The thing is... you're completely wrong. It was a Christian country who invaded Iraq and killed 1,000,000 people since 2003. The same goes for any example you might be able to drag out of your half-addled brain... Christian atrocities are echoed with a far smaller response from the Muslim world. If this were not the case, there would be no New York left AT ALL.
Ho ho. Very good. But most of the terrorists on the planet are in fact Christian. Other than that, though, you display incredible intelligence and wit.
Don't assume that since Emperor Dubya is president that he's in control of anything, including his own bladder. He's a figurehead. There most certainly are people in control of things, and they use Bush to deflect people's attacks from themselves. If you look at Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rice, and the rest of the neo-con gang, you'll find that they are incredibly capable people... unfortunately they're also incredibly evil people.
The reason no-one's tracked down Bin Laden is simple: the Bin Laden Group is Bush's biggest financial backer. The Bin Laden dynasty and the Bush dynasty go back a long way.
The reason why no-one's made any serious in-roads into bringing the so-called terrorists under control is that terrorism is the best thing that happened to ultra-conservative politics in the past century. It's vitally important for the Republicans, and increasingly more important for the Democrats, to have a horrible outside threat to protect the masses from, and to justify the increasing militarisation of the world, both domestically and internationally. Look at the rights we've lost in the name of protecting ourselves from the boogey man... this article is but one example.
As the self-proclaimed leaders of the free world, this isn't much of a defense. In fact it's quite a shitty defense. You can point your finger at other countries who have military dictatorships that are backed by the US, and say that they sin, but this misses my previous point that they are backed by the US.
The simple fact is that you can't parade around the world in your tanks, with your banned chemical and nuclear weapons, and have your CIA kidnap and 'render' political opponents to countries who will torture them to death... or of course carry out the torture yourself, and then claim that you are spreading freedom and democracy.
This CIA goat was claiming that we're seeing a shadow of a 'very different' CIA, operating in the past. But if anything, what we're seeing from these documents is a far more defensible organisation than you have today under the war criminals, Bush, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rice, etc. But they won't release these files until after every current neo-con has been wasted... er... died of natural causes.
Remember - This is the same Prime Minister of Australia (John Howard) who phone spammed the continent prior to the last election, then paid his smug looking son to email spam the nation
Exactly. I'm glad someone remembers this. Not many do, unfortunately.
But the biggest problem I have with Howard pushing his broadband 'revolution' is that he's privatising Telstra... against the wishes of the majority of Australians. Why should taxpayers have to pay for this investment? Clearly they shouldn't. It's Telstra's responsibility now. Of course they'll only do so when profitable, which goes a long way towards explaining why it shouldn't have been privatised in the first place. But now that it IS privatised, I don't see why my tax dollars should subsidize Telstra's equipment. They're only going to charge me through the roof for using this equipment that I just paid for.
Have a read of the absolutely brilliant book, 'Autopoieses and Cognition', by Humberto Maturana and Francesca Varella. They argue that cognition is a fundamental operation of all life, and they make their case extremely well. It's a hard book to track down, and a yet harder book to read, but it's well worthwhile.
The Bush Administration wouldn't get away with shutting down CNN.
CNN always has and always will be on Bush's side, so I don't think this argument is really meaningful. But as for shutting down other stations, sure, it happens. Here in Australia, just 3 or 4 years ago, there was a community TV station in Sydney, called Actively Radical TV. It ran a lot of leftist documentaries. It was very popular. It's license wasn't renewed, strangely enough. So don't tell me that this 'not renewing license' thing doesn't happen in Western 'democracies'. It's just that we very rarely have a media outlet that doesn't align itself with the ruling class.
The best they could do is stop cooperating and making life hard for CNN, but not shut it down because we here in America still love our freedom.
What a stupid thing to say! It's all because you love your freedom is it? I put it to you that ALL people 'love their freedom', but that some people, mostly in the US, have no idea what freedom actually is. Their idea of freedom is locking people in someone elses dungeons for 5 years without trial, or carpet combing a country with napalm, chemical and nuclear weapons. Some freedom.
