US Government is kinda worthless, isn't it? Give everyone wireless networked PDA's, and five days to vote on every issue. No need for politicians or letters.
I've written plenty of hand-written letters, and a few typed, to my Representative and Senators in Virginia on numerous, numerous issues. Fortunately, my rep in VA was Rick Boucher, the only guy who seemed to understand technology (though he was all about privatizing the utilities - argh!).
Senator John Warner's office replied to my letters, actually addressing the issues (though only to say that though he understands my concerns, he disagrees and Naval exercises on Vieques will continue as long as he can help it - doh!). I've actually physically lobbied (on behalf of National Coalition for the Homeless and Amnesty International) and as part of a group, gotten to speak to a PR person and have ZERO effect.
The bottom line is: Money talks, even if it's talking bullshit.
If voting could change anything, it would be illegal.
It would make more sense if they sent it all up like all LEGO kits come (minus the excessive packaging).I imagine astronauts hanging (floating) around, scratching their heads over cartoony instructions:
"Dimitri, I need a 1 x 6 block. Nyet, a block, not plank!"
The Reason they Disappeared
on
Bert Is Evil
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· Score: 1
Seasame Street produced a special episode in which Bert is diagnosed with leukemia and dies. The purpose, of course, was to teach kids about death. So many parents wrote in objections to it that they never aired the episode, however all subsequent episodes made do have Ernie & Bert in it -- for continuity's sake. I bet a little web-searching would turn up an article but I'm too lazy.;P
Hello...they're not attacking people who wear fur or leather. Where did you come up with that notion? Releasing 10,000 minks is "terrorism"? How is it terrorism if no individual is hurt, only corporate interests?
If you can argue that they are terrorists, then by all rights just about every Pro-Life group must certainly qualify as a terrorist, what with all their "wanted" ads on the internet, remeber those? (crosshairs drawn on abortion doctors' faces). Of course the Bush administration will NEVER classify them as such, as they have consistently failed to mention those kinds of incidents as part of religious extremism.
For that matter Reclaim the Streets (RTS) is technically a "terrorist" organization -- this org. advocates nothing other than the "reclamation of public space" and organizes spontaneous dance parties in the streets.
We need to pay close attention to who is deciding what is "terrorism".
Unfortunately I don't have cable but when I did I remember Farscape being a pretty decent show. I went to the web-page you linked, explored around, and discovered this gem in the "Crichton's Notes section:
Okay, so when I'm published in the International Journal of Intergalactic Science I'll have to edit these sections down a bit, but for now, I've gotta talk about how great it was to be inside Aeryn.
Oh, not like that, come on now. Give me some credit. I'm not the type to kiss and tell - not when I think I might get caught, anyhow.
See, these aliens attacked us, but Moya used the defense screen we'd recovered from the Zelbinion. Somehow the combination of the energy beam and the defense screen caused a bizarro physical reaction, and *poof* next thing I know I'm in AERYN'S body! I mean, like, my consciousness is, or something. And she's in Rygel's, and - ick - Rygel's in mine. BOY was it weird. But, Aeryn's body, man, let me tell you, I thought that thing was fun from the OUTSIDE. I'm not even going to try and describe what breasts feel like, I mean HAVING breasts feels like... Suffice it to say if I got to keep Aeryn's body I might never leave my room again.
Take any episode of ST:TNG, probably the best of all the series, and re-shoot the entire episode, except from the perspective of six ensigns or civilian passengers. So Picard, Riker, et. al. show up only as background characters whereas the real story is a human story between these six, very human, but throughly developed characters.
If they are intent on changing the net (a decentralized, non-hierarchical system designed with intention of sharing information) then perhaps I can change the nature of business, to a decentralized, nonhierarchical system designed with the intention of producing/distributing goods, tit-for-tat.
(yes, it is a totally shameless plug for a flundering sourceforge project)
One of my favorite sci-fi books ever, has this to day about ideas, or IP, etc:
It is the nature of idea to be communicated; written, spoken, done. The idea is like grass, it craves light, likes crowds, thrives on crossbreeding, grows better for being stepped on.
Paying for it would be like someone coming up to you and saying, "Hey, I'll sing a song you've never heard if you give me a dollar!" No street musician would make money that way. Their way is through simply giving, then getting donations thrown back at them.
The success of content-sharing over content-selling stems from the mutual satisfaction involved: nobody [real] loses money and both parties benefit. That is why spam is so hated but the newgroups are proliferate with requests and requests-fulfilled for "pirate" mp3's and apps.
