Posts like these, where rational debate is gleefully displaced by jackassed elitism, are one of the many reasons I'm avoiding Slashdot these days. Thanks for reminding me of what I'm not missing. I'll be back in about a year to see if it's gotten any worse.
One could record a hell of a nice album with their personal computer and give it away in MP3 format
One could, and many are. I'm also selling the CD's (when we finish), no doubts there. But the modern, savvy musician is going to realize that recordings are a loss leader. The real money is going to have to be earned actively via performances, not passively via royalties. Gone will be the days when a band can spend months perfecting their sound in the studio with an Antares Autotune, sequencers, and unlimited punch-ins, and then go out and suck ass live. Oddly enough the same technology that has up until now been allowing sub-par musicians to make flawless music may be their undoing. Each year, home digital recording technology gets cheaper. They're practically giving this stuff away. You can buy a 16-track digital recorder for less than the price of a good guitar these days.
could put a 30 second track at the beginning of every cd, of a stern sounding voice *reminding* you that you can't copy the cd . . . to play it at the beginning of EVERY track)...
Such a CD would sell about as well as "Gargling Lullabies for Sexy Seniors."
You know, every time the FPI and Interpol warnings come up, I sit for a moment and think seriously to myself, "Do I have enough time to go take a leak?"
Anyway, like I said, the interactivity software is what's infected on the Powerpuff DVD. If you didn't install it and have autorun off, it should be safe to play the movie content-
The first "PC Friendly" DVD I put in my PC caused fatal exceptions and forced me to reboot. I thereafter disabled autorun. I have never seen such an untested load of shit software package (except for the Windows NT Option Pack). "PC Hostile" is more like it. If the features are that much work to access, I don't want 'em.
You remain wrong. Written colloquialisms will trump artificial academic "standards" every time. It takes longer, but it does happen. There are places in this country where "alot" goes down on paper and stays there after the instructor has proofread it.
If you want to move out of the double-wide and get off Food Stamps,
Obviously, you have never analyzed the literacy level of the average $250,000-a-year corporate exec. Trust me, you can be a stuttering imbecile and still run a Fortune 1000 company in this society. That's one of the reasons (I suspect) that most of them abandon email after they reach Director or so. It's just too embarrasing to be constantly revealing to the rank and file that no, you don't read anything past the subject line of your own emails and yes, you really do spell "definitely" with one 'a,' one 'i,' and one 'e,' and it's not just a typo.
Is Microsoft supposed to release software on some other timetable?
Their stated goal is to release a new OS every 18 months. That's the life expectancy of a laptop, but desktops tend to persist in a corporate environment for up to 5 years before they're phased out. It's a simple matter of fact that most companies are unwilling to throw out a $2000 PC until it's completely obsolete and falling apart to boot. Upgrading that PC's OS when the memory and hard disk requirements have doubled and tripled is untenable, and most people won't do it.
You make it sound like trying to make some money is an evil thing
Sucking your customer's blood with tyrranical license requirements and forced upgrades is an evil thing. It makes your customers go elsewhere, normally. Unless you have nowhere to go, which is what Microsoft is trying to achieve with their monopoly.
What profit-minded company doesn't release products based on its business model?
The business model is the problem. It assumes a level of financial outlay that no one is willing to support (remember, MS was the cheap OS alternative to mainframes, *nix, and Novell), and a level of continual disruption to the IT environment that no one is willing to undergo. My company is just next year going to get going on Windows 2000, and we're only now throwing out our incredibly large windows 95 install base. It's a huge messy and unpleasant undertaking. Microsoft has indicated that future releases will be licensed by subscription, and upgrades (every 18 months) will be mandatory. This is a business model calculated to violently piss off customers and drive them away in huge herds. Already Windows XP looks to be the most annoying, patronizing, let-me-do-that-for-you OS since the original Mac, and MS doesn't seem to be disposed to accomodating their customers anymore. They have competely lost their touch. You can't get phone support for their product without paying a pile of money, and even then their support is bar none the worst I have ever encountered.
The parent post was about adopting to others' needs. Microsoft has adopted to the attitude that they are driving and what the customer wants doesn't matter for shit. They will pay for that philosophy with massive lost sales and unpopularity.
I just checked 3 diffrent books all on tesla
And they all say the same thing.
