No, see the problem is that as the ads proliferate, sellers of 'free' services think that the quality of their product can go into the shitpot. Thus, as everyone can see by my email address, I am reduced to doing my own techsupport for my ISP connection, because all they give a shit about is whether or not I can read the ads.
A 'free' long distance service like you mention sounds like an abomination to me.
And it's not just free stuff. Go to a movie theatre. Pay $8 a ticket. Get bombarded by ads. Wait a minute! Who paid for the ticket? Did you pay for the ads too?
And as the frequency of ads increases, your actual 'voice' as a consumer drops to nothing. You can't avoid the ad economy. It's everywhere. The ads you can't skip in DVD's are just another example. You do pay for them, don't you? Why should you pay to be advertised at?
And the more money the ads bring in, the less the 'cost' to the consumer matters, and the less the service providers give a shit about your problems.
I leave you with the product of my imagination. This is trying to have a private conversation with someone via an 'advertised' long distance service:
Marsha: "Oh, John" John: "Marsha" Marsha: "John" John: "Marsha, I want to tell you some -" NOW AT SUPER AUTO STORE, NO MONEY DOWN SAVE SAVE SAVE SAVE SAVE GET YOUR CARS FAST THESE CARS HAVE TO GO SAVE SAVE SAVE Marsha: "John?"
Katz, v. (katzed, katzing) 1. to expound upon a topic from a geek's point of view; 2. to be unable to speak upon a topic _without_ bringing up the term geek; 3. to insert into every single sentence of one's speech the terms 'geek,' 'open source,' or 'interactive.' ex. 'I will katz your ideas to pieces.' ex. 2. 'I have katzed about that quite a bit. Did you mention geeks?' ex. 3. 'Go away, you sub-geek humanoid, can't you see I'm katzing right now?'
Submliminal messages may be illegal, but no evidence has ever been brought to show that they're even slightly effective. The laugh is on the advertisers, in this case.
see this url for a list of cited studies: http://www.urbanlegends.com/products/subliminal.ad vertising/subliminal_messages_sources.ht ml
As I'm sure most/.-ers were, I was 'chosen' to work the Y2k shift. I had loudly and repeatedly predicted that nothing would happen, and to prove it I planned for myself a long and pleasant night's distration of trying to get Half-Life running on the corporate network. Of course nothing happened and around 6:00 a.m. when the first shift was getting ready to leave, somebody asked me if I knew where some extra keyboards were.
His great idea was to pry the Y keys off everyone's keyboard and replace them with K keys. He of course should not have mentioned it to me, as I had a whole stack of them under my desk.
We were going to do the entire floor but ended up doing just a few select people who were coming in on the next shift.
An obscure joke, and amusing only to those who had been awake for 30+ hours. And it can never be done again.
Around the 1700's or so a scientist, I believe it was Faraday, was asked by the Queen of England of what use were his studies of useless phenomenon like electricity and magnetism. To which Faraday replied "Of what use is a baby?"
Only in the 20th century could anyone really appreciate his comment. The chances of us actually seeing an end-use for some of this in our lifetimes is almost nil. But we do it anyway because we (or at least some of us) care what kind of world our descendants inhabit.
Re:One More: the IDChip hoax
on
Hoax-a-go-go!
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· Score: 1
If you like that, go over to www.joeyskaggs.com. This guy makes a 'living,' somehow, of hoaxing the media. His actual purpose is to reveal uncritical media reporting. I think the best one was the 'Solomon Project'; he basically got CNN to show up for a 'news conference' at some graphics art studio where some dummied-up pc's were meant to be this computer program designed to replace judges and juries. CNN broadcast the show _once_; when he revealed the hoax it was buried and I believe CNN to this day will not admit that the thing ever existed.
Oooh, I'd forgotten that. Considering the current state of 'free speech,' the way the gov't treats such things as encryption, and in fact the general attitude towards technology, that's way more likely now than it would have been 15 years ago when the book was written. If some genius comes up with the real implementation of this, let's hope they GPL it . . . and post it on some massive distributed anonymous file sharing system so that it's everywhere.
