I read Fromme's (spelling?) "Escape from Freedom" years ago and rember thinking (at the time) that it was very insightful on the subject of why "normal" people are susceptable to the propaganda of authoritarian governments.
That's very valid and would need to be kept in mind while TREATING people with the types of paranoias that lead them to be vulnerable to "charismatic leaders", or focusing on getting individuals away from cults (or relationships)where they are being exploited by people who target those with poor mental health.
But the Government is not talking about that. They are talking countering anti-government propaganda. And what might be valid to prevent another Jones Town suicide situation, is not valid to interfere with political opposition, no matter how loopy it may be.
Like it or lump it, delusional people still have the right to freedom of speech, the right to form political parties, and the right to identify and uncover "conspiracies" (real or imaginary).
If the groups are promoting crimal actions - the government can prosecute them through the criminal system. If they are ripping vulnerable people off - then deal with it as fraud. And the governement could give better funding to community groups that try to counter cults.
Yes, although China will also lose a little bit of face. It's not much, but their human rights abuses are so large that any criticism that focuses the spotlight is good.
The team needs to be made up of a group of amoral people led by a complete Idealist (Blake).
Blake wasn't absolutely a completed idealist - he was at least in part motivated by revenge and ego. And the crew wasn't totally immoral - Cally, Dayna and Gan were sometimes more ethical than Blake. And Avon was loyal (he had no real reason not to steal the ship and could have done it). That's what I loved about it - it wasn't all "good" versus "evil" like Star Trek (which I also loved). The characters were more complex.
You're right - it was the moral ambiguity that made the show. It would be interesting to see how they handle the issue of terrorism in these sorry times.
Mind you, it was very uneven - the best episodes were great, but it often had the Lost-in-Space style "alien of the week" approach to Sci-Fi (Remember the mushrooms that could read minds? The planet made of spit? The space rats?).
Overall, I've always thought it would make a great movie if you dicked all of the silly episodes and just dealt with the central terrorist (or rebel depending on your POV) plot.
Lets say there is a purple car, but in my memory I remember it as blue... Why did this happen? When did this happen? Surely 2 moments after seeing the car I would remember it as blue, but later that week I recall it differently. Was it in the process of putting it into long term memory, or did it degrade over time in long term memory?
But it would never be random. You are making a wrong assumption about how human memory works: that everything we see is transferred into long term memory, although sometimes that information is degraded or retrieved wrongly. But only a percentage of what happens to us is remembered. It islikely that you don't remember the colour of the car you saw at all (wrongly or rightly). All you remember is that you saw a car, maybe of a particular type. You then randomly retrive an image of that type of car from a memory of a completly different time. That car was purple.
So the computer would need to forget some percentage of what it saw but be driven to fill in the blanks of the missing details from other, similar memories. Plus, it would need rules about how certain categories of what it saw would be more or less likely to be forgotten (i.e. it's common to forget cars we see, it would be surprising if you forgot an elephant strolling down your road). Plus it would have to have some things it remembers being very easy to retrieve (the elephant), some things hard to retrieve (the name of that man you worked with last year). Plus you'd need to make sure the computer made a certain percentage of retrieval mistakes (You say his name was Bill but it was Kevin).
If my ancestor got a brain virus, and it is still with us, then it most probably is that that virus provided something very positive compared to the negatives that you speak of. Otherwise, evolution would have taken care of removing that persons lineage from existance..
But not everything negative that you might inherit kills you or stops you breeding. So senile dementia is a terrible thing, and I can't see the positives in it, but it's not going to be eliminated by natural selection.
Worse, it fits in with the "Science is just another belief system" way of arguing. So religion and science are just two points of view within the same paradigm (as are evolution and intelligent design). Not different (and opposing) paradigms.
Yes, I don't have a problem with it. If Starbucks uses the images from the ruins to make $$$ and the Mexican Govt charges a fee to maintain the ruins, then it seems like a good thing to me.
Lucky ducky that your family has a tartan! I'm Scottish from a long line of Scots, but being a grotty lowlanders, we had naught but a knock on the head handed down through the generations. However, there are rules of use for tartans - and I'm quite happy to protect your families heritage from being ripped off by some American fast food chain. It's not about copyright to me - it's also the issue of treating other people's culture with respect. For example, in Australia, it became quite common for people to use "aboriginal" designs to flog tourist items, while the Aboriginal and Torres Straight Islander people died in poverty of third world diseases. And how many record companies have ripped of poor Africans for source music without paying them a cent?