Plus, pirates are much more romantic than the East India Trading Company.
I agree, the State is going to royally screw him over silly "improper" bandwidth usage, when it was their fault that their connection was volume-rated and not bandwidth-rated. (or was it, really?)
I say he makes a run for Canada or Mexico now -- let the lawyers go to court while safely watching the case from a distant land. Screw those greedy bureaucrats.
If high acceleration engines (10-50) are ever developed, people will have to be immersed and pressurized in liquid in order to survive the acceleration. I forget what sci-fi book I saw it in. Preferably breathable liquid. I'm not sure how many G's astronauts experience in conventional rockets (or rockets-with-wings), but I think it's around 4 or 5.
noun pl.
1. Persons skilled in the art of getting elected.
2. People whow know how to make a crowd-pleasing argument but little else.
3. People who strive to achieve a position with the authority to make decisions for other people.
Syn: fat-cats, morons, carbon-bags-of-mostly-hot-air
I can't understand the purpose of these all-purpose legislators. These people don't know anything but making good press and saying crowd-pleasing things, no matter if those things are grounded in superstition, popular myth, or are completely erroneous.
Why don't we let the EPA set environmental legislation and elect the environmental experts? Why not vote for Department of Transportation officials? What use are these jackass-of-all-trades, competent-at-none, easily-corrupted monkeys in office? We need to elect experts for the field of their speciality, not lawyers.
"You're too stupid so we're going to decide for you," is the mentality of this legislation. People put a lot of trust in these elected officials -- it's time for them to start trusting us.
And just like in Australia, the same thing happened here, as another poster pointed out.
I think it's pretty inevitable that copyright and patent law will be strictly enforced in the end. After all, since contemporary capitalism (multinational corporations) depends on it, those with the most to lose will defend the DMCA with every resource they've got (and they've got a lot). Not to offend anyone's politics here, but at this point I see the courts / gov't existing only to enforce the laws that the status quo has bought and paid for. After all, that's what they're there for, isn't it?
Governors, CEO's, judges, cops -- their infighting is merely a clever farce to win our confidence that one of them is actually on our side. Haaa-ha.
Are you folks so hopelessly naive that you think you can give all of this power to the state to do things like go after fast food and Wal Mart without it inevitably devolving to censorship?
I don't recall Katz saying anything about government regulation. If you actually read the article, he's merely drawing out the abstract processes paralleled in the two spheres of economics / community.
Your problem seems to be in thinking that state power is the only alternative to privatized (corporate) power. I dare you to be more imaginative than this. "Left" and "Right" conditions us to think that politics and values are somehow limited to a one-dimensional scale (libertarians expand it to two). However, you must realize that political ideas are n-dimensional, in that there simply is no way quantitatively say:"this idea is more conservative than that", or "this idea is less neoliberal than such-and-such".
Katz doesn't suggest any such thing as government regulation. It was you who concluded that such is the only possible recourse.
As others have noted here, the State has become no less than the personal henchman of big business. Communism is simply the division between State and Capitalism less well disguised.
There are other possibilities, many other possibilities.
Let's look at the results of military weapons programs, shall we ???
I agree that there are plenty of beneficial spin-offs (not without their detractors, of course) however I would like to point out that if we put as much money into civilian R&D as we did into military R&D, those benefits would reach people much sooner (and cheaper). Military development is not the only way to make advancements. I would prefer a bullet-train system over jet planes any day (more cost effective and less pollution).
Editorial Right Wingedness
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Republic.Com
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· Score: 1
He does his argument great damage by using as an example of a hate and extremist group the usual left-wing target, The National Rifle Association (NRA) He trots out the usual suspects such as Skinheads and the KKK and fails to mention any of the other
hate groups such as American supporters of Peru's shining path, environmental terrorists who spike logging areas, World Trade Organization protestors/rioters or other left wing extremists. In Chapter three Sunstein speaks of the gun rights movement alongside the KKK, God Hates Fags, and other hate groups in what can only be considered an attempt at guilt by association.[emphasis added]
"Hate groups", timothy? Supporters of the Tupac Amaru socialist guerilla group...who do they hate? Capitalists? Does that mean that Republicans are a hate group for opposing Democrats?
"environmental terrorists who spike logging areas" -- hmm, do I detect a hint of bias? Maybe just an eensy weensy bit?
"WTO protestors/rioters and other left wing extremists" don't sound like hate groups to me. I would like to know exactly why you consider these to be hate groups? Or are they hate groups because you hate how they threaten the security of your precious trust fund?
