Agreeing or disagreeing doesn't make the person insightful (or a troll) and those who use mod points for the purpose of modding posts up or down based on agenda rather than according to the qualities the moderation is SUPPOSED to be for are violently abusing a system intended to promote dialogue and suppress that which would inhibit it.
You can't "site" anything, unless you're planning on building an apartment complex. And you can cite nothing because deconstructionalist arguments don't apply to an entity that cannot be reduced to less than the whole. (Would you care to falsify chemistry on the grounds that quarks don't form covalent bonds? That's basically what you're claiming.)
No, you're not throwing anything in my face because you're too much of a gibbering idiot to throw anything past those bootlaces of yours you keep tripping over.
Nor can you find me "countless" videos and pictures, because I'm damn sure I can count them -- and I'm also 99% sure I can establish that such pictures are Agent Provocateurs from the Tea Party and Fox News.
No, you DO discount it because you don't even know what the argument IS. You're only looking at what you personally want the argument to be and no further.
I have revised nothing. I state facts, you state fictions and that's all there is to it. I owe you nothing, except maybe a roundhouse kick to that oversized gob of yours.
The health-care reforms haven't kicked in, for the most part, are being appealed by a lot of States - some of which have overturned a lot of the provisions - and until the SCOTUS issues a decision next year there is essentially no healthcare reform. The fight to get it was vicious enough that almost nothing else got done during that battle and nothing at all has been doable since.
Even if SCOTUS does hold up the healthcare reform, every Republican standing - to a person - has stated they'll get the bill repealed. In other words, those 2.5 million Americans really don't have anything more than an IOU.
Yes, Obama put two non-crazy people into SCOTUS, but they're badly outnumbered by crazies on both sides of the political fence. There aught to be minimum sanity requirements at the very least for such a powerful entity, and ideally no person with a politics-driven ideology should be permitted onto it. However, that's not as things are. How things are is that SCOTUS is run by ideologues driven by party loyalty and sponsor loyalty. Doesn't matter how sane a person is going in, they won't stay sane in that kind of toxic environment. How could they? To truly eliminate the two-party deadlock in SCOTUS, SCOTUS as a whole has to be detoxed.
No, the OWS includes a number of prominent conservatives. The OWS isn't about individuals and it's an exercise in futility to figure out the demands by deconstructionist approaches. The OWS blends by combining people who are rich and poor, who are left- and right-wing, who are angry at abuse of position (regardless of who is abusing it or how) or who are angry at a lack of status for others (regardless of who or how), so it's all kinds of people with all kinds of competing views. The OWS is classless.
Yes, the Tea Party is engaged in "Class War" (which is interesting because the whole point of the American Dream is a classless society), which is a divisive action. The OWS, however, is classless. The fringes' complaints confuse the different meanings of "lack of class", but that's their problem. The OWS' blended complaint is that there has traditionally been a conflict of interest between what people can do and what they will do. Their protest is that this conflict of interest is NOT doing for the nation, and that the sole defense of those involved in that conflict of interest is that they're entitled to government welfare at the exclusion of those not involved in that conflict of interest.
The OWS doesn't stand for - or against - there being any government welfare at all. Individuals might, but the OWS isn't run by individuals, it's its own thing, the individuals merely happen to be there. The OWS doesn't care if all get the welfare currently given to those who exploit the loopholes in the system, if nobody does, or if the system is totally re-engineered to give something in-between, so long as everyone plays by the same rules. That's what the percentages bit is about. Nobody cares what particular 1% is the problem, the problem is that you can even divide the population up by different rulebooks at all.
Yes, but one challenger or even a group of engineers from challenging teams has no right to violate the restriction on prior art -or- to block DARPA from running such contests by means of patent ownership.
The patent is overly broad, in other words. A team patenting a very specific solution is one thing, but this isn't patenting something very specific. It's patenting a swathe of solutions.
It's also in violation of the essence of a patent. Patents are there to encourage inventors by allowing them monopoly of their invention for a fixed period. None of these inventors created the "idea", since the "idea" is the contest. Nor are they cashing in on their invention, Google is. Google had nothing to do with the invention and therefore isn't being encouraged to do anything. The inventors are presumably salaried and thus also not encouraged to do anything.
I think the consensus* will be that the DARPA Challenge constitutes Prior Art as many of those vehicles were converted from human to fully autonomous.
I also think the consensus* will be that the patent will make it impossible for DARPA to continue running its challenge, as having Google demand royalties from every entrant would make it impossible for highly innovative/inventive colleges or individuals from taking part as these are not the kinds of groups that will have money to spare for paying off Google.
*consensus here is defined as "the view of the actual geeks and nerds on this site".
Well, your total incapacity to form an intelligent reply certainly confirms your claim, Jefe, that you lack any kind of intellect or education. Maybe when you actually ask something, it can be answered. Until then, you're as capable of reading Plato's Republic as the rest of us.