Re:About filtering out bad language from movies
on
Quickielanche
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· Score: 1
I remember the pathetic sound of the "Blues Brothers" when it was put on network TV. Everytime Jake or Elwood said "Bullshit" it was overdubbed with "Bamboozle." Akroyd's overdubs sounded wooden, and of course Belushi was dead by then -- this was before his brother had a career and I've always wondered if it was him. At any rate, the movie just sounded stupid and anyone could tell what they were saying. The incredibly poor quality of the overdubs gave it all away.
I also remember laughing hysterically at the TV version of Exorcist -- the line was: "Your Mother Sucks Socks That Smell!!!!" (Sucks Cocks In Hell for those who have never seen the original)
Let's face it, most 4-year olds know the Seven Dirty Words (I know mine does). He also knows that they're rude. If these people think that blipping this stuff out is going to protect their kids from *anything* they're on crack, plain and simple.
Re:The definition of slashdotted...
on
Quickielanche
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· Score: 1
Well I'm going to keep hitting refresh every five seconds until it comes back!!! BWAHAHAHAHAHA
Carl Sagan put this idea into "Contact" many years ago. It was fictionally called "adnix." It detected the speech patterns of advertising and blocked them out. Fictionally, following soon after "adnix" came "preachnix."
I find it faintly ironic that the preachers beat everyone else to it. Considering the sponsors of that site, I'm sure we'll see "DarwinFree" and "BiasedLiberalMediaFree" next.
I fully support the idea of derivative music. It's the blood in the veins of the art. I enjoy the Star Wars soundtrack also. It was years after I first heard it, when I minored in music in college, that I became exposed to the stuff I'm talking about and realized how derivitive that music was. I think in part it was George Lucas' fault. As I recall, his temp tracks were the direct basis for Williams' soundtrack. I'd love to hear those temp tracks. I bet we'd find the Planets, and the Sorcerer's Apprentice, and all those other works in there. Mind you, he is probably the *best* composer for movies there is. It's just that he's also playing in an idiom that is for all intents and purposes artistically dead . . . though music professors probably still compose and perform symphonies, they are in my opinion traveling down a closed path, and probably are incapable of capturing the artistic community's attention in the same way that, for example, rock music does (or did -- I think that's in severe danger of choking too).
As a musician I've been frequently accused of sounding just like my musical hero, Geddy Lee. I don't mind this and don't feel that I'm ripping him off. What's irritating is that the new IP laws could give intellectual protection to people who have derived their work from earlier forms -- so that it's OK for Williams to borrow for Star Wars, but nobody better borrow from Williams.
BTW 'Rosencrantz' was probably one of the funniest movies of all time -- if you read Shakespeare at all. I think it did more to explain the play to me than an entire semester of studying the original would have. It's like someone's college thesis on Shakespeare gone out of control.
'I suggest you study some history.' I have. Try the following titles: The Republic, Plato ?Theory of Relativity, Albert Einstein. (I don't have the title offhand-- it's E's 'popular' book, about 150pp in length, on the subject but it's the best one I read of the three or four that I did). The Starry Messenger, Galileo Galilei. ?Dialog on Two Systems, Galileo Galilei. Title may vary depending on the translation. A Brief History Of Time, Stephen Hawking. Cosmos, Carl Sagan. (TV show or book, doesn't matter). Broca's Brain, Carl Sagan. The First Three Minutes, Steven Weinberg.
To answer all but your adhominem attacks. Plato's 'ideal realm' was the apparent basis for the ridiculous Aristotelian 'spheres' which caused Galileo so much trouble, and continued to beleaguer scientists throughout the Renaissance. Basically, the heavens were thought to be perfect and any evidence to the contrary was vehemently denied and suppressed. Blemishes on the surface of the Moon were dismissed as an optical illusion. Read Galileo's Dialogs for the complete story.