Are you a liar, or simply a fool who can't count past 1?
Even if there were only 1 'wealthy oil interest', it wouldn't be Chavez, it would be the people of Venezuaela. You see, the profits from the sale of oil are being used for the public good... health, education... you know... all the things that US citizens have to pay for ( or ho without ). So what's better? You think you're better of in the US without a small number of 'wealthy oil interests', including your dumb-arse president? I don't think so.
ATI's own linux drivers are absolute SHIT. Their latest and greatest 3D offerings are easily outperformed by bargain basement cards from nVidia. And ATI have broken their word on their plan to 'support' open-source drivers, refusing to give any hardware specifications to developers, leaving them to reverse-engineer everything.
And it's not only 3D performance that sucks. The 2D performance of their drivers is an ORDER OF MAGNITUDE slower than the open-source driver, and nVidia's driver at XRENDER performance ( ie rendering the webpage you're looking at... have you ever wondered why scrolling in Firefox is so fucking slow on an ATI card? ). See http://ati.cchtml.com/show_bug.cgi?id=7. The bottom comment says:
Yes, you read that correctly, the Radeon X1400 is 15x slower than the (now obsolete) Radeon 7500, and 114x slower than the (similarly priced) Geforce 6600. To buy new hardware only to find that it's exponentially slower than the old hardware at the most basic of tasks is insulting. There shouldn't be any problem with making the X1400 *at least* as fast as the 7500, and preferably, competitive with it's similarly priced competition.
Unless this situation is rectified (either by the fglrx drivers being fixed, or documentation being released so that open source drivers can be developed), I will not buy any more ATI hardware, simply because it is embarrassingly slow.
Like I said... sounds like a fine product for a boycott. Get an Intel graphics accelerator instead. They have excellent open-source drivers, and are about to release a stand-alone graphics card ( previously all have been integrated ).
Re:'The gene' has very little to do with it
on
The Human Mutation
·
· Score: 1
'Some unknown mystical or physical force' is not required, so no need to feel left out! Every cell in the body participates in cognition. See Maturana and Varela's excellent book, 'Autopoieses and Cognition'... or have a look at the Wikipedia page: Autopoiesis... but this page is actually quite lacking... I must add to it. And, taking my previous point that life is continuous through reproduction ( ie doesn't 'stop' and 'start', has no 'beginning' and 'end' inside the reproduction loop ), it then follows that things like organisational structure and cellular memory can indeed be transferred in the reproductive process. This is different from the kind of memory that we usually relate to, yes, but not entirely different. Also much of what makes us 'human' lives in the collective unconscious... and before you call me a mad hatter, keep in mind Carl Jung is the most respected psychologist we have, and indeed pioneered modern psychology.
What seems mystical is merely something that exists that you don't yet understand.
Imagine what would happen if the Department of Health and Human Services seized the patents on drugs made in Brazil because it didn't want to pay the price the Brazilians wanted.
The US have certainly done this in the past. While high-tech industries were developing in the US, they paid NO attention to other people's intellectual property. It's only now that they hold most of this property that they're interested in the 'rights' of the holders.
And it's not exactly unlike the US to act unilaterally, claiming that their action is in the 'national interest', is it? The only thing that prevents the US from doing exactly that is the fact that this would give a green light to other countries to ignore patents, which would have a net detrimental effect on the US ( again, due to the fact that the US now holds most of the world's so-called 'intellectual property' ).
Is it because we're "too rich?"
It depends on what you mean by 'rich'. If you mean 'rich in intellectual property', then the answer is most certainly YES. The rule of thumb for understanding every decision the US ( or other capitalist power ) makes is this: will this enrich the ruling class or not?