I agree with what you say, but note the following:
1) If the education is actually worth the money, it will produce either a better-paying job AND/OR a more efficient company. Either way, both individuals and companies pay tax, so those who get functional education pay twice (three times if you include the corporation's taxes) for that education, but those who get non-functional education only pay once. That doesn't add up. That is punishing success and rewarding failure - the very thing the right-wing tell us NOT to do. I don't care how that's fixed, but to excuse not fixing it on the grounds that it's ok to punish success when it's other people's success - no, I will not accept that.
2) I care that the net cost to America for health-care exceeds the net cost to every single one of the next five most successful Western nations. The gross costs are immaterial because only the net matters. Only the net defines how much we pay in taxes, only the net defines how profitable business can be, only the net controls the national deficit, only the net has any real existence. I don't care how you lower the net, I only care that you don't ignore it in favor of the gross which means exactly nothing.
3) I wonder how many Tea Partiers entered at the management level with MBAs. I wonder how many of them started with old money and used that to bypass the bottom rungs. Yes, plenty of Democrats have done that too, but they're not the ones arguing about starting at the bottom. It's the right that is......except when it applies to them. To have everyone truly start at the bottom, inheritance tax would be 100% with material heirlooms being sent to museums for evaluation in a cultural history perspective. I see no-one, left or right, who would seriously believe - never mind advocate - such a system. So, no, the right is not about "everyone" starting at the bottom OR working their way up. Nor is the left. The only question is who starts where, because nobody thinks they should start at the bottom. My own view is an extrapolation from the question of what one can do for their country. You want, really want, to ask what you can do for your country? Then the answer is to do your best and you cannot do your best if you're incorrectly placed. Round peg, square hole. Start at your peak value. THEN you will be doing for your country. To be a drain on the nation through starting too far down (or too far up) is to scrounge off the nation and to be a drain on what it offers.
I'd note that plenty of top-ranking lawyers, top-ranking doctors and even corporate board directors have taken part in OWS protests. These are people who have no student loans left, have healthcare that's damn-near free and who have little further to rise. How can they possibly be asking these things for themselves? They ARE the "rich", they ARE the 1%, but they're still protesting and they're still OWS. The Tea Party doesn't want to explain that or understand that. Look around at other replies to me. You'll see people stating openly that they don't want to know, don't care to know, and despise anything that conflicts with them.
The young may feel over-entitled, but I quote Harold McMillan (a staunch conservative if ever there was one) - if you're not socialist by the age of 20 you have no heart, and if you're still socialist by the age of 40 you have no brain. In short, the young are SUPPOSED to feel over-entitled. It's how they learn. You cannot ever learn where the true boundaries lie if you never test them. His latter point was just as important -- if you haven't learned where the boundaries are in 20 years, you're a damn fool. But, unlike him, I don't place restrictions on the specifics. If you have drawn a nice, safe but totally dysfunctional set of boundaries that never go anywhere near where they rightfully should to be maximally functional, you're still a damn fool.
Exactly. Results matter, purity does not. Purity of thought should be left to Buddhist monks - it actually seems to be something they can do something useful with.
Worthless. Obama's efforts to get conciliation and negotiation have failed utterly, showing replacing any one person is a pointless endeavor. Unless you have a majority in both Houses AND the Presidency AND a majority in the Supreme Court, no third viewpoint is worth a damn.
The true Scotsmen I know would consider the Patriot Act to be blasphemy, the Tea Party to be a bunch of Southerners dictating to the True North and Alabama to be worse than the Campbells -- and you don't get worse than that.
No, you don't trust it because you're not interest in discourse - the only form of politics that actually exists. All else is militancy disguised as politics.
You say "that's all I need to know or care about" not because of some God-given knowledge of yours but because you aren't interested in constructivism. Constructivists add. Destructivists remove. Tell me, are you adding or removing? The latter? Then you are making my point abundantly clear.
To call me ignorant and a liar (and yourself a poor speller) is to be a revisionist. You say yourself that you don't trust what I say, that you don't care what I say. That *is* revisionism. You are editing reality to suit your preferences. That's what revisionism *IS*. I edit my beliefs to suit reality, because I learn. I construct, you destruct. It's as simple as that.
"Quit taxing us so much" would also have a bit more, ummm, credibility if the Tea Party were in support of extending the tax cuts for the poor. However, the Tea Party is actually pressuring tax INCREASES on the poor. Thus, their message has nothing to do with tax reduction EXCEPT on the high-earners. The Tea Party has made it very clear that tax increases on those who don't view the world the Tea Party way is the best way to crush those whose views are different.
To me, crushing those you don't like is not rational. Listening to those you don't like IS rational. Those who post flammage as a reply to me are therefore not rational. Not because of their world view, but because of their destructive attitude. I have stated this more than once on many, many forums -- if you believe politics is about killing your opponents or crushing them beneath your feet, you are not into politics. I don't know what you're into, but it's not politics. A psych ward may be able to help in figuring it out, but that's the only hope for such cretins.