Plato's republic and the metaphors contained therein crop up everywhere in the succeeding medieval period as a basis for serfdom and slavery. Sagan I believe says in Cosmos that the ideas of the Platonists formed the basis for a 'corrupt social order.' A little research would bear that out. That and the stupid cave metaphor are the primary reasons I object to Plato.
None of the scientific fields in question were, as far as I am aware, created by Christians. Einstein was a Jew, as you might recall. I think Darwin was an agnostic of some sort. Astronomy was invented centuries before the Bible was written, and as you may note neither the names of the stars nor the planets bear any 'Christian' derivation. Stars are by and large named in Arabic. Thus the Arabs probably contributed the most to the field of astronomy pre-Galileo. The pre-Galileo planets all have Roman names. Mathematics -- again I believe we call the numerals 0 through 9 the 'Arabic' numerals, not the 'Hebrew' numerals.
Plenty of Christians advance the cause of science. I don't belittle their contributions. Newton was a devout Christian. But most of the time they do so at the protests of their church. In addition to the persecution of Galileo, and the List of Bad Books (or whatever) maintained by the Catholic Church, we have a more modern example: Not too long ago Hawking reports (see Brief History of Time) that the Pope lectured a bunch of physicists on how it was OK for them to talk about the Big Bang, but the period preceding it was verboten. Hawking of course confessed that he had been thinking about just that the day before . . .
And the whole basis of Science is to learn about the universe. Whether it was created by anyone is not yours to say. You don't know that and can't prove it. And as I've posted before, God is a non-logical premise that Occam's Razor suggests we omit for reasons of simplicity. In short (or not), I believe the universe makes exactly as much sense without God as with. And since God doesn't make much sense to me, can't be proven, and adds no benefit to my understanding of the universe, and was to all appearances introduced to the equations by HUMAN BEINGS who didn't know any better than I do, I omit the whole idea from my equations.
I would invite you to read my lifetime catalog of 4,000 books before you determine the 'quasi' and 'immature' states you believe I occupy. The titles above are the tip of the iceberg, friend. Also try: 'Paradise Lost,' by Milton, ' Dante's 'Inferno,' anything by the Bard, Tolkien's 'Lord of the Rings,' Stephen King's 'The Dark Tower' series, and (to get to the stuff I really like) anything by Asimov, anything by Brian Aldiss, anything at all by Terry Bisson, Larry Niven, Stephen R. Donaldson, Vernor Vinge, MJ Engh, some selected Orson Scott Card (i thought Speaker for the Dead was his best ever), and so on, and so on, and so on . . .
They had the first version of the documentary finished by early '99, but some idiot deleted all the source footage and they had to recreate it from scratch . . .
The rules for hyperlinking are already established. They are built into the HTTP protocol.
When you put your web pages out on the internet, it isn't like you're putting up a glassed-in storefront that you _allow_ people to see. It's more like you're stringing your possessions out in the middle of a busy public intersection. The whole concept is that people can walk right up and look at what they want without a 'guide' telling them what to think or see. If they have been directed to the 'store' from a competitor's 'store,' well tough shit.
This bothers marketing and salespeople immensely, because their whole way of getting you to be a sucker is to frame the product in such a way as it looks attractive and you have the right 'idea' about it.
Businessmen and lawyers who don't understand this basic premise of HTTP and the net in general deserve to be hoist on their own petard. If they don't want people looking at the contents of their site via direct hyperlink, they can shut the doors and require secure access to get in. This will reduce the number of hits on their site. I for one refuse to go to a site that requires my registration. I know plenty of others who do the same for reasons of basic privacy. . .
I keep thinking that something like a "Net Out" would possibly get people's attention. Pick a day (the anniversary of some idiot piece of legislation, so that everyone could agree) and on that day, avoid the net. Avoid answering questions about the net. Avoid fixing anyone's access to their email, etc. Stall your friends and relatives, and your boss if possible. Take the day off, if it's feasible. All people who really care about this avoid in all possible ways the advancement or maintenance of the net.