Of course, if it's printed in three different books, it must be true. I don't even need the titles of the books to believe you! Nor do I need to wonder whether all three books are referencing the same flawed source! Nor do I even need to dwell on the logical validity of the claims. Bottom line: BOOKS NEVER LIE.
A well-written essay infects the mind of the reader with its meme. The reader tells two friends, who tell two friends, and so on and so on. A subtle essay can change the minds of a million people, which is far more dangerous than giving them guns. People in power fear negative opinions of themselves for a good reason. Even a minority of their constituents turned against them can nullify their regime. Why do you think most repressive governments begin by restricting speech?
If your bridge takes you to a sinking ship, do you still think that's such a good idea? I don't know about you, but I am pretty sure the days when IT professionals of any level of talent could just hop around are OVER. Yes, if you have the skills they are still needed, but there are a dozens or hundreds of more cooperative replacements standing in line right behind you. Be fucking happy you have a job where you get to "play" for a living, and take your big fat paycheck home at night and murmur sweet nothings in its ear. I know a lot of people who are looking at a steaming grill for a living these days instead of a locked-down PC environment. I can think of many other things to get worked up over besides my access level to my PC at work.
By blindly adopting a belief system without any supporting evidence, they fall into the same logical trap as theists.
What I'm sure you meant to say was, "by casually rejecting an entire set of unprovable and uneccesary premises such as God and the afterlife . .." you imply by your logic chopping that I am substituting my non-god for god. That is not the case. I have moved beyond that, and I am not grappling with that question anymore at all. Atheism is a direct statement of "there is no god, nor any need for one." Agnosticism is "god may or may not exist, but we don't know that, really." I do not need to prove, or even worry about, the non-existence of a being you invent to explain things. That is the fundamental difference. I have not invented a being to take the place of God. I have simply dismissed the question as no longer worth arguing about.
Most of what God was invented to explain is now understood. We know the mechanism whereby the Earth was created, or at least we think we're close. We know what makes the stars shine. We know what makes our hearts beat. We have some good ideas about the building blocks of matter and energy. None of these things require us to furrow our eyebrows about what role God has in things. This compendium of non-god-related premises is not a competing set of beliefs, it's the scientific and technological foundations upon which modern society was built. You cannot go anywhere in this world (well, except maybe the hills of Afghanistan) without being close to, and possibly dependent for your survival on, the technological benefits of this process. Not a leap of faith at all.
It is true, however, that the "hard" atheist position ("there is NO god") requires faith and is unscientific itself
No, it simply requires some deduction. No evidence exists for the existence of god. No need is demonstrated in any explanation of the universe's workings for the hand of such a being, and finally, the reason people postulate God in the first place is because they invented him in fiction in order to explain that which they originally did not understand. No proof, no need, and no reason. God is an illogical quantity, entirely aside from whether or not I've ever seen any proof. I don't need it, and I don't ask for it, because most of the activities God is alleged to engage in have been explained already by rational and repeatable means. The quite valid assumption is made that eventually we will have explained everything in the "space" that God used to occupy, and there will no longer be even the basic uncertainty to drive theism. This is why, in my opinion, fundamentalists rail so endlessly at evolution, because desribes in concrete terms how life arose on this planet, and is entirely independent of the hand of a fictional God.
The same is true for the afterlife. What is it that makes people imagine their consciousness could survive the death of their body? There's no evidence that your consciousness is anything other than the chemical activity of your brain's neurons, so when the brain stops functioning how can you imagine that this activity will continue? Even if it did, for what possible reason would that be so? You will not have eyes, so you will not be able to see. You will not have ears, so you will not be able to hear. You will not have hands or feet, so you won't be able to move around. Supernatural experiences were first described by people who didn't know how the body worked, so they just assumed that being a "ghost" meant you had ghostly eyes and ghostly ears and ghostly hands and ghostly feet, but the simple fact is we know those things are very fragile mechanisms and we know exactly how they work. What sense does it make to imagine they continue to work, somehow, after the physical components that make them function are destroyed?
Again the entire postulate that there is such a thing lacks evidence, and logical consistency. I certainly don't have to make a leap of faith to understand that when I die, I will lie in a coffin and rot. It's what I've observed. For the same reason I postulate that there is no God in charge of the Universe, or its creation, because there is no need for such a being.
either on this world or some distant planet - someone has genetically engineered a "1000 foot tall purple gorrilla".
In the paraphrased words of William of Occam, "One must not multiply logical quantities beyond reason." Or, "the simplest explanation is always the best one."