A reply that is constructivist, listening and coherent, even if it flies 100% in the face of everything I think, IS rational. That is not a view you will ever hear a Tea Party advocate say, but it IS absolutely core to who I am.
Your analysis of the OWS is provably false because the OWS doesn't have any such stance. That you would bother to post without doing any research is evidence of your ignorance and vindication of my point. The ignorant are destructive, the knowledgeable are constructive.
I would also point out that the nations with free health care have longer life expectancies, lower child mortality and fewer preventable deaths. That has nothing to do with the rich being "evil", that has to do with the ethics of not butchering those segments of the population you don't like. Or can I take it you approve of selective culls of anyone not sharing your politics?
I would further point out that the US not only ranks below virtually every Western nation on happiness, education, corruption prevention and crime prevention, it also ranks below virtually every Western nation on political involvement, political transparency, political ethics, political discourse and political maturity. The cause of these latter ones is simple to identify -- ideological "purity" fetishists, of which you are clearly one. The cause of the former is through LACK of government, not excess of it.
OWS has nothing against people being rich, and it's hard to call 80% of the American population a voting minority -- well, unless you first believe that you have suddenly gained the UNCONSTITUTIONAL right to disenfranchise 80% of Americans.
The Tea Party has absolutely zero understanding of the Constitution, pressured the House to ignore one amendment (which requires the Government to make good on debts) and has sought to repeal another. Sorry, but the Tea Party is not about adhering to the Constitution, it is about the Constitution's destruction.
The Tea Party likes the role model of Somalia - a nation run by religious extremists with heavy weapons but without any kind of government structure. It doesn't? Well, care to explain (a) why the religious extremists are the ones in America with the heavy weapons, (b) why those extremists are the ones the Tea Party wants as political leaders, and (c) what the hell you THINK would happen if the US had no government (the smallest government you can have)? Perry has already stated he wants the Presidency dissolved, so no, you can't get away with saying they want "minimal" government. They've made it clear they want NONE. Anarchy. Somalia-style warlord fiefdoms. THAT is what the Tea Party is explicitly advocating and THAT is what you are supporting.
The difference between you and me is that I come from a family where the right-wingers who have held office have always had left-wingers exclusively as advisers and where the left-wingers who have held office have always had right-wingers exclusively as advisers. In short, I come from a family where it is NOT the political wing you are on that matters but the message you deliver.
I hold to that value as an absolute. I also hold that the Tea Party is completely incapable of comprehending such a stance, that it is so obsessed with the "purity" of its ideology that it cannot comprehend the fact that there IS no constructive ideology. An ideology, in and of itself, will ALWAYS be destructive. You CANNOT construct through deconstruction. The ONLY way to construct is to build, and the only way to build is to disavow purity and blend to perfection.
THAT is why the Wall Street protests are constructive and THAT is why the Tea Party is destructive. The former blends, the latter splits.
To call me a liar is to demonstrate your ignorance of the definition of the word, for a start, but it is to also demonstrate that you are ignorant of the history of what works and what doesn't. I know that history well and in detail far beyond the understanding of the Palins of the world.
To call me a karma whore is to be ignorant of my own posting history. I post what I say, frequently with vicious - and incredibly naive - backlashes like your own. When I posted about the Fukoshima reactor and my research into the history of TEPCO's actions, I was sand-blasted with hatred -- only to be demonstrated correct as the findings of the various investigations have been revealed. That is because I DO THE LEGWORK. You and your pathetic little worms of friends do not.
If I post a comment, it is not to get it modded higher (hell, I -average- +20 a week even after the vitriol I receive) it is because my research states that this is the hypothesis that is most likely correct and that the rival hypotheses have been falsified and thus safely ignored.
I am not superior to you through greater intelligence (though that does help), I am superior to you because I actually understand the questions AND the answers, whereas you understand neither.
I forget -- is Time's PotY the one that's supposed to be "cursed"? And, if so, is there any chance Wall Street paid Time for the feature, hoping to use the curse as a weapon of mass destruction?
That, in itself, gives the lie to the notion that individuals are the be-all and end-all of civilization. These protests are cohesive, identifiable entities, but they are NOT run by individuals, guided by individuals or presented by individuals. Try to deconstruct them to individuals and you find nothing. Yet the protests exist, they do actually have a function and they have a definite goal -- even though not a single individual within them can tell you what that goal actually is. The individual in these protests is a cell in a body greater than the individual and just like the cells in the human body, the cell is not the guide, the presenter or the decider.
Funny, I thought America was ranking outside the top 10 nations on every metric going (happiness, health, prosperity, employment, lack of corruption, education, etc) -- well, with the exception of ego. America is joint first with France, Germany and several third-world dictators on Ego.