In the total absence of any kind of net census, I have no idea if that would work, but at the very least no site would get slashdotted on that day . . .
I would just like to point out at the (ha!) risk of my precious (ha!) karma that you are typing remarkably well for someone who's on fire. Your aptitude for concentration under stress is commendable. Perhaps (to get within pissing distance of the All Important Topic) NASA could use someone like you to fly rockets, always assuming that you survive your current crisis?
Re:Philosophy and physics overlap
on
The Mind of God
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There are two things I dislike about this. One is the argument from authority. Yes these people are experts, but we only believe what they say because we can test it for ourselves.
I consider Einstein to have made three major errors in his career. The first was his introduction of the cosmological constant into Relativity. He was assuming a static universe and like Newton before him discovered to his dismay that gravity in any finite universe would cause said universe to collapse upon itself. So he invented the cosmological constant to prop it up. Later, Hubble and Humison discovered that the universe was expanding and removed all need for such a figure in his equations. This is a case of modifying an argument to fit the desired conclusion. His second blunder was his statement that "God does not play at dice." in regards to quantum mechanics. As every person who uses a transistor ought to know, he lost that argument. His last was writing that letter to the president about atom bombs -- which has nothing to do with this.
What's important about the above is that in the first two cases, Einstein assumed something he could neither observe nor prove to fill a gap in his theory or prop up his argument and it turned out to be false. Great authorities can and will make errors.
The other thing I don't like is your attempt to prove such a thing must be true by the _number_ of quotations you bring out of a hat. I don't know that there's a logical term for it, maybe 'argument from majority.'
Simply put, the majority of humanity once believed the earth to be flat and at the center of the universe. The preponderance of their beliefs did not make it true. Objects did not suddenly assume a sun-centered orbit upon Copernicus' pronouncement of his theory, or upon Kepler's mathematical proof, or Galileo's evidence. They always had been that way. Just because a lot of people think something must be true, does not make it so.
Just because a lot of physicists who otherwise make valuable contributions to physics state that they believe in God doesn't add any validity to that belief. Such a claim must be tested as thoroughly (in my view) as any other claim. And the trouble is, there are no tests for it. It is therefore, again in my view, not worth exploring as an alternative to reality. Thus I am an atheist. I don't doubt god, I don't disbelieve. I just don't believe. I don't want to give up the time or space in my mind to the clutter of alot of other people's fantasies.
No one knows, but you, what's good for you. No one knows, better than you, what you ought to believe. I apply that on a daily basis and it works very well.
Thanks. And done. But now the crushing irony. Who will believe that it was me? I have no empirical evidence . . .
Re:you make the same mistake!
on
The Mind of God
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I don't know where you get bias. It's easy to claim that trees exist. You can walk right outside and see one. It's much more fantastic to claim that you speak to an enormous invisible being that I cannot see or hear. As a skeptic my level of required proof in such a case is raised to something well beyond "well _I_ can hear him!" It's an extraordinary claim. It requires more than just inferential evidence or your good word.
Re:you make the same mistake!
on
The Mind of God
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I don't have to prove that aliens don't exist. It is YOU who are making the claim that they do. I am assuming, in absence of any proof, that believing in them complicates things more than not beliving in them. The principle of economy is called Occam's Razor.
And I know can go get my own picture of a coelocanth. It's not so fantastic a claim as aliens who only show up in the middle of hayfields at night. . .
Re:you make the same mistake!
on
The Mind of God
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I _can_ at least get behind the idea of coelacanths because there are fossils that prove they _once_did_ exist. I _cannot_ get behind the idea of a formless superbeing becuase there has _never_ been any empirical evidence that he existed. It's simpler to omit the guy from the equation.
You're trying to jam a scientific argument into a deductive syllogism. Doesn't work, I'm afraid. Science is an inductive process, logically. When you're trying to prove the validity of a theorem you have to apply some economy to your argument, in the form of cutting out unnecessary logical quantities. This is known as Occam's Razor and it does the God theory in quite easily.