Sure. But the 'International Intellectual Property Association' do have valid concerns here. That's not to say that intellectual property is a good thing - it's most certainly not, and individuals and countries are right to reject it. Of course most countries that DO reject it do it mostly for the wrong reasons - for their own economic benefit. The right reasons to reject intellectual property have more to do with human rights, equality, etc.
The amendments include extensions to the prohibitions on the spread of false information
I seem to remember an incredible amount of bullshit... sorry... 'false information' coming from Dubya & co over Iraq's WOMD. In particular, I remember them being caught red-handed fabricating evidence.
It's all very well to have laws, but who decides which laws apply to which people?
'The gene' has very little to do with it
on
The Human Mutation
·
· Score: 1
This is another demonstration of the failure of the reductionist method to describe complex phenomena. Genetics is but a small portion of what 'makes us human', and this particular gene is but a small portion of genetics. Saying that one gene 'makes us human' is like saying "I've found the atom that makes this the Earth". People who insist that we are nothing but a product of our genetics are missing a very important point: reproduction is not a discrete process - it's a continuation of life, and therefore everything that is included in the parents' lives are also included in the makeup of the child, from body chemistry through to thought itself. Life is organised on many levels by many processes, NOT physical 'codes'. Genes exist, and are used, sure, but they are not the be-all and end-all.
What these reductionist scientists can claim is that they've found a gene that appears to be unique to humans. This is quite different from what they're claiming.
The point that the author is missing is that the GPL is not written by people who have any love for copyright - far from it - this is why they call it copyleft. One of the ideals behind open source is that knowledge is not a private possession, but a public possession. The GPL is a very elegant way of achieving this goal inside current copyright law.
Sure, it would be a great achievement to abolish copyright on knowledge ( intellectual copyright ) completely. But in the current climate, that's not going to fly. Therefore I think it's completely consistent to be anti-copyright and pro-GPL. The only inconsistency is in people's minds who can't appreciate what the GPL is trying to achieve.
Oh bullshit. If corporations don't want to invest i R&D, they can take their bat and ball and fuck off. Medical research is something that the GOVERNMENT should conduct, not corporations, for these reasons exactly:
- massive R&D costs - requirement that ALL people benefit from R&D, and not just rich Americans with private health insurance
But there IS a relationship. Hans gets DOD contract to develop cryptographic plugins for reiser4. Hans gets framed for murder. It doesn't take a lot of dot-connecting. Just because you're paranoid, it doesn't mean they're not out to get you:)
I've thought he'd been framed from day one. He had some Department of Defense contracts for developing resier4. I wouldn't put it past them ( or the US administration ) to get bitchy over such a contract. Of course this is highly speculative, but what if, say, they asked him to implement something he didn't feel comfortable with? It's not like these guys have a problem with killing or imprisoning innocent people ( think Guantanimo Bay ). This is how they do business.
Oh come ON! Corporations are the least likely to invest in the long-haul stuff. What they do is give puny donations to universities, who then spend millions of tax-payer dollars in R&D, and right at the end, your corporation will come back, patent the idea, and cry blue murder if someone suggests that it's not theirs.
Anyway, what exactly did Disney do that's so fucking special? If the Chinese government want to open an amusement park, who the hell are you or Disney to say what they're allowed to be amused at? Do you think the sky will fall if Chinese kids can see Mickey Mouse without paying excessive ( particularly in their terms ) kick-backs to US corporations?
Memory is stored non-locally, as an interference pattern, in many ways similar to a hologram on a plate. There is absolutely NO way 'stimulating' a mouse brain in this way is going to achieve memory storage or retrieval. The best scientists can do within the reductionist mindset ( which these guys most certainly are working in ) is to monitor the physical reactions to stimuli. This is qualitatively a world away from anything useful, and memory storage in particular. I'm sure it gets them further funding, but they're not going to achieve anything.
Sure. But peace is not a goal that is seriously discussed by our world leaders. Profits, on the other hand, are at the top of the agenda. And war has proven to be far more profitable than peace, particularly for the current US administration and their associates.