Unlikely. Those Tea Partiers who post here as ACs look at the words but don't actually SEE anything at all, and "expecting" requires the notion of a hypothesis and prediction -- a methodology that flies firmly in the face of all that the Tea Party stands for.
Not really. There's a distinction between rational protesting for and irrational protesting against. 2011 has seen a lot of rational, constructive protesting. The Tea Party was all about irrational, destructive rabble-rousing.
For books, I'd argue that books should be submitted exclusively in a format that is -either- lossless and self-describing (eg: LaTeX, SGML-based formats, Postscript, though there's plenty more) -or- formats that can be directly converted into such a format without human intervention. A self-describing format is great because even if the exact specifications for the format are lost, you can reconstitute it with comparative ease. It's not a cryptological problem the way any binary format would be.
For multimedia, I'd try to be as close to that as humanly possible. It should not be necessary for archivists in the distant future, on discovering their digital format computer died on account of too much alien life-form pron, to become experts in digital analysis and forensics. There are digital formats that are extremely simple - bloated, but simple - that can be used.
Ok, what would this require for the LoC. Well, 1 petabyte of data will require 512 standard-issue 2Tb drives. You want backups, so you want another 512 drives to act as a mirror system. Hard drives have an expected lifespan of 5 years, so that's not great. You can double the capacity of what's online by using tape drives and then archive both the original and mirrored tape. Tapes have a lifespan of around 15-30 years, if kept in ideal conditions, so that's a lot better than hard drives. Tapes are much cheaper than complete drive units, so making additional backups is less of a problem.
It's not going to require a vast amount of space to store 256 tapes. If you include two backup copies, that's 768 tapes. A good-sized walk-in closet. Now, if the LoC wanted to back up not just copyrighted material but de-duplicated information off the Internet as well, you're looking at one such closet a month. That might be very painful, but given the size of a typical large warehouse - and you'd need one for each copy - it's doable for many decades. If you stick to just copyrighted material, even in the 100% lossless + self-documenting formats, I simply don't see enough material being generated to fill more than one such walk-in closet a year and the warehouse would likely not be filled for a couple of centuries or so. By the time the format reaches the point where re-duplicating is necessary, new archival forms will likely have been developed. The new forms will occupy less space, so the space in use will shrink. The shrink will likely be under 50%, so by the time of the next migration more space will have been consumed than for the previous migration. Even so, you're talking unimaginably slow creep.
So for space that's peanuts by the standards of most Universities (the University of Manchester has over FIVE warehouses of books in addition to the massive libraries you can actually walk through) you can store more registered copyrighted data in a 100% reproducible lossless format than will be produced within the expected lifespan of any building used to store that data.
Debunking isn't necessarily the same thing as criticizing the workings. Plenty of theory holds up even after a person has had their knuckles rapped and told to go through the calculations again. (Black hole evaporation was discovered by such a process.) The problem with Newton (and, indeed, Einstein) is that there are questions of originality. Einstein was well-aware of spacetime theory prior to coming up with relativity, for example. Newton was well-aware of prior work on laws of motion and on calculus. All three things are correct, so no work is getting debunked. Both Einstein and Newton did original work on top of whatever they borrowed, so neither person is being debunked. The only question is what did they know and when did they know it.
Newton is particularly troublesome, in this regard, as it is firmly established that he caused the suicide of a fellow member of the Royal Acadamy through extreme libel. Sorry, but the only "nut" in that case was Newton himself.
That's a very good question. The digital media with the longest lifespan is based on core and gives you a 100 year lifespan (generally considered "archival quality" in physical formats) but it's horribly expensive to build core-based memories and even modern derivatives are usually bulky.
I'd also like to point to this article on the subject:
"Most librarians and archivists have accepted the basic wisdom -- for now at least -- that digital preservation depends upon copying, not on the survival of the physical media (Lesk). But copying, also referred to as "refreshing" or "migration" is more complex than simply transferring a stream of bits from old to new media or from one generation of systems to the next. Complex and expensive transformations of digital objects often are necessary to preserve digital materials so that they remain authentic representations of the original versions and useful sources for analysis and research (Task Force on Archiving of Digital Information)."
The problem with the solution described is that most modern formats are lossy, so migration-based techniques (with the accompanying transforms) will degrade quality -- sometimes faster than copying analogue media. Only lossless formats are degradation-free from migration and most digital media is not transmitted in a lossless format. Too bulky. Which, ultimately, means that the primary reason for using digital (the ability to copy error-free) isn't valid for the way we currently use digital media, which in turn means that the kind of preservation you're talking about simply isn't possible without a major change in the way people approach data storage.
And, since you're right in discussing what the consumer gets (versus what the studios have), that ultimately means consumers have to get archival-grade digital data for any kind of consumer-based archive (including libraries, who - as far as studios are concerned - are still consumers) to work at all.
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Agreeing or disagreeing doesn't make the person insightful (or a troll) and those who use mod points for the purpose of modding posts up or down based on agenda rather than according to the qualities the moderation is SUPPOSED to be for are violently abusing a system intended to promote dialogue and suppress that which would inhibit it.