The simplest explanation is that there is no 1000 foot tall purple gorilla because not only do we not see one, we don't even need one.
Atheism, at least mine, isn't just a refutation of the existence of a being I've never seen, or seen proof of. I also have never seen proof of the need of that being to complete my picture of the universe. The existence of God long ago moved from a question of "is or is not there" to "is or is not required." Theists, meanwhile, either don't understand or are rejecting a goodly chunk of modern science that directly implies that intellegent organization in the creation of the universe not only wasn't present, it wasn't necessary, or even possible.
I hate this kind of argument, because you are trying to do the same thing as creationists do to evolution; reduce the bar that creationism has to pass to be a science by reducing the scientific process that results in evolutionary theory to "just an opinion, everyone has one." I reject that; atheism isn't just a belief or an opinion arrived at because I was comfortable with it, it's a logical premise. You can refute it on logical grounds, you can throw rhetoric at it, you can throw facts at it. But you cannot defeat it by reducing it to the illogical level of "I believe in God because the Bible tells me so. . . " In what aspect of the statement "there is no god because there is no evidence of a god, nor evidence of a need for god?" do you see a leap of faith?
The average member of humanity tends to profess a belief in one god or another...so I'd say that the default is to believe in some sort of supreme / divine being.
The average member of humanity circa 3000 BC probably believed the Earth was flat and at the center of their universe. Neither the strength of their beliefs nor the number of their adherents was enough to make reality bend.
I was raised by parents who did not indoctrinate me into any religion. I can assure you, after seeing how it happens, that religion is essentially brainwashed into small children at about the age of four. Four year olds do not have the critical capacity to reason these things through, but they do have the curiosity about the world that leads them to asking the existential questions. Helpful adults give them easy answers and the first answer the child gets sticks, and it's awfully hard to change his mind thereafter. The fact that it's done by everyone to everyone is the only reason it's so pervasive.
Sir, I followed your link, and read what was available of the book.
It's a simple and sad case of "preaching to the choir." If one does not believe the fundamental assertion that the US is an evil empire, one will not be able to follow the crazy chain of reasoning for long. I saw a lot of very disturbing and depressing things listed in these pages, but what depressed me most was the cyclical chain of thought I was seeing. This was the chain of thought typical in an obsessive-compulsive conspiracy theorist. Every act, no matter how trivial, was somehow part of the conspiracy, and cast in the most sinister light possible. Very few references were given, and the reader was invited to think cynically rather than skeptically. There is a fine line between the cynic, who questions the good in all that he sees, and the skeptic, who simply questions the reality of what he sees. Skepticism is healthy for a thinking mind. Cynicism is not.
It didn't help that every quote by a US or British official was essentially a straw man argument, and every rebuttal to it was unanswerable without having the original speakers present. It didn't help that the entire site is in this edgy blue bold font, which makes it look like a tabloid, and half the paragraphs are in bold italics for emphaisis. What finally broke the chain for me, however, was the page that claimed that, by opening it in a browser window, a file was automatically opened for me at the FBI offices. Now I have more than a passing familiarity with how the Web works, and I know that this statement would require that either the author himself be sending this message to the FBI from his weblog, or that aol was. Now if he knows that and it's that important to him, what the fuck is he doing hosting his "seditious" website on an AOL member page? He could put it in any country, or any server, anywhere, and not have to deal with the surveillance.
Not only that, but if he was living in the "police state" circumstances he clearly wants the reader to think he is, why would the F Boogeymen I allow him to have his website in the first place? The hilarity of his percieved self-importance (I'm a big political protestor, I have a file at the FBI) would have had me rolling on the floor if the subject matter of the last few weeks weren't so serious. I'm sorry, I just don't buy the book. It screams crank, crackpot, hysteria, conspiracy theorist. It was like reading a book written by the speaker on Tool's "Faiip de Oiad." It had the same urgent, terrified intensity and I just lost it. I finished reading the three chapters of that book and could not bring myself to believe any of it, certainly not the paranoid nonsense you post above. If the world really works that way, I have been deluding myself for 30 years and I'd rather not know about it.
Why should we allow Bin Laden to live when it is obvious he is willing to kill us?
