudo-mysticism"! ;-)
Grab.
I'm reminded of Monty Python: "That's no basis for a system of government!"
If your voting restriction is on intelligence, then you get an intellectual elite running the country - this may be no bad thing, incidentally, since we'd get the leaders we want instead of the ones we deserve, and stuff might get run right! If your voting restriction is on a test against empathy, you'll get a government run for the benefit of the ppl to the exclusion of defence and other things. These just as a couple of examples.
But if your voting restriction is on those dumb enough to put their necks on the line - well hey, we've got ourselves a government of macho assholes. If any poor dumb sod can join the army as a grunt, that poor dumb sod has a chance of coming out the other side any having a say in politics, so you'll find the politicians catering to the lowest common denominator, ie. that dumb grunt.
Think it ain't so? Well American politics already goes for the lowest common denominator of the WWF viewer - how many TV ads gave any reason to vote for a candidate other than spurious ones? "Candidate X is bad for the environment" when candidate Y is busy setting up chemical factories in his backyard. "Candidate Y is going to tax you more" when candidate X is preparing for fantasy budget predictions. For God's sake, even the news channels are the same - the most in-depth questions were being asked on the talk show interviews, and that's a scarey concept if you believe in unbiased and accurate reporting!
ST wasn't really much of a parody at the time. But looking at the US now - oh boy!
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I'm with you on the "grow once and never again" side, at least until we've got some good evidence of the results - we don't know what might happen.
:-)
I'm much less with you (in fact, not at all) about the "frankenfoods" tag. Find other examples of GM crops being harmful. And even finding examples is difficult - over in the UK, first the protesters said they didn't want full-scale growing so they got some field trials (sorry for the pun!), then they decided that growing them in fields was bad so they trashed the crops (causing thousands of pounds worth of damage and delaying testing programs by years), and now they want to ban the research altogether. If this seems like a rational and considered approach to anyone, they should call a psychiatrist immediately.
The problem with "grow once only" is that it imposes yearly costs on the growers. All the GM companies were originally going to do non-reproductive seed, (a) for more money, and (b) bcos we don't know enough about it - admittedly probably more (a) than (b). Then front-page articles in all the papers said "GM companies ripping off poor countries", and editorials were saying that this was blatant exploitation of the poor man, and all the aid organisations said that something must be done. Under huge pressure from governments on the issue, the GM companies had to switch to reproductive grain. Now the editorials are saying "Is this safe?" and "Frankenfoods will pollute our countryside", and they're recommending the exact opposite. So what do you think they should do? Are you recommending that GM companies listen to the public, or are you actually only recommending that they listen to the section of the public which shares your views? And be honest to yourself when you answer that one...
You're part-right about the failure of society - in many countries (particularly Africa) there is starvation due to the effects of wars, particularly civil wars, and the average guys are getting it in the neck. This stuff won't help there - the problem is in the political system, not the agriculture system. Where it will help is in poor countries where the ppl are not dying of hunger but are suffering poor health and premature death due to vitamin deficiencies through living exclusively on a diet of rice or millet without any access to fresh fruit, meat or other essential dietary elements.
Grab.
PS. Jello Biafra isn't exactly my choice of a considered voice of reason and a sound ideological example!
I didn't write the original post - I was merely replying ad-hoc to your post. Sorry! But not I've started, I'll get you an answer.
WARNING: The post below makes reference to the Nazis. This is not a failed debating point, but an essential element if we're going to talk about fascist, and compare ST's society to other Fascist societies. Now that's over with...
The society in ST is fascist by disenfranchising those with a different political viewpoint. If you ain't done your service you can't vote, and you can't form any political opposition to constitutionally reject this system. Other fascist societies (Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia both fit the bill as described in your dictionary entry) worked on a similar basis by making voting conditional on Party membership.
This gives all power to those who join up. And if you've joined up, you believe in it, and you'll refuse power to anyone who doesn't believe in it - or there's social pressure to conform. Hence the social regimentation. Oppression of opposition is almost too easy, since there can't by definition be any political opposition. The assembly is restricted to those who were voted in to do what the "believers" want - think of the decisions made in Britain during the Potato Famine to the benefit of the rich landowners who were the only voters. And hence the state is more powerful than the individual in that it only those individuals who support the state's views can _become_ the state.
The real question is whether Heinlein intended it as a parody of a fascist state, whether he intended to support the principles of the state, or whether he just put the state in as the background to some adolescent fiction. I'm not entirely sure, since his standard of writing isn't 100% there and wobbles significantly. I think he probably did intend it as a loose parody, since his other books are very much like ESR's armed anarchist worldview - the "geeks with guns" theory - but I'm pretty sure that any parody is fairly incidental to the teenage male fantasy fiction. He reused the "earn your vote" theme in another book too IIRC, which was kind of a "Survivor with guns and knives on Mars" - that could have been an interesting idea too but went rapidly downhill.
That's the trouble - lots of writers can come up with interesting ideas, but few can do them justice. Michael Crichton's prone to the same problem, except his just descend into stock thriller territory. For Heinlein, his descend into stock teenage male fantasy. Another poster got it dead right - all Heinlein's main characters are too perfect, which gives them nowhere to develop.
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Asimov and Heinlein may have respected each other, but that doesn't mean that they believed the same things. You can be friends with someone without subscribing to their beliefs, and without necessarily having much of an opinion of their work (although Asimov was quite eclectic in his choice of what he liked, so he may have).
:-)
Oh, and reading 3 of his books does not qualify as excessive. I've read a good half-dozen (and own a couple; the rest were library copies), but I'm not dead keen. If you read a book a year, 3 books may seem a lot. If you get through a typical paperback in an afternoon, as I do, 3 books is a rainy day with nothing better to do, or a week's worth of reading before bed. And I'd not want to make a judgement on whether the guy was a good or bad writer until I'd read several of his books - everyone can have a bad day, after all.
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Thank God for that - I thought they would be dubbing over all the English voices!
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