You should be ashamed of yourself.
Ah. Y'know, shows my age when I read that as Maiden and wondered when Iron Maiden started doing person of the year album covers.
Nor do I recall them shooting politicians and children in the head.
You can't "site" anything, unless you're planning on building an apartment complex. And you can cite nothing because deconstructionalist arguments don't apply to an entity that cannot be reduced to less than the whole. (Would you care to falsify chemistry on the grounds that quarks don't form covalent bonds? That's basically what you're claiming.)
No, you're not throwing anything in my face because you're too much of a gibbering idiot to throw anything past those bootlaces of yours you keep tripping over.
Nor can you find me "countless" videos and pictures, because I'm damn sure I can count them -- and I'm also 99% sure I can establish that such pictures are Agent Provocateurs from the Tea Party and Fox News.
No, you DO discount it because you don't even know what the argument IS. You're only looking at what you personally want the argument to be and no further.
I have revised nothing. I state facts, you state fictions and that's all there is to it. I owe you nothing, except maybe a roundhouse kick to that oversized gob of yours.
The health-care reforms haven't kicked in, for the most part, are being appealed by a lot of States - some of which have overturned a lot of the provisions - and until the SCOTUS issues a decision next year there is essentially no healthcare reform. The fight to get it was vicious enough that almost nothing else got done during that battle and nothing at all has been doable since.
Even if SCOTUS does hold up the healthcare reform, every Republican standing - to a person - has stated they'll get the bill repealed. In other words, those 2.5 million Americans really don't have anything more than an IOU.
Yes, Obama put two non-crazy people into SCOTUS, but they're badly outnumbered by crazies on both sides of the political fence. There aught to be minimum sanity requirements at the very least for such a powerful entity, and ideally no person with a politics-driven ideology should be permitted onto it. However, that's not as things are. How things are is that SCOTUS is run by ideologues driven by party loyalty and sponsor loyalty. Doesn't matter how sane a person is going in, they won't stay sane in that kind of toxic environment. How could they? To truly eliminate the two-party deadlock in SCOTUS, SCOTUS as a whole has to be detoxed.
No, the OWS includes a number of prominent conservatives. The OWS isn't about individuals and it's an exercise in futility to figure out the demands by deconstructionist approaches. The OWS blends by combining people who are rich and poor, who are left- and right-wing, who are angry at abuse of position (regardless of who is abusing it or how) or who are angry at a lack of status for others (regardless of who or how), so it's all kinds of people with all kinds of competing views. The OWS is classless.
Yes, the Tea Party is engaged in "Class War" (which is interesting because the whole point of the American Dream is a classless society), which is a divisive action. The OWS, however, is classless. The fringes' complaints confuse the different meanings of "lack of class", but that's their problem. The OWS' blended complaint is that there has traditionally been a conflict of interest between what people can do and what they will do. Their protest is that this conflict of interest is NOT doing for the nation, and that the sole defense of those involved in that conflict of interest is that they're entitled to government welfare at the exclusion of those not involved in that conflict of interest.
The OWS doesn't stand for - or against - there being any government welfare at all. Individuals might, but the OWS isn't run by individuals, it's its own thing, the individuals merely happen to be there. The OWS doesn't care if all get the welfare currently given to those who exploit the loopholes in the system, if nobody does, or if the system is totally re-engineered to give something in-between, so long as everyone plays by the same rules. That's what the percentages bit is about. Nobody cares what particular 1% is the problem, the problem is that you can even divide the population up by different rulebooks at all.
Yes, but one challenger or even a group of engineers from challenging teams has no right to violate the restriction on prior art -or- to block DARPA from running such contests by means of patent ownership.
The patent is overly broad, in other words. A team patenting a very specific solution is one thing, but this isn't patenting something very specific. It's patenting a swathe of solutions.
It's also in violation of the essence of a patent. Patents are there to encourage inventors by allowing them monopoly of their invention for a fixed period. None of these inventors created the "idea", since the "idea" is the contest. Nor are they cashing in on their invention, Google is. Google had nothing to do with the invention and therefore isn't being encouraged to do anything. The inventors are presumably salaried and thus also not encouraged to do anything.
I think the consensus* will be that the DARPA Challenge constitutes Prior Art as many of those vehicles were converted from human to fully autonomous.
I also think the consensus* will be that the patent will make it impossible for DARPA to continue running its challenge, as having Google demand royalties from every entrant would make it impossible for highly innovative/inventive colleges or individuals from taking part as these are not the kinds of groups that will have money to spare for paying off Google.
*consensus here is defined as "the view of the actual geeks and nerds on this site".
Well, your total incapacity to form an intelligent reply certainly confirms your claim, Jefe, that you lack any kind of intellect or education. Maybe when you actually ask something, it can be answered. Until then, you're as capable of reading Plato's Republic as the rest of us.