I am very opposed to the death penalty, but bin Ladin is not a convicted criminal safely behind a concrete wall. He is more akin to a wild animal loose in the neighborhood. Well, a pack of them. I don't care for the idea of being at war, and I've spent the last three days basically reliving september 11th again, going to bed with fear and uncertainty, having bad dreams, waking up and going through it all over again. But I have no doubt on two counts: bin Ladin has expressed his sincere desire to kill Americans indiscriminately, and there's really nothing we can do to change his mind since he's obviously a madman. We cannot stop him with any peaceful legal means, so we've got to kill him. I still object to the death penalty. But that's because it's done in cold blood to someone who society has effectively controlled and prevented from doing further harm. We have not done so to bin Ladin or his terrorists, so we have to defend ourselves as best we can.
No one noticed Chernobyl? Most of the objection to nuclear fission is not just the waste and mess, but that the long term effects are really long term, measured in thousands of years. That, and the potency of a catastrophe is so high in proportion to the benefit recieved. Fission is a hell of an expensive way to boil water, and dangerous to boot. I don't care for fossil fuels myself, but I'm willing to tolerate them while true alternatives are found. Better solar cells, and a sustainable fusion reaction would help. Getting our society to spend money on these is a bitch, especially after "cold fusion," but I suspect that as fossil fuels become harder to dig out of the ground the incentives will get stronger and more immediate.
No. Disney will not have me buying shit just because my kids are nagging me. I have the semblance of a spine, and I'm capable of resisting my son's impulse to have every star wars toy in the store. I can certainly hold off on the latest dreck from their animation studios. Face it, aside from Toy Story (which was a separate entity that broke all of Disney's rules anyway) their film output has been largely crap for the last ten years or so. Their films used to appeal to adults as well, but lately they haven't been putting in the effort. There are lots of other more independent studios, and kids don't get tired of watching the same thing over and over again. I can entertain my kids with the hundreds of tapes we already have in the house (not to mention actually that there are other activities than watching TV) while I send letters to Disney informing them of each purchase I have chosen to avoid.
The most preposterous thing about high-priced journals is that the "value-added" part of a journal is the peer review, which is done almost always for free.
See, I would understand this if the journals kept on staff a horde of paid reviewers whose credentials were worth some cash. But it sounds like they are adopting the RIAA business model, where all the overhead is borne by someone else (in this case the scientist who submits the paper and the reviewer who checks it) and they just stand there and collect from a "revenue stream." This more than anything else tells me it's gotta stop. Copyright and patent were there to "promote the useful arts," and this process sounds like it's preventing them.
Thank you. It's been awhile. I think I was thinking about sound waves and light waves at the same time. Audible sound waves (at least the bass ones, which are all I care about) are all in feet and inches . . .
The frequency of the waves occurs farther apart. Thus we see a redder color. Same light. Same intensity. Same speed. Just the frequency changes. The way it was originally tracked was with the very prominent calcium absorption lines on a spectrograph. I learned all about it as a kid watching an episode of cosmos, which I still have on videotape. Even on the blurry 1920's spectrometer slides that Hubble and Humison used, the effect was dramatic and immediately obvious.
I don't recall the actual length of visible light waves, but I think it's in non-microscopic units. At extreme distances, the expansion of the universe probably means our relative speed to those objects is extremely high. What we see as the red light may have started in the ultraviolet at the source . . .
Slashdot Mirror
Posts like these, where rational debate is gleefully displaced by jackassed elitism, are one of the many reasons I'm avoiding Slashdot these days. Thanks for reminding me of what I'm not missing. I'll be back in about a year to see if it's gotten any worse.
One could, and many are. I'm also selling the CD's (when we finish), no doubts there. But the modern, savvy musician is going to realize that recordings are a loss leader. The real money is going to have to be earned actively via performances, not passively via royalties. Gone will be the days when a band can spend months perfecting their sound in the studio with an Antares Autotune, sequencers, and unlimited punch-ins, and then go out and suck ass live. Oddly enough the same technology that has up until now been allowing sub-par musicians to make flawless music may be their undoing. Each year, home digital recording technology gets cheaper. They're practically giving this stuff away. You can buy a 16-track digital recorder for less than the price of a good guitar these days.
Such a CD would sell about as well as "Gargling Lullabies for Sexy Seniors."
You know, every time the FPI and Interpol warnings come up, I sit for a moment and think seriously to myself, "Do I have enough time to go take a leak?"
The first "PC Friendly" DVD I put in my PC caused fatal exceptions and forced me to reboot. I thereafter disabled autorun. I have never seen such an untested load of shit software package (except for the Windows NT Option Pack). "PC Hostile" is more like it. If the features are that much work to access, I don't want 'em.