Mexico is a pretty poor country. I wouldn't object to there being some fund for use of these images for profit in foreign countries provided the money went into some cultural preservation purposes (for maintenance of the ruins or something).
I don't really see it as a copyright issue at all. I would have linked to have read more about the matter than the link above gave.
We had a fire near our work and with twitter I found out what was on fire and some basic details long before either the online news or the radio had anything other than "firefighters are fighting a blaze in X" with nothing else.
The area concerned was heavily industrial, so it mattered to me what was on fire because of potiential fumes.
Twitter is fast and useful for that occasional use. Which is why the army of constant micro-bloggers needs to be encouraged. We can then tap into their otherwise pointless garbage about everything that happens every moment of their lives. Because when something does happen, they will tweet about that.
But both jobs you've mentioned are fairly well paid and high status (at least here in Australia, most construction workers are paid more than executives, and neither group are renouned for being crippled by work load).
Move out to the low-paid, low status jobs, and particularly ones with lots of female or migrant workers and there are heaps of slave-driven jobs (admittedly not as bad as African diamond mines).
Some examples: call centre workers on "forced feed" schedules, paid-per-word typists, paid-per-piece garment workers, nurses, cleaners, etc. I also found working at fast food restaurants was pretty hard work, although the hours tended to be short.
To the poster of the question. The basic rule when entering any new group is "fit in". Don't work too much harder than those around you. Don't work too much less.
If you start a new job and try to start "fixing" people, they will hate you. If the workplace doesn't suit you, then get another job.
I didn't think he was saying that objects blur themselves when they move fast. I thought he meant "my hand looks blurry when I wave it in front of my face".
The claim you made was that "Males of any species prefer young females because they're the healthiest."
You said this in the context of a discussion about whether it is natural for men to be attracted to young females in the broader context of a story about about a man who raped his foster-daugeter.
I took it that you agreed that it was natural for a male to be attracted to a young female because young = healthy = attractive.
Perhaps I should have read your post in a narrower context - i.e. as part of a discussion about why girls reach puberty younger these days.
What exactly was the point of your post?
The point of my post was that I doubted that he chose the healthiest/most attractive female. Only the most accessible.
Are you sure that "we as a socitey seem to think that rape is as grave a crime as one can commit"?
Here in Australia, the average sentence for rape is 5 years and for murder 19 years. Which I think reflects well how Australians regard the relative seriousness of the two crimes. I've never really heard any female say they'd rather be murdered than raped.
But what's the point of a debate about which is worse? I'd rather someone painted graffiti on my fence than rob me, I rather be robbed than beaten, I'd rather be beaten than raped, raped than murdered, murdered fast than tortured and murdered and so on.
Slashdot Mirror
Wouldn't want to bite my tongue with diamond teeth.
Gawd, he was an ugly bugger.
I read Fromme's (spelling?) "Escape from Freedom" years ago and rember thinking (at the time) that it was very insightful on the subject of why "normal" people are susceptable to the propaganda of authoritarian governments.
But the Government is not talking about that. They are talking countering anti-government propaganda. And what might be valid to prevent another Jones Town suicide situation, is not valid to interfere with political opposition, no matter how loopy it may be.
Like it or lump it, delusional people still have the right to freedom of speech, the right to form political parties, and the right to identify and uncover "conspiracies" (real or imaginary).
If the groups are promoting crimal actions - the government can prosecute them through the criminal system. If they are ripping vulnerable people off - then deal with it as fraud. And the governement could give better funding to community groups that try to counter cults.
But government as arbitor of the "truth"? No way.
Google china breaks too easily and isn't dishwaher safe. Chinese google has too much MSG.
If I had mod points I'd mod you up.
Yes, although China will also lose a little bit of face. It's not much, but their human rights abuses are so large that any criticism that focuses the spotlight is good.
Normally I would agree with you, but China scares me more than Google.
Would've been funnier if the tank broke.
The team needs to be made up of a group of amoral people led by a complete Idealist (Blake).
Blake wasn't absolutely a completed idealist - he was at least in part motivated by revenge and ego. And the crew wasn't totally immoral - Cally, Dayna and Gan were sometimes more ethical than Blake. And Avon was loyal (he had no real reason not to steal the ship and could have done it). That's what I loved about it - it wasn't all "good" versus "evil" like Star Trek (which I also loved). The characters were more complex.
Mind you, it was very uneven - the best episodes were great, but it often had the Lost-in-Space style "alien of the week" approach to Sci-Fi (Remember the mushrooms that could read minds? The planet made of spit? The space rats?).