I agree with what you say, but note the following:
1) If the education is actually worth the money, it will produce either a better-paying job AND/OR a more efficient company. Either way, both individuals and companies pay tax, so those who get functional education pay twice (three times if you include the corporation's taxes) for that education, but those who get non-functional education only pay once. That doesn't add up. That is punishing success and rewarding failure - the very thing the right-wing tell us NOT to do. I don't care how that's fixed, but to excuse not fixing it on the grounds that it's ok to punish success when it's other people's success - no, I will not accept that.
2) I care that the net cost to America for health-care exceeds the net cost to every single one of the next five most successful Western nations. The gross costs are immaterial because only the net matters. Only the net defines how much we pay in taxes, only the net defines how profitable business can be, only the net controls the national deficit, only the net has any real existence. I don't care how you lower the net, I only care that you don't ignore it in favor of the gross which means exactly nothing.
3) I wonder how many Tea Partiers entered at the management level with MBAs. I wonder how many of them started with old money and used that to bypass the bottom rungs. Yes, plenty of Democrats have done that too, but they're not the ones arguing about starting at the bottom. It's the right that is... ...except when it applies to them. To have everyone truly start at the bottom, inheritance tax would be 100% with material heirlooms being sent to museums for evaluation in a cultural history perspective. I see no-one, left or right, who would seriously believe - never mind advocate - such a system. So, no, the right is not about "everyone" starting at the bottom OR working their way up. Nor is the left. The only question is who starts where, because nobody thinks they should start at the bottom. My own view is an extrapolation from the question of what one can do for their country. You want, really want, to ask what you can do for your country? Then the answer is to do your best and you cannot do your best if you're incorrectly placed. Round peg, square hole. Start at your peak value. THEN you will be doing for your country. To be a drain on the nation through starting too far down (or too far up) is to scrounge off the nation and to be a drain on what it offers.
I'd note that plenty of top-ranking lawyers, top-ranking doctors and even corporate board directors have taken part in OWS protests. These are people who have no student loans left, have healthcare that's damn-near free and who have little further to rise. How can they possibly be asking these things for themselves? They ARE the "rich", they ARE the 1%, but they're still protesting and they're still OWS. The Tea Party doesn't want to explain that or understand that. Look around at other replies to me. You'll see people stating openly that they don't want to know, don't care to know, and despise anything that conflicts with them.
The young may feel over-entitled, but I quote Harold McMillan (a staunch conservative if ever there was one) - if you're not socialist by the age of 20 you have no heart, and if you're still socialist by the age of 40 you have no brain. In short, the young are SUPPOSED to feel over-entitled. It's how they learn. You cannot ever learn where the true boundaries lie if you never test them. His latter point was just as important -- if you haven't learned where the boundaries are in 20 years, you're a damn fool. But, unlike him, I don't place restrictions on the specifics. If you have drawn a nice, safe but totally dysfunctional set of boundaries that never go anywhere near where they rightfully should to be maximally functional, you're still a damn fool.
Exactly. Results matter, purity does not. Purity of thought should be left to Buddhist monks - it actually seems to be something they can do something useful with.
Worthless. Obama's efforts to get conciliation and negotiation have failed utterly, showing replacing any one person is a pointless endeavor. Unless you have a majority in both Houses AND the Presidency AND a majority in the Supreme Court, no third viewpoint is worth a damn.
The true Scotsmen I know would consider the Patriot Act to be blasphemy, the Tea Party to be a bunch of Southerners dictating to the True North and Alabama to be worse than the Campbells -- and you don't get worse than that.
No, you don't trust it because you're not interest in discourse - the only form of politics that actually exists. All else is militancy disguised as politics.
You say "that's all I need to know or care about" not because of some God-given knowledge of yours but because you aren't interested in constructivism. Constructivists add. Destructivists remove. Tell me, are you adding or removing? The latter? Then you are making my point abundantly clear.
To call me ignorant and a liar (and yourself a poor speller) is to be a revisionist. You say yourself that you don't trust what I say, that you don't care what I say. That *is* revisionism. You are editing reality to suit your preferences. That's what revisionism *IS*. I edit my beliefs to suit reality, because I learn. I construct, you destruct. It's as simple as that.
"Quit taxing us so much" would also have a bit more, ummm, credibility if the Tea Party were in support of extending the tax cuts for the poor. However, the Tea Party is actually pressuring tax INCREASES on the poor. Thus, their message has nothing to do with tax reduction EXCEPT on the high-earners. The Tea Party has made it very clear that tax increases on those who don't view the world the Tea Party way is the best way to crush those whose views are different.
To me, crushing those you don't like is not rational. Listening to those you don't like IS rational. Those who post flammage as a reply to me are therefore not rational. Not because of their world view, but because of their destructive attitude. I have stated this more than once on many, many forums -- if you believe politics is about killing your opponents or crushing them beneath your feet, you are not into politics. I don't know what you're into, but it's not politics. A psych ward may be able to help in figuring it out, but that's the only hope for such cretins.