If you want to move out of the double-wide and get off Food Stamps,
Obviously, you have never analyzed the literacy level of the average $250,000-a-year corporate exec. Trust me, you can be a stuttering imbecile and still run a Fortune 1000 company in this society. That's one of the reasons (I suspect) that most of them abandon email after they reach Director or so. It's just too embarrasing to be constantly revealing to the rank and file that no, you don't read anything past the subject line of your own emails and yes, you really do spell "definitely" with one 'a,' one 'i,' and one 'e,' and it's not just a typo.
Their stated goal is to release a new OS every 18 months. That's the life expectancy of a laptop, but desktops tend to persist in a corporate environment for up to 5 years before they're phased out. It's a simple matter of fact that most companies are unwilling to throw out a $2000 PC until it's completely obsolete and falling apart to boot. Upgrading that PC's OS when the memory and hard disk requirements have doubled and tripled is untenable, and most people won't do it.
You make it sound like trying to make some money is an evil thing
Sucking your customer's blood with tyrranical license requirements and forced upgrades is an evil thing. It makes your customers go elsewhere, normally. Unless you have nowhere to go, which is what Microsoft is trying to achieve with their monopoly.
What profit-minded company doesn't release products based on its business model?
The business model is the problem. It assumes a level of financial outlay that no one is willing to support (remember, MS was the cheap OS alternative to mainframes, *nix, and Novell), and a level of continual disruption to the IT environment that no one is willing to undergo. My company is just next year going to get going on Windows 2000, and we're only now throwing out our incredibly large windows 95 install base. It's a huge messy and unpleasant undertaking. Microsoft has indicated that future releases will be licensed by subscription, and upgrades (every 18 months) will be mandatory. This is a business model calculated to violently piss off customers and drive them away in huge herds. Already Windows XP looks to be the most annoying, patronizing, let-me-do-that-for-you OS since the original Mac, and MS doesn't seem to be disposed to accomodating their customers anymore. They have competely lost their touch. You can't get phone support for their product without paying a pile of money, and even then their support is bar none the worst I have ever encountered.
The parent post was about adopting to others' needs. Microsoft has adopted to the attitude that they are driving and what the customer wants doesn't matter for shit. They will pay for that philosophy with massive lost sales and unpopularity.
And they all say the same thing.
Of course, if it's printed in three different books, it must be true. I don't even need the titles of the books to believe you! Nor do I need to wonder whether all three books are referencing the same flawed source! Nor do I even need to dwell on the logical validity of the claims. Bottom line: BOOKS NEVER LIE.
Slashdot: News for Nitpickers. Things to Split Hairs Over.
A well-written essay infects the mind of the reader with its meme. The reader tells two friends, who tell two friends, and so on and so on. A subtle essay can change the minds of a million people, which is far more dangerous than giving them guns. People in power fear negative opinions of themselves for a good reason. Even a minority of their constituents turned against them can nullify their regime. Why do you think most repressive governments begin by restricting speech?
What I'm sure you meant to say was, "by casually rejecting an entire set of unprovable and uneccesary premises such as God and the afterlife . . ." you imply by your logic chopping that I am substituting my non-god for god. That is not the case. I have moved beyond that, and I am not grappling with that question anymore at all. Atheism is a direct statement of "there is no god, nor any need for one." Agnosticism is "god may or may not exist, but we don't know that, really." I do not need to prove, or even worry about, the non-existence of a being you invent to explain things. That is the fundamental difference. I have not invented a being to take the place of God. I have simply dismissed the question as no longer worth arguing about.
Most of what God was invented to explain is now understood. We know the mechanism whereby the Earth was created, or at least we think we're close. We know what makes the stars shine. We know what makes our hearts beat. We have some good ideas about the building blocks of matter and energy. None of these things require us to furrow our eyebrows about what role God has in things. This compendium of non-god-related premises is not a competing set of beliefs, it's the scientific and technological foundations upon which modern society was built. You cannot go anywhere in this world (well, except maybe the hills of Afghanistan) without being close to, and possibly dependent for your survival on, the technological benefits of this process. Not a leap of faith at all.