Unfortunately, the people most likely to understand and use software are the least likely to reproduce. People who don't have a computer (ie those with lower income backgrounds and correspondingly less education) tend to have a lot of babies, earlier.
Besides, Darwinism is a completely discredited and passe social theory, whilest natural selection is just one evolutionary mechanism amoungst dozens.
Also, there is another type that kinda of scares me:
Obsessive Re-creationist -- My ex-girlfriend, before she was my girlfriend, got this game and immediately modelled every family after all of her friends' apartments in Chicago. ie. they all had the same layout and good approximation of looks for people, complete with names and extensive bios. When people left an apartment, that character would be executed and new ones induced from "dummy apartments" to move in.
In other words, she spent hours making sure that every Sim was approximately in the same situation as her real-life friends. When she (the real person) got involved with someone, she made sure that it was going on in the Sims. When she broke up with them, she made sure they starved to death in a room with no doors.
She had my apartment modelled. When she and I became involved, my Sim counterpart moved in with her Sim counterpart. At first I thought it was funny; later I was disturbed when she would say, "Hey, look at what we did today in the photo album!"
It took a lot of coaxing to make sure, when we split up, that my Sim-self was returned to his old apartment instead of being left in a pool with no ladder. Lesson: you can't base a relationship on the Sims (as if I had to say that!).
Slashdot Mirror
John Warner happens to be the Chairman on the Senate Armed Forces Committee, or at least was. Thats why we went to him.
US Government is kinda worthless, isn't it? Give everyone wireless networked PDA's, and five days to vote on every issue. No need for politicians or letters.
Senator John Warner's office replied to my letters, actually addressing the issues (though only to say that though he understands my concerns, he disagrees and Naval exercises on Vieques will continue as long as he can help it - doh!). I've actually physically lobbied (on behalf of National Coalition for the Homeless and Amnesty International) and as part of a group, gotten to speak to a PR person and have ZERO effect.
The bottom line is: Money talks, even if it's talking bullshit.
If voting could change anything, it would be illegal.
"Dimitri, I need a 1 x 6 block. Nyet, a block, not plank!"
Seasame Street produced a special episode in which Bert is diagnosed with leukemia and dies. The purpose, of course, was to teach kids about death. So many parents wrote in objections to it that they never aired the episode, however all subsequent episodes made do have Ernie & Bert in it -- for continuity's sake. I bet a little web-searching would turn up an article but I'm too lazy. ;P
If you can argue that they are terrorists, then by all rights just about every Pro-Life group must certainly qualify as a terrorist, what with all their "wanted" ads on the internet, remeber those? (crosshairs drawn on abortion doctors' faces). Of course the Bush administration will NEVER classify them as such, as they have consistently failed to mention those kinds of incidents as part of religious extremism.
For that matter Reclaim the Streets (RTS) is technically a "terrorist" organization -- this org. advocates nothing other than the "reclamation of public space" and organizes spontaneous dance parties in the streets.
We need to pay close attention to who is deciding what is "terrorism".
Okay, so when I'm published in the International Journal of Intergalactic Science I'll have to edit these sections down a bit, but for now, I've gotta talk about how great it was to be inside Aeryn.
Oh, not like that, come on now. Give me some credit. I'm not the type to kiss and tell - not when I think I might get caught, anyhow.
See, these aliens attacked us, but Moya used the defense screen we'd recovered from the Zelbinion. Somehow the combination of the energy beam and the defense screen caused a bizarro physical reaction, and *poof* next thing I know I'm in AERYN'S body! I mean, like, my consciousness is, or something. And she's in Rygel's, and - ick - Rygel's in mine. BOY was it weird. But, Aeryn's body, man, let me tell you, I thought that thing was fun from the OUTSIDE. I'm not even going to try and describe what breasts feel like, I mean HAVING breasts feels like... Suffice it to say if I got to keep Aeryn's body I might never leave my room again.
'Course, alien beam hits again, right, and it's bye bye breasts.
Hmm...
"This CD features Anti-Terrorist Protection" :P
It will be called: Star Trek: Friends.
(yes, it is a totally shameless plug for a flundering sourceforge project)
It is the nature of idea to be communicated; written, spoken, done. The idea is like grass, it craves light, likes crowds, thrives on crossbreeding, grows better for being stepped on.
Paying for it would be like someone coming up to you and saying, "Hey, I'll sing a song you've never heard if you give me a dollar!" No street musician would make money that way. Their way is through simply giving, then getting donations thrown back at them.