A reply that is constructivist, listening and coherent, even if it flies 100% in the face of everything I think, IS rational. That is not a view you will ever hear a Tea Party advocate say, but it IS absolutely core to who I am.
Your analysis of the OWS is provably false because the OWS doesn't have any such stance. That you would bother to post without doing any research is evidence of your ignorance and vindication of my point. The ignorant are destructive, the knowledgeable are constructive.
I would also point out that the nations with free health care have longer life expectancies, lower child mortality and fewer preventable deaths. That has nothing to do with the rich being "evil", that has to do with the ethics of not butchering those segments of the population you don't like. Or can I take it you approve of selective culls of anyone not sharing your politics?
I would further point out that the US not only ranks below virtually every Western nation on happiness, education, corruption prevention and crime prevention, it also ranks below virtually every Western nation on political involvement, political transparency, political ethics, political discourse and political maturity. The cause of these latter ones is simple to identify -- ideological "purity" fetishists, of which you are clearly one. The cause of the former is through LACK of government, not excess of it.
OWS has nothing against people being rich, and it's hard to call 80% of the American population a voting minority -- well, unless you first believe that you have suddenly gained the UNCONSTITUTIONAL right to disenfranchise 80% of Americans.
The Tea Party has absolutely zero understanding of the Constitution, pressured the House to ignore one amendment (which requires the Government to make good on debts) and has sought to repeal another. Sorry, but the Tea Party is not about adhering to the Constitution, it is about the Constitution's destruction.
The Tea Party likes the role model of Somalia - a nation run by religious extremists with heavy weapons but without any kind of government structure. It doesn't? Well, care to explain (a) why the religious extremists are the ones in America with the heavy weapons, (b) why those extremists are the ones the Tea Party wants as political leaders, and (c) what the hell you THINK would happen if the US had no government (the smallest government you can have)? Perry has already stated he wants the Presidency dissolved, so no, you can't get away with saying they want "minimal" government. They've made it clear they want NONE. Anarchy. Somalia-style warlord fiefdoms. THAT is what the Tea Party is explicitly advocating and THAT is what you are supporting.
The difference between you and me is that I come from a family where the right-wingers who have held office have always had left-wingers exclusively as advisers and where the left-wingers who have held office have always had right-wingers exclusively as advisers. In short, I come from a family where it is NOT the political wing you are on that matters but the message you deliver.
I hold to that value as an absolute. I also hold that the Tea Party is completely incapable of comprehending such a stance, that it is so obsessed with the "purity" of its ideology that it cannot comprehend the fact that there IS no constructive ideology. An ideology, in and of itself, will ALWAYS be destructive. You CANNOT construct through deconstruction. The ONLY way to construct is to build, and the only way to build is to disavow purity and blend to perfection.
THAT is why the Wall Street protests are constructive and THAT is why the Tea Party is destructive. The former blends, the latter splits.
To call me a liar is to demonstrate your ignorance of the definition of the word, for a start, but it is to also demonstrate that you are ignorant of the history of what works and what doesn't. I know that history well and in detail far beyond the understanding of the Palins of the world.
To call me a karma whore is to be ignorant of my own posting history. I post what I say, frequently with vicious - and incredibly naive - backlashes like your own. When I posted about the Fukoshima reactor and my research into the history of TEPCO's actions, I was sand-blasted with hatred -- only to be demonstrated correct as the findings of the various investigations have been revealed. That is because I DO THE LEGWORK. You and your pathetic little worms of friends do not.
If I post a comment, it is not to get it modded higher (hell, I -average- +20 a week even after the vitriol I receive) it is because my research states that this is the hypothesis that is most likely correct and that the rival hypotheses have been falsified and thus safely ignored.
I am not superior to you through greater intelligence (though that does help), I am superior to you because I actually understand the questions AND the answers, whereas you understand neither.
I forget -- is Time's PotY the one that's supposed to be "cursed"? And, if so, is there any chance Wall Street paid Time for the feature, hoping to use the curse as a weapon of mass destruction?
That, in itself, gives the lie to the notion that individuals are the be-all and end-all of civilization. These protests are cohesive, identifiable entities, but they are NOT run by individuals, guided by individuals or presented by individuals. Try to deconstruct them to individuals and you find nothing. Yet the protests exist, they do actually have a function and they have a definite goal -- even though not a single individual within them can tell you what that goal actually is. The individual in these protests is a cell in a body greater than the individual and just like the cells in the human body, the cell is not the guide, the presenter or the decider.
Funny, I thought America was ranking outside the top 10 nations on every metric going (happiness, health, prosperity, employment, lack of corruption, education, etc) -- well, with the exception of ego. America is joint first with France, Germany and several third-world dictators on Ego.