No, it simply requires some deduction. No evidence exists for the existence of god. No need is demonstrated in any explanation of the universe's workings for the hand of such a being, and finally, the reason people postulate God in the first place is because they invented him in fiction in order to explain that which they originally did not understand. No proof, no need, and no reason. God is an illogical quantity, entirely aside from whether or not I've ever seen any proof. I don't need it, and I don't ask for it, because most of the activities God is alleged to engage in have been explained already by rational and repeatable means. The quite valid assumption is made that eventually we will have explained everything in the "space" that God used to occupy, and there will no longer be even the basic uncertainty to drive theism. This is why, in my opinion, fundamentalists rail so endlessly at evolution, because desribes in concrete terms how life arose on this planet, and is entirely independent of the hand of a fictional God.
The same is true for the afterlife. What is it that makes people imagine their consciousness could survive the death of their body? There's no evidence that your consciousness is anything other than the chemical activity of your brain's neurons, so when the brain stops functioning how can you imagine that this activity will continue? Even if it did, for what possible reason would that be so? You will not have eyes, so you will not be able to see. You will not have ears, so you will not be able to hear. You will not have hands or feet, so you won't be able to move around. Supernatural experiences were first described by people who didn't know how the body worked, so they just assumed that being a "ghost" meant you had ghostly eyes and ghostly ears and ghostly hands and ghostly feet, but the simple fact is we know those things are very fragile mechanisms and we know exactly how they work. What sense does it make to imagine they continue to work, somehow, after the physical components that make them function are destroyed?
Again the entire postulate that there is such a thing lacks evidence, and logical consistency. I certainly don't have to make a leap of faith to understand that when I die, I will lie in a coffin and rot. It's what I've observed. For the same reason I postulate that there is no God in charge of the Universe, or its creation, because there is no need for such a being.
It's called Bhuddism. Though it has its own issues (such as its medieval-style caste system).
In the paraphrased words of William of Occam, "One must not multiply logical quantities beyond reason." Or, "the simplest explanation is always the best one."
The simplest explanation is that there is no 1000 foot tall purple gorilla because not only do we not see one, we don't even need one.
Atheism, at least mine, isn't just a refutation of the existence of a being I've never seen, or seen proof of. I also have never seen proof of the need of that being to complete my picture of the universe. The existence of God long ago moved from a question of "is or is not there" to "is or is not required." Theists, meanwhile, either don't understand or are rejecting a goodly chunk of modern science that directly implies that intellegent organization in the creation of the universe not only wasn't present, it wasn't necessary, or even possible.
I hate this kind of argument, because you are trying to do the same thing as creationists do to evolution; reduce the bar that creationism has to pass to be a science by reducing the scientific process that results in evolutionary theory to "just an opinion, everyone has one." I reject that; atheism isn't just a belief or an opinion arrived at because I was comfortable with it, it's a logical premise. You can refute it on logical grounds, you can throw rhetoric at it, you can throw facts at it. But you cannot defeat it by reducing it to the illogical level of "I believe in God because the Bible tells me so. . . " In what aspect of the statement "there is no god because there is no evidence of a god, nor evidence of a need for god?" do you see a leap of faith?
The average member of humanity circa 3000 BC probably believed the Earth was flat and at the center of their universe. Neither the strength of their beliefs nor the number of their adherents was enough to make reality bend.
I was raised by parents who did not indoctrinate me into any religion. I can assure you, after seeing how it happens, that religion is essentially brainwashed into small children at about the age of four. Four year olds do not have the critical capacity to reason these things through, but they do have the curiosity about the world that leads them to asking the existential questions. Helpful adults give them easy answers and the first answer the child gets sticks, and it's awfully hard to change his mind thereafter. The fact that it's done by everyone to everyone is the only reason it's so pervasive.
It's a simple and sad case of "preaching to the choir." If one does not believe the fundamental assertion that the US is an evil empire, one will not be able to follow the crazy chain of reasoning for long. I saw a lot of very disturbing and depressing things listed in these pages, but what depressed me most was the cyclical chain of thought I was seeing. This was the chain of thought typical in an obsessive-compulsive conspiracy theorist. Every act, no matter how trivial, was somehow part of the conspiracy, and cast in the most sinister light possible. Very few references were given, and the reader was invited to think cynically rather than skeptically. There is a fine line between the cynic, who questions the good in all that he sees, and the skeptic, who simply questions the reality of what he sees. Skepticism is healthy for a thinking mind. Cynicism is not.