The success of content-sharing over content-selling stems from the mutual satisfaction involved: nobody [real] loses money and both parties benefit. That is why spam is so hated but the newgroups are proliferate with requests and requests-fulfilled for "pirate" mp3's and apps.
Plus, pirates are much more romantic than the East India Trading Company.
I say he makes a run for Canada or Mexico now -- let the lawyers go to court while safely watching the case from a distant land. Screw those greedy bureaucrats.
Placing a fully suited Lego Spaceman in the Toaster Oven (the microwave didn't work, of course) and melting him ever so slightly.
Result: A surface-pitted Lego figure hideously deformed, yet smiling resolutely despite his fate! I was the loser in that round...
Then I discovered that a certain gauge of drill bit corresponded exactly to the spears that the castle-set Lego-men carried...
If high acceleration engines (10-50) are ever developed, people will have to be immersed and pressurized in liquid in order to survive the acceleration. I forget what sci-fi book I saw it in. Preferably breathable liquid. I'm not sure how many G's astronauts experience in conventional rockets (or rockets-with-wings), but I think it's around 4 or 5.
1. Persons skilled in the art of getting elected.
2. People whow know how to make a crowd-pleasing argument but little else.
3. People who strive to achieve a position with the authority to make decisions for other people. Syn: fat-cats, morons, carbon-bags-of-mostly-hot-air
I can't understand the purpose of these all-purpose legislators. These people don't know anything but making good press and saying crowd-pleasing things, no matter if those things are grounded in superstition, popular myth, or are completely erroneous.
Why don't we let the EPA set environmental legislation and elect the environmental experts? Why not vote for Department of Transportation officials? What use are these jackass-of-all-trades, competent-at-none, easily-corrupted monkeys in office? We need to elect experts for the field of their speciality, not lawyers.
"You're too stupid so we're going to decide for you," is the mentality of this legislation. People put a lot of trust in these elected officials -- it's time for them to start trusting us.
I think it's pretty inevitable that copyright and patent law will be strictly enforced in the end. After all, since contemporary capitalism (multinational corporations) depends on it, those with the most to lose will defend the DMCA with every resource they've got (and they've got a lot). Not to offend anyone's politics here, but at this point I see the courts / gov't existing only to enforce the laws that the status quo has bought and paid for. After all, that's what they're there for, isn't it?
Governors, CEO's, judges, cops -- their infighting is merely a clever farce to win our confidence that one of them is actually on our side. Haaa-ha.
Your problem seems to be in thinking that state power is the only alternative to privatized (corporate) power. I dare you to be more imaginative than this. "Left" and "Right" conditions us to think that politics and values are somehow limited to a one-dimensional scale (libertarians expand it to two). However, you must realize that political ideas are n-dimensional, in that there simply is no way quantitatively say :"this idea is more conservative than that", or "this idea is less neoliberal than such-and-such".
Katz doesn't suggest any such thing as government regulation. It was you who concluded that such is the only possible recourse.
As others have noted here, the State has become no less than the personal henchman of big business. Communism is simply the division between State and Capitalism less well disguised.
There are other possibilities, many other possibilities.
(somehow I get the feeling that this argument won't fly in court)
"environmental terrorists who spike logging areas" -- hmm, do I detect a hint of bias? Maybe just an eensy weensy bit?
"WTO protestors/rioters and other left wing extremists" don't sound like hate groups to me. I would like to know exactly why you consider these to be hate groups? Or are they hate groups because you hate how they threaten the security of your precious trust fund?
I think environmentalists are worried about a great deal more than this tiny drop in the bucket.
Besides, Darwinism is a completely discredited and passe social theory, whilest natural selection is just one evolutionary mechanism amoungst dozens.
Obsessive Re-creationist -- My ex-girlfriend, before she was my girlfriend, got this game and immediately modelled every family after all of her friends' apartments in Chicago. ie. they all had the same layout and good approximation of looks for people, complete with names and extensive bios. When people left an apartment, that character would be executed and new ones induced from "dummy apartments" to move in.
In other words, she spent hours making sure that every Sim was approximately in the same situation as her real-life friends. When she (the real person) got involved with someone, she made sure that it was going on in the Sims. When she broke up with them, she made sure they starved to death in a room with no doors.
She had my apartment modelled. When she and I became involved, my Sim counterpart moved in with her Sim counterpart. At first I thought it was funny; later I was disturbed when she would say, "Hey, look at what we did today in the photo album!"
It took a lot of coaxing to make sure, when we split up, that my Sim-self was returned to his old apartment instead of being left in a pool with no ladder. Lesson: you can't base a relationship on the Sims (as if I had to say that!).