Slashdot Mirror
No, see the problem is that as the ads proliferate, sellers of 'free' services think that the quality of their product can go into the shitpot. Thus, as everyone can see by my email address, I am reduced to doing my own techsupport for my ISP connection, because all they give a shit about is whether or not I can read the ads.
A 'free' long distance service like you mention sounds like an abomination to me.
And it's not just free stuff. Go to a movie theatre. Pay $8 a ticket. Get bombarded by ads. Wait a minute! Who paid for the ticket? Did you pay for the ads too?
And as the frequency of ads increases, your actual 'voice' as a consumer drops to nothing. You can't avoid the ad economy. It's everywhere. The ads you can't skip in DVD's are just another example. You do pay for them, don't you? Why should you pay to be advertised at?
And the more money the ads bring in, the less the 'cost' to the consumer matters, and the less the service providers give a shit about your problems.
I leave you with the product of my imagination. This is trying to have a private conversation with someone via an 'advertised' long distance service:
Marsha: "Oh, John"
John: "Marsha"
Marsha: "John"
John: "Marsha, I want to tell you some -"
NOW AT SUPER AUTO STORE, NO MONEY DOWN SAVE SAVE SAVE SAVE SAVE GET YOUR CARS FAST THESE CARS HAVE TO GO SAVE SAVE SAVE
Marsha: "John?"
Katz, v. (katzed, katzing) 1. to expound upon a topic from a geek's point of view; 2. to be unable to speak upon a topic _without_ bringing up the term geek; 3. to insert into every single sentence of one's speech the terms 'geek,' 'open source,' or 'interactive.' ex. 'I will katz your ideas to pieces.' ex. 2. 'I have katzed about that quite a bit. Did you mention geeks?' ex. 3. 'Go away, you sub-geek humanoid, can't you see I'm katzing right now?'
I made a similar point elsewhere in this thread, but I used something off www.urbanlegends.com. This article, in comparison, is AWESOME.
Submliminal messages may be illegal, but no evidence has ever been brought to show that they're even slightly effective. The laugh is on the advertisers, in this case.
d vertising/subliminal_messages_sources.ht ml
see this url for a list of cited studies: http://www.urbanlegends.com/products/subliminal.a
. . . was one of the many pseudonyms of sci-fi author Harlan Ellison.
YOU HAVE AWAKENED MY BUNGHOLE AND NOW YOU MUST TAPE IT BACK SHUT!!!
As I'm sure most /.-ers were, I was 'chosen' to work the Y2k shift. I had loudly and repeatedly predicted that nothing would happen, and to prove it I planned for myself a long and pleasant night's distration of trying to get Half-Life running on the corporate network. Of course nothing happened and around 6:00 a.m. when the first shift was getting ready to leave, somebody asked me if I knew where some extra keyboards were.
His great idea was to pry the Y keys off everyone's keyboard and replace them with K keys. He of course should not have mentioned it to me, as I had a whole stack of them under my desk.
We were going to do the entire floor but ended up doing just a few select people who were coming in on the next shift.
An obscure joke, and amusing only to those who had been awake for 30+ hours. And it can never be done again.
Around the 1700's or so a scientist, I believe it was Faraday, was asked by the Queen of England of what use were his studies of useless phenomenon like electricity and magnetism. To which Faraday replied "Of what use is a baby?"
Only in the 20th century could anyone really appreciate his comment. The chances of us actually seeing an end-use for some of this in our lifetimes is almost nil. But we do it anyway because we (or at least some of us) care what kind of world our descendants inhabit.
If you like that, go over to www.joeyskaggs.com. This guy makes a 'living,' somehow, of hoaxing the media. His actual purpose is to reveal uncritical media reporting. I think the best one was the 'Solomon Project'; he basically got CNN to show up for a 'news conference' at some graphics art studio where some dummied-up pc's were meant to be this computer program designed to replace judges and juries. CNN broadcast the show _once_; when he revealed the hoax it was buried and I believe CNN to this day will not admit that the thing ever existed.