If you haven't been there and done that, please sit down and drink your $tarbuck$ frappacino
What? If I haven't actually been to Iraq, raped their women and children, blown up their schools & hospitals & sewerage treatment plants, and profited all the while, you want me to shut the fuck up, right? Amongst other things, that's very undemocratic of you. The best support you can give US troops is to pull them the fuck out of Iraq and get them back home, get them some decent medical care, and probably a lot of psychiatric care as well. There's nothing noble in what they're doing, or what anyone 'supporting' them is doing. Get over it. All previous excuses for being there have evaporated. You have lost the war of words, and you are clearly losing the military side of things too.
Consciousness is clearly the hidden variable here.
This explains:
- why the intentions of the experimenter affects the results of an experiment
- how consciousness translates to free will and movement in our 3D reality
It also explains the uncomfortable when you don't look at it, it doesn't exist thing. It's not so much that it doesn't exist per say, it's just that it hasn't decayed ( collapsed the wave function ) into 4D space-time, because the process of the collapse of the way function requires an observer. But it still exists, just enfolded into a higher reality that we don't ( usually ) perceive.
Slashdot Mirror
The thing is ... you're completely wrong. It was a Christian country who invaded Iraq and killed 1,000,000 people since 2003. The same goes for any example you might be able to drag out of your half-addled brain ... Christian atrocities are echoed with a far smaller response from the Muslim world. If this were not the case, there would be no New York left AT ALL.
Not at this time, no. Digest this one and I may have more for you.
That's the most scientific explanation I've heard since I last farted. I suppose I now understand why stalks stand on 1 leg.
Ho ho. Very good. But most of the terrorists on the planet are in fact Christian. Other than that, though, you display incredible intelligence and wit.
Don't assume that since Emperor Dubya is president that he's in control of anything, including his own bladder. He's a figurehead. There most certainly are people in control of things, and they use Bush to deflect people's attacks from themselves. If you look at Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rice, and the rest of the neo-con gang, you'll find that they are incredibly capable people ... unfortunately they're also incredibly evil people.
... this article is but one example.
The reason no-one's tracked down Bin Laden is simple: the Bin Laden Group is Bush's biggest financial backer. The Bin Laden dynasty and the Bush dynasty go back a long way.
The reason why no-one's made any serious in-roads into bringing the so-called terrorists under control is that terrorism is the best thing that happened to ultra-conservative politics in the past century. It's vitally important for the Republicans, and increasingly more important for the Democrats, to have a horrible outside threat to protect the masses from, and to justify the increasing militarisation of the world, both domestically and internationally. Look at the rights we've lost in the name of protecting ourselves from the boogey man
As the self-proclaimed leaders of the free world, this isn't much of a defense. In fact it's quite a shitty defense. You can point your finger at other countries who have military dictatorships that are backed by the US, and say that they sin, but this misses my previous point that they are backed by the US.
... or of course carry out the torture yourself, and then claim that you are spreading freedom and democracy.
... er ... died of natural causes.
The simple fact is that you can't parade around the world in your tanks, with your banned chemical and nuclear weapons, and have your CIA kidnap and 'render' political opponents to countries who will torture them to death
This CIA goat was claiming that we're seeing a shadow of a 'very different' CIA, operating in the past. But if anything, what we're seeing from these documents is a far more defensible organisation than you have today under the war criminals, Bush, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rice, etc. But they won't release these files until after every current neo-con has been wasted
Exactly. I'm glad someone remembers this. Not many do, unfortunately.
But the biggest problem I have with Howard pushing his broadband 'revolution' is that he's privatising Telstra
Exactly.
Have a read of the absolutely brilliant book, 'Autopoieses and Cognition', by Humberto Maturana and Francesca Varella. They argue that cognition is a fundamental operation of all life, and they make their case extremely well. It's a hard book to track down, and a yet harder book to read, but it's well worthwhile.