It didn't help that every quote by a US or British official was essentially a straw man argument, and every rebuttal to it was unanswerable without having the original speakers present. It didn't help that the entire site is in this edgy blue bold font, which makes it look like a tabloid, and half the paragraphs are in bold italics for emphaisis. What finally broke the chain for me, however, was the page that claimed that, by opening it in a browser window, a file was automatically opened for me at the FBI offices. Now I have more than a passing familiarity with how the Web works, and I know that this statement would require that either the author himself be sending this message to the FBI from his weblog, or that aol was. Now if he knows that and it's that important to him, what the fuck is he doing hosting his "seditious" website on an AOL member page? He could put it in any country, or any server, anywhere, and not have to deal with the surveillance.
Not only that, but if he was living in the "police state" circumstances he clearly wants the reader to think he is, why would the F Boogeymen I allow him to have his website in the first place? The hilarity of his percieved self-importance (I'm a big political protestor, I have a file at the FBI) would have had me rolling on the floor if the subject matter of the last few weeks weren't so serious. I'm sorry, I just don't buy the book. It screams crank, crackpot, hysteria, conspiracy theorist. It was like reading a book written by the speaker on Tool's "Faiip de Oiad." It had the same urgent, terrified intensity and I just lost it. I finished reading the three chapters of that book and could not bring myself to believe any of it, certainly not the paranoid nonsense you post above. If the world really works that way, I have been deluding myself for 30 years and I'd rather not know about it.
I am very opposed to the death penalty, but bin Ladin is not a convicted criminal safely behind a concrete wall. He is more akin to a wild animal loose in the neighborhood. Well, a pack of them. I don't care for the idea of being at war, and I've spent the last three days basically reliving september 11th again, going to bed with fear and uncertainty, having bad dreams, waking up and going through it all over again. But I have no doubt on two counts: bin Ladin has expressed his sincere desire to kill Americans indiscriminately, and there's really nothing we can do to change his mind since he's obviously a madman. We cannot stop him with any peaceful legal means, so we've got to kill him. I still object to the death penalty. But that's because it's done in cold blood to someone who society has effectively controlled and prevented from doing further harm. We have not done so to bin Ladin or his terrorists, so we have to defend ourselves as best we can.
No one noticed Chernobyl? Most of the objection to nuclear fission is not just the waste and mess, but that the long term effects are really long term, measured in thousands of years. That, and the potency of a catastrophe is so high in proportion to the benefit recieved. Fission is a hell of an expensive way to boil water, and dangerous to boot. I don't care for fossil fuels myself, but I'm willing to tolerate them while true alternatives are found. Better solar cells, and a sustainable fusion reaction would help. Getting our society to spend money on these is a bitch, especially after "cold fusion," but I suspect that as fossil fuels become harder to dig out of the ground the incentives will get stronger and more immediate.
That has got to be the worst advice I've ever heard someone give on Slashdot. And that's saying a lot.
No. Disney will not have me buying shit just because my kids are nagging me. I have the semblance of a spine, and I'm capable of resisting my son's impulse to have every star wars toy in the store. I can certainly hold off on the latest dreck from their animation studios. Face it, aside from Toy Story (which was a separate entity that broke all of Disney's rules anyway) their film output has been largely crap for the last ten years or so. Their films used to appeal to adults as well, but lately they haven't been putting in the effort. There are lots of other more independent studios, and kids don't get tired of watching the same thing over and over again. I can entertain my kids with the hundreds of tapes we already have in the house (not to mention actually that there are other activities than watching TV) while I send letters to Disney informing them of each purchase I have chosen to avoid.
Hypothetical question: How the hell will the photographer know his pictures are being copied?
See, I would understand this if the journals kept on staff a horde of paid reviewers whose credentials were worth some cash. But it sounds like they are adopting the RIAA business model, where all the overhead is borne by someone else (in this case the scientist who submits the paper and the reviewer who checks it) and they just stand there and collect from a "revenue stream." This more than anything else tells me it's gotta stop. Copyright and patent were there to "promote the useful arts," and this process sounds like it's preventing them.
Thank you. It's been awhile. I think I was thinking about sound waves and light waves at the same time. Audible sound waves (at least the bass ones, which are all I care about) are all in feet and inches . . .
I don't recall the actual length of visible light waves, but I think it's in non-microscopic units. At extreme distances, the expansion of the universe probably means our relative speed to those objects is extremely high. What we see as the red light may have started in the ultraviolet at the source . . .