All you need are some LSD-laced Mickey Mouse stamps and you've covered the gamut of UL idiocy for the last 20 years.
Oooh, I'd forgotten that. Considering the current state of 'free speech,' the way the gov't treats such things as encryption, and in fact the general attitude towards technology, that's way more likely now than it would have been 15 years ago when the book was written. If some genius comes up with the real implementation of this, let's hope they GPL it . . . and post it on some massive distributed anonymous file sharing system so that it's everywhere.
I remember the pathetic sound of the "Blues Brothers" when it was put on network TV. Everytime Jake or Elwood said "Bullshit" it was overdubbed with "Bamboozle." Akroyd's overdubs sounded wooden, and of course Belushi was dead by then -- this was before his brother had a career and I've always wondered if it was him. At any rate, the movie just sounded stupid and anyone could tell what they were saying. The incredibly poor quality of the overdubs gave it all away.
I also remember laughing hysterically at the TV version of Exorcist -- the line was: "Your Mother Sucks Socks That Smell!!!!" (Sucks Cocks In Hell for those who have never seen the original)
Let's face it, most 4-year olds know the Seven Dirty Words (I know mine does). He also knows that they're rude. If these people think that blipping this stuff out is going to protect their kids from *anything* they're on crack, plain and simple.
Well I'm going to keep hitting refresh every five seconds until it comes back!!! BWAHAHAHAHAHA
Carl Sagan put this idea into "Contact" many years ago. It was fictionally called "adnix." It detected the speech patterns of advertising and blocked them out. Fictionally, following soon after "adnix" came "preachnix."
I find it faintly ironic that the preachers beat everyone else to it. Considering the sponsors of that site, I'm sure we'll see "DarwinFree" and "BiasedLiberalMediaFree" next.
I fully support the idea of derivative music. It's the blood in the veins of the art. I enjoy the Star Wars soundtrack also. It was years after I first heard it, when I minored in music in college, that I became exposed to the stuff I'm talking about and realized how derivitive that music was. I think in part it was George Lucas' fault. As I recall, his temp tracks were the direct basis for Williams' soundtrack. I'd love to hear those temp tracks. I bet we'd find the Planets, and the Sorcerer's Apprentice, and all those other works in there. Mind you, he is probably the *best* composer for movies there is. It's just that he's also playing in an idiom that is for all intents and purposes artistically dead . . . though music professors probably still compose and perform symphonies, they are in my opinion traveling down a closed path, and probably are incapable of capturing the artistic community's attention in the same way that, for example, rock music does (or did -- I think that's in severe danger of choking too).
As a musician I've been frequently accused of sounding just like my musical hero, Geddy Lee. I don't mind this and don't feel that I'm ripping him off. What's irritating is that the new IP laws could give intellectual protection to people who have derived their work from earlier forms -- so that it's OK for Williams to borrow for Star Wars, but nobody better borrow from Williams.
BTW 'Rosencrantz' was probably one of the funniest movies of all time -- if you read Shakespeare at all. I think it did more to explain the play to me than an entire semester of studying the original would have. It's like someone's college thesis on Shakespeare gone out of control.
'I suggest you study some history.' I have. Try the following titles:
The Republic, Plato
?Theory of Relativity, Albert Einstein. (I don't have the title offhand-- it's E's 'popular' book, about 150pp in length, on the subject but it's the best one I read of the three or four that I did).
The Starry Messenger, Galileo Galilei.
?Dialog on Two Systems, Galileo Galilei. Title may vary depending on the translation.
A Brief History Of Time, Stephen Hawking.
Cosmos, Carl Sagan. (TV show or book, doesn't matter).
Broca's Brain, Carl Sagan.
The First Three Minutes, Steven Weinberg.
To answer all but your adhominem attacks. Plato's 'ideal realm' was the apparent basis for the ridiculous Aristotelian 'spheres' which caused Galileo so much trouble, and continued to beleaguer scientists throughout the Renaissance. Basically, the heavens were thought to be perfect and any evidence to the contrary was vehemently denied and suppressed. Blemishes on the surface of the Moon were dismissed as an optical illusion. Read Galileo's Dialogs for the complete story.