CNN always has and always will be on Bush's side, so I don't think this argument is really meaningful. But as for shutting down other stations, sure, it happens. Here in Australia, just 3 or 4 years ago, there was a community TV station in Sydney, called Actively Radical TV. It ran a lot of leftist documentaries. It was very popular. It's license wasn't renewed, strangely enough. So don't tell me that this 'not renewing license' thing doesn't happen in Western 'democracies'. It's just that we very rarely have a media outlet that doesn't align itself with the ruling class.
What a stupid thing to say! It's all because you love your freedom is it? I put it to you that ALL people 'love their freedom', but that some people, mostly in the US, have no idea what freedom actually is. Their idea of freedom is locking people in someone elses dungeons for 5 years without trial, or carpet combing a country with napalm, chemical and nuclear weapons. Some freedom.
Are you a liar, or simply a fool who can't count past 1?
... health, education ... you know ... all the things that US citizens have to pay for ( or ho without ). So what's better? You think you're better of in the US without a small number of 'wealthy oil interests', including your dumb-arse president? I don't think so.
Even if there were only 1 'wealthy oil interest', it wouldn't be Chavez, it would be the people of Venezuaela. You see, the profits from the sale of oil are being used for the public good
And it's not only 3D performance that sucks. The 2D performance of their drivers is an ORDER OF MAGNITUDE slower than the open-source driver, and nVidia's driver at XRENDER performance ( ie rendering the webpage you're looking at
Like I said
'Some unknown mystical or physical force' is not required, so no need to feel left out! Every cell in the body participates in cognition. See Maturana and Varela's excellent book, 'Autopoieses and Cognition' ... or have a look at the Wikipedia page: Autopoiesis ... but this page is actually quite lacking ... I must add to it. And, taking my previous point that life is continuous through reproduction ( ie doesn't 'stop' and 'start', has no 'beginning' and 'end' inside the reproduction loop ), it then follows that things like organisational structure and cellular memory can indeed be transferred in the reproductive process. This is different from the kind of memory that we usually relate to, yes, but not entirely different. Also much of what makes us 'human' lives in the collective unconscious ... and before you call me a mad hatter, keep in mind Carl Jung is the most respected psychologist we have, and indeed pioneered modern psychology.
What seems mystical is merely something that exists that you don't yet understand.
The US have certainly done this in the past. While high-tech industries were developing in the US, they paid NO attention to other people's intellectual property. It's only now that they hold most of this property that they're interested in the 'rights' of the holders.
And it's not exactly unlike the US to act unilaterally, claiming that their action is in the 'national interest', is it? The only thing that prevents the US from doing exactly that is the fact that this would give a green light to other countries to ignore patents, which would have a net detrimental effect on the US ( again, due to the fact that the US now holds most of the world's so-called 'intellectual property' ).
It depends on what you mean by 'rich'. If you mean 'rich in intellectual property', then the answer is most certainly YES. The rule of thumb for understanding every decision the US ( or other capitalist power ) makes is this: will this enrich the ruling class or not?
Sure. But the 'International Intellectual Property Association' do have valid concerns here. That's not to say that intellectual property is a good thing - it's most certainly not, and individuals and countries are right to reject it. Of course most countries that DO reject it do it mostly for the wrong reasons - for their own economic benefit. The right reasons to reject intellectual property have more to do with human rights, equality, etc.
I seem to remember an incredible amount of bullshit
It's all very well to have laws, but who decides which laws apply to which people?
This is another demonstration of the failure of the reductionist method to describe complex phenomena. Genetics is but a small portion of what 'makes us human', and this particular gene is but a small portion of genetics. Saying that one gene 'makes us human' is like saying "I've found the atom that makes this the Earth". People who insist that we are nothing but a product of our genetics are missing a very important point: reproduction is not a discrete process - it's a continuation of life, and therefore everything that is included in the parents' lives are also included in the makeup of the child, from body chemistry through to thought itself. Life is organised on many levels by many processes, NOT physical 'codes'. Genes exist, and are used, sure, but they are not the be-all and end-all.