Unlikely. Those Tea Partiers who post here as ACs look at the words but don't actually SEE anything at all, and "expecting" requires the notion of a hypothesis and prediction -- a methodology that flies firmly in the face of all that the Tea Party stands for.
Not really. There's a distinction between rational protesting for and irrational protesting against. 2011 has seen a lot of rational, constructive protesting. The Tea Party was all about irrational, destructive rabble-rousing.
For books, I'd argue that books should be submitted exclusively in a format that is -either- lossless and self-describing (eg: LaTeX, SGML-based formats, Postscript, though there's plenty more) -or- formats that can be directly converted into such a format without human intervention. A self-describing format is great because even if the exact specifications for the format are lost, you can reconstitute it with comparative ease. It's not a cryptological problem the way any binary format would be.
For multimedia, I'd try to be as close to that as humanly possible. It should not be necessary for archivists in the distant future, on discovering their digital format computer died on account of too much alien life-form pron, to become experts in digital analysis and forensics. There are digital formats that are extremely simple - bloated, but simple - that can be used.
Ok, what would this require for the LoC. Well, 1 petabyte of data will require 512 standard-issue 2Tb drives. You want backups, so you want another 512 drives to act as a mirror system. Hard drives have an expected lifespan of 5 years, so that's not great. You can double the capacity of what's online by using tape drives and then archive both the original and mirrored tape. Tapes have a lifespan of around 15-30 years, if kept in ideal conditions, so that's a lot better than hard drives. Tapes are much cheaper than complete drive units, so making additional backups is less of a problem.
It's not going to require a vast amount of space to store 256 tapes. If you include two backup copies, that's 768 tapes. A good-sized walk-in closet. Now, if the LoC wanted to back up not just copyrighted material but de-duplicated information off the Internet as well, you're looking at one such closet a month. That might be very painful, but given the size of a typical large warehouse - and you'd need one for each copy - it's doable for many decades. If you stick to just copyrighted material, even in the 100% lossless + self-documenting formats, I simply don't see enough material being generated to fill more than one such walk-in closet a year and the warehouse would likely not be filled for a couple of centuries or so. By the time the format reaches the point where re-duplicating is necessary, new archival forms will likely have been developed. The new forms will occupy less space, so the space in use will shrink. The shrink will likely be under 50%, so by the time of the next migration more space will have been consumed than for the previous migration. Even so, you're talking unimaginably slow creep.
So for space that's peanuts by the standards of most Universities (the University of Manchester has over FIVE warehouses of books in addition to the massive libraries you can actually walk through) you can store more registered copyrighted data in a 100% reproducible lossless format than will be produced within the expected lifespan of any building used to store that data.
Debunking isn't necessarily the same thing as criticizing the workings. Plenty of theory holds up even after a person has had their knuckles rapped and told to go through the calculations again. (Black hole evaporation was discovered by such a process.) The problem with Newton (and, indeed, Einstein) is that there are questions of originality. Einstein was well-aware of spacetime theory prior to coming up with relativity, for example. Newton was well-aware of prior work on laws of motion and on calculus. All three things are correct, so no work is getting debunked. Both Einstein and Newton did original work on top of whatever they borrowed, so neither person is being debunked. The only question is what did they know and when did they know it.
Newton is particularly troublesome, in this regard, as it is firmly established that he caused the suicide of a fellow member of the Royal Acadamy through extreme libel. Sorry, but the only "nut" in that case was Newton himself.
That's a very good question. The digital media with the longest lifespan is based on core and gives you a 100 year lifespan (generally considered "archival quality" in physical formats) but it's horribly expensive to build core-based memories and even modern derivatives are usually bulky.
I'd also like to point to this article on the subject:
http://www.uky.edu/~kiernan/DL/hedstrom.html
A quote from it:
"Most librarians and archivists have accepted the basic wisdom -- for now at least -- that digital preservation depends upon copying, not on the survival of the physical media (Lesk). But copying, also referred to as "refreshing" or "migration" is more complex than simply transferring a stream of bits from old to new media or from one generation of systems to the next. Complex and expensive transformations of digital objects often are necessary to preserve digital materials so that they remain authentic representations of the original versions and useful sources for analysis and research (Task Force on Archiving of Digital Information)."
The problem with the solution described is that most modern formats are lossy, so migration-based techniques (with the accompanying transforms) will degrade quality -- sometimes faster than copying analogue media. Only lossless formats are degradation-free from migration and most digital media is not transmitted in a lossless format. Too bulky. Which, ultimately, means that the primary reason for using digital (the ability to copy error-free) isn't valid for the way we currently use digital media, which in turn means that the kind of preservation you're talking about simply isn't possible without a major change in the way people approach data storage.
And, since you're right in discussing what the consumer gets (versus what the studios have), that ultimately means consumers have to get archival-grade digital data for any kind of consumer-based archive (including libraries, who - as far as studios are concerned - are still consumers) to work at all.