Plato's republic and the metaphors contained therein crop up everywhere in the succeeding medieval period as a basis for serfdom and slavery. Sagan I believe says in Cosmos that the ideas of the Platonists formed the basis for a 'corrupt social order.' A little research would bear that out. That and the stupid cave metaphor are the primary reasons I object to Plato.
None of the scientific fields in question were, as far as I am aware, created by Christians. Einstein was a Jew, as you might recall. I think Darwin was an agnostic of some sort. Astronomy was invented centuries before the Bible was written, and as you may note neither the names of the stars nor the planets bear any 'Christian' derivation. Stars are by and large named in Arabic. Thus the Arabs probably contributed the most to the field of astronomy pre-Galileo. The pre-Galileo planets all have Roman names. Mathematics -- again I believe we call the numerals 0 through 9 the 'Arabic' numerals, not the 'Hebrew' numerals.
Plenty of Christians advance the cause of science. I don't belittle their contributions. Newton was a devout Christian. But most of the time they do so at the protests of their church. In addition to the persecution of Galileo, and the List of Bad Books (or whatever) maintained by the Catholic Church, we have a more modern example: Not too long ago Hawking reports (see Brief History of Time) that the Pope lectured a bunch of physicists on how it was OK for them to talk about the Big Bang, but the period preceding it was verboten. Hawking of course confessed that he had been thinking about just that the day before . . .
And the whole basis of Science is to learn about the universe. Whether it was created by anyone is not yours to say. You don't know that and can't prove it. And as I've posted before, God is a non-logical premise that Occam's Razor suggests we omit for reasons of simplicity. In short (or not), I believe the universe makes exactly as much sense without God as with. And since God doesn't make much sense to me, can't be proven, and adds no benefit to my understanding of the universe, and was to all appearances introduced to the equations by HUMAN BEINGS who didn't know any better than I do, I omit the whole idea from my equations.
I would invite you to read my lifetime catalog of 4,000 books before you determine the 'quasi' and 'immature' states you believe I occupy. The titles above are the tip of the iceberg, friend. Also try: 'Paradise Lost,' by Milton, ' Dante's 'Inferno,' anything by the Bard, Tolkien's 'Lord of the Rings,' Stephen King's 'The Dark Tower' series, and (to get to the stuff I really like) anything by Asimov, anything by Brian Aldiss, anything at all by Terry Bisson, Larry Niven, Stephen R. Donaldson, Vernor Vinge, MJ Engh, some selected Orson Scott Card (i thought Speaker for the Dead was his best ever), and so on, and so on, and so on . . .
They had the first version of the documentary finished by early '99, but some idiot deleted all the source footage and they had to recreate it from scratch . . .
The rules for hyperlinking are already established. They are built into the HTTP protocol.
When you put your web pages out on the internet, it isn't like you're putting up a glassed-in storefront that you _allow_ people to see. It's more like you're stringing your possessions out in the middle of a busy public intersection. The whole concept is that people can walk right up and look at what they want without a 'guide' telling them what to think or see. If they have been directed to the 'store' from a competitor's 'store,' well tough shit.
This bothers marketing and salespeople immensely, because their whole way of getting you to be a sucker is to frame the product in such a way as it looks attractive and you have the right 'idea' about it.
Businessmen and lawyers who don't understand this basic premise of HTTP and the net in general deserve to be hoist on their own petard. If they don't want people looking at the contents of their site via direct hyperlink, they can shut the doors and require secure access to get in. This will reduce the number of hits on their site. I for one refuse to go to a site that requires my registration. I know plenty of others who do the same for reasons of basic privacy. . .