What these reductionist scientists can claim is that they've found a gene that appears to be unique to humans. This is quite different from what they're claiming.
The point that the author is missing is that the GPL is not written by people who have any love for copyright - far from it - this is why they call it copyleft. One of the ideals behind open source is that knowledge is not a private possession, but a public possession. The GPL is a very elegant way of achieving this goal inside current copyright law.
Sure, it would be a great achievement to abolish copyright on knowledge ( intellectual copyright ) completely. But in the current climate, that's not going to fly. Therefore I think it's completely consistent to be anti-copyright and pro-GPL. The only inconsistency is in people's minds who can't appreciate what the GPL is trying to achieve.
Oh bullshit. If corporations don't want to invest i R&D, they can take their bat and ball and fuck off. Medical research is something that the GOVERNMENT should conduct, not corporations, for these reasons exactly:
- massive R&D costs
- requirement that ALL people benefit from R&D, and not just rich Americans with private health insurance
But there IS a relationship. Hans gets DOD contract to develop cryptographic plugins for reiser4. Hans gets framed for murder. It doesn't take a lot of dot-connecting. Just because you're paranoid, it doesn't mean they're not out to get you :)
I've thought he'd been framed from day one. He had some Department of Defense contracts for developing resier4. I wouldn't put it past them ( or the US administration ) to get bitchy over such a contract. Of course this is highly speculative, but what if, say, they asked him to implement something he didn't feel comfortable with? It's not like these guys have a problem with killing or imprisoning innocent people ( think Guantanimo Bay ). This is how they do business.
Oh come ON! Corporations are the least likely to invest in the long-haul stuff. What they do is give puny donations to universities, who then spend millions of tax-payer dollars in R&D, and right at the end, your corporation will come back, patent the idea, and cry blue murder if someone suggests that it's not theirs .
Anyway, what exactly did Disney do that's so fucking special? If the Chinese government want to open an amusement park, who the hell are you or Disney to say what they're allowed to be amused at? Do you think the sky will fall if Chinese kids can see Mickey Mouse without paying excessive ( particularly in their terms ) kick-backs to US corporations?
Memory is stored non-locally, as an interference pattern, in many ways similar to a hologram on a plate. There is absolutely NO way 'stimulating' a mouse brain in this way is going to achieve memory storage or retrieval. The best scientists can do within the reductionist mindset ( which these guys most certainly are working in ) is to monitor the physical reactions to stimuli. This is qualitatively a world away from anything useful, and memory storage in particular. I'm sure it gets them further funding, but they're not going to achieve anything.
Sure. But peace is not a goal that is seriously discussed by our world leaders. Profits, on the other hand, are at the top of the agenda. And war has proven to be far more profitable than peace, particularly for the current US administration and their associates.
What?
If I haven't actually been to Iraq, raped their women and children, blown up their schools & hospitals & sewerage treatment plants, and profited all the while, you want me to shut the fuck up, right? Amongst other things, that's very undemocratic of you. The best support you can give US troops is to pull them the fuck out of Iraq and get them back home, get them some decent medical care, and probably a lot of psychiatric care as well. There's nothing noble in what they're doing, or what anyone 'supporting' them is doing. Get over it. All previous excuses for being there have evaporated. You have lost the war of words, and you are clearly losing the military side of things too.
Consciousness is clearly the hidden variable here.
This explains:
- why the intentions of the experimenter affects the results of an experiment
- how consciousness translates to free will and movement in our 3D reality
It also explains the uncomfortable when you don't look at it, it doesn't exist thing. It's not so much that it doesn't exist per say, it's just that it hasn't decayed ( collapsed the wave function ) into 4D space-time, because the process of the collapse of the way function requires an observer. But it still exists, just enfolded into a higher reality that we don't ( usually ) perceive.