Overall, I've always thought it would make a great movie if you dicked all of the silly episodes and just dealt with the central terrorist (or rebel depending on your POV) plot.
Lets say there is a purple car, but in my memory I remember it as blue. .. Why did this happen? When did this happen? Surely 2 moments after seeing the car I would remember it as blue, but later that week I recall it differently. Was it in the process of putting it into long term memory, or did it degrade over time in long term memory?
But it would never be random. You are making a wrong assumption about how human memory works: that everything we see is transferred into long term memory, although sometimes that information is degraded or retrieved wrongly. But only a percentage of what happens to us is remembered. It islikely that you don't remember the colour of the car you saw at all (wrongly or rightly). All you remember is that you saw a car, maybe of a particular type. You then randomly retrive an image of that type of car from a memory of a completly different time. That car was purple.
So the computer would need to forget some percentage of what it saw but be driven to fill in the blanks of the missing details from other, similar memories. Plus, it would need rules about how certain categories of what it saw would be more or less likely to be forgotten (i.e. it's common to forget cars we see, it would be surprising if you forgot an elephant strolling down your road). Plus it would have to have some things it remembers being very easy to retrieve (the elephant), some things hard to retrieve (the name of that man you worked with last year). Plus you'd need to make sure the computer made a certain percentage of retrieval mistakes (You say his name was Bill but it was Kevin).
Nope. Kangaroos just hop straight out in front of your car, side-on. Usually at dusk. They are obviously slow learners.
If my ancestor got a brain virus, and it is still with us, then it most probably is that that virus provided something very positive compared to the negatives that you speak of. Otherwise, evolution would have taken care of removing that persons lineage from existance. .
But not everything negative that you might inherit kills you or stops you breeding. So senile dementia is a terrible thing, and I can't see the positives in it, but it's not going to be eliminated by natural selection.
Worse, it fits in with the "Science is just another belief system" way of arguing. So religion and science are just two points of view within the same paradigm (as are evolution and intelligent design). Not different (and opposing) paradigms.
I don't think it's a copyright issue really.
Mexico is a pretty poor country. I wouldn't object to there being some fund for use of these images for profit in foreign countries provided the money went into some cultural preservation purposes (for maintenance of the ruins or something).
I don't really see it as a copyright issue at all. I would have linked to have read more about the matter than the link above gave.
The area concerned was heavily industrial, so it mattered to me what was on fire because of potiential fumes.
Twitter is fast and useful for that occasional use. Which is why the army of constant micro-bloggers needs to be encouraged. We can then tap into their otherwise pointless garbage about everything that happens every moment of their lives. Because when something does happen, they will tweet about that.
Move out to the low-paid, low status jobs, and particularly ones with lots of female or migrant workers and there are heaps of slave-driven jobs (admittedly not as bad as African diamond mines).
Some examples: call centre workers on "forced feed" schedules, paid-per-word typists, paid-per-piece garment workers, nurses, cleaners, etc. I also found working at fast food restaurants was pretty hard work, although the hours tended to be short.
If you start a new job and try to start "fixing" people, they will hate you. If the workplace doesn't suit you, then get another job.
I remember reading in psych about these people who couldn't see motion at all because they had damage to some area of the brain. They only saw frames.
I didn't think he was saying that objects blur themselves when they move fast. I thought he meant "my hand looks blurry when I wave it in front of my face".
...the entire slashdot community would never have a significant other because they would all be pining for Natalie Portman.
Point taken, but the females will have to vote on who our "Natalie Portman" equivilant is.
Does that change what I said?
No.
Did I even make that claim?
The claim you made was that "Males of any species prefer young females because they're the healthiest."
You said this in the context of a discussion about whether it is natural for men to be attracted to young females in the broader context of a story about about a man who raped his foster-daugeter.
I took it that you agreed that it was natural for a male to be attracted to a young female because young = healthy = attractive.
Perhaps I should have read your post in a narrower context - i.e. as part of a discussion about why girls reach puberty younger these days.
What exactly was the point of your post?
The point of my post was that I doubted that he chose the healthiest/most attractive female. Only the most accessible.
Here in Australia, the average sentence for rape is 5 years and for murder 19 years. Which I think reflects well how Australians regard the relative seriousness of the two crimes. I've never really heard any female say they'd rather be murdered than raped.
But what's the point of a debate about which is worse? I'd rather someone painted graffiti on my fence than rob me, I rather be robbed than beaten, I'd rather be beaten than raped, raped than murdered, murdered fast than tortured and murdered and so on.
It's not a victim competition. So what?