I keep thinking that something like a "Net Out" would possibly get people's attention. Pick a day (the anniversary of some idiot piece of legislation, so that everyone could agree) and on that day, avoid the net. Avoid answering questions about the net. Avoid fixing anyone's access to their email, etc. Stall your friends and relatives, and your boss if possible. Take the day off, if it's feasible. All people who really care about this avoid in all possible ways the advancement or maintenance of the net.
In the total absence of any kind of net census, I have no idea if that would work, but at the very least no site would get slashdotted on that day . . .
I would just like to point out at the (ha!) risk of my precious (ha!) karma that you are typing remarkably well for someone who's on fire. Your aptitude for concentration under stress is commendable. Perhaps (to get within pissing distance of the All Important Topic) NASA could use someone like you to fly rockets, always assuming that you survive your current crisis?
There are two things I dislike about this. One is the argument from authority. Yes these people are experts, but we only believe what they say because we can test it for ourselves.
I consider Einstein to have made three major errors in his career. The first was his introduction of the cosmological constant into Relativity. He was assuming a static universe and like Newton before him discovered to his dismay that gravity in any finite universe would cause said universe to collapse upon itself. So he invented the cosmological constant to prop it up. Later, Hubble and Humison discovered that the universe was expanding and removed all need for such a figure in his equations. This is a case of modifying an argument to fit the desired conclusion. His second blunder was his statement that "God does not play at dice." in regards to quantum mechanics. As every person who uses a transistor ought to know, he lost that argument. His last was writing that letter to the president about atom bombs -- which has nothing to do with this.
What's important about the above is that in the first two cases, Einstein assumed something he could neither observe nor prove to fill a gap in his theory or prop up his argument and it turned out to be false. Great authorities can and will make errors.
The other thing I don't like is your attempt to prove such a thing must be true by the _number_ of quotations you bring out of a hat. I don't know that there's a logical term for it, maybe 'argument from majority.'
Simply put, the majority of humanity once believed the earth to be flat and at the center of the universe. The preponderance of their beliefs did not make it true. Objects did not suddenly assume a sun-centered orbit upon Copernicus' pronouncement of his theory, or upon Kepler's mathematical proof, or Galileo's evidence. They always had been that way. Just because a lot of people think something must be true, does not make it so.
Just because a lot of physicists who otherwise make valuable contributions to physics state that they believe in God doesn't add any validity to that belief. Such a claim must be tested as thoroughly (in my view) as any other claim. And the trouble is, there are no tests for it. It is therefore, again in my view, not worth exploring as an alternative to reality. Thus I am an atheist. I don't doubt god, I don't disbelieve. I just don't believe. I don't want to give up the time or space in my mind to the clutter of alot of other people's fantasies.
No one knows, but you, what's good for you. No one knows, better than you, what you ought to believe. I apply that on a daily basis and it works very well.
Thanks. And done. But now the crushing irony. Who will believe that it was me? I have no empirical evidence . . .
I don't know where you get bias. It's easy to claim that trees exist. You can walk right outside and see one. It's much more fantastic to claim that you speak to an enormous invisible being that I cannot see or hear. As a skeptic my level of required proof in such a case is raised to something well beyond "well _I_ can hear him!" It's an extraordinary claim. It requires more than just inferential evidence or your good word.
I don't have to prove that aliens don't exist. It is YOU who are making the claim that they do. I am assuming, in absence of any proof, that believing in them complicates things more than not beliving in them. The principle of economy is called Occam's Razor.
And I know can go get my own picture of a coelocanth. It's not so fantastic a claim as aliens who only show up in the middle of hayfields at night. . .
I _can_ at least get behind the idea of coelacanths because there are fossils that prove they _once_did_ exist. I _cannot_ get behind the idea of a formless superbeing becuase there has _never_ been any empirical evidence that he existed. It's simpler to omit the guy from the equation.
You're trying to jam a scientific argument into a deductive syllogism. Doesn't work, I'm afraid. Science is an inductive process, logically. When you're trying to prove the validity of a theorem you have to apply some economy to your argument, in the form of cutting out unnecessary logical quantities. This is known as Occam's Razor and it does the God theory in quite easily.