Say what you want about corporations, but at the end of the day, they can't legally initiate the use of force against you.
!
What are you? Ten years old or something?
Corporations collectively spend billions on lobbying the government to bring in laws to "protect IP rights" specifically so that they can legally initiate force against you. It's called the FBI kicking in your door and seizing your property on the flimsiest of evidence and if you don't think that's force then you're welcome to tell the agents that you refuse to co-operate!
Don't you see any contradiction between saying that he has copied the stuff of others and bashing IP laws?
Not entirely. There is hypocrisy in Gates' actions of copying others and lobbying (successfully) for stonger IP laws knowing that he has the cash to ignore those same laws. It seems fair enough to me to criticise both actions.
Is it really too much to ask that you use a frigging dictionary before spouting off about things you don't understand? "Viable" means capable of breeding; viable offspring means offspring which are not sterile.
In plants, a "viable breeding population" could be a single fertile individual.
Human growth is a continuum, everyone develops at a different rate, and there's no way to draw a line that won't leave some adults labeled "children" or some children labeled "adults".
However there is no agreed method of measuring this so age is the least-worst approximation. Regardless of this, the article and a lot of the/. postings are taking the line that there should be no restrictions other than what parents can enforce by some method of total surveillance. That seems to me to be utterly moronic and unreasonable, not to mention oppressive.
No system is perfect and some innocent people go to gaol and some guilty walk free but is it worth the same effort to prevent a slightly immature person from voting or allow a mature child to vote early as it is to ensure the right people are locked up? Probably not. So, pick an age and dry your eyes; you'll be past that barrier and looking back soon enough. And I say that with the experience of age;)
Folks, what we have here is your leftist equivalent of the nutbag christian fundamentalists we have on the right.
Here's my chain of reasoning:
John O'Neill, the FBI's top expert on Bin Laden warned that OBL was backing a major attack on the WTC. He had been on the case of OBL since the embassy bombings in Africa right through to the USS Cole in 2000.
O'Neill speaks of his concerns and is stonewalled as regards anything which leads to Saudis. OBL is a Saudi.
O'Neill is so convinced that after a quarter of a century in the FBI he quits and goes to work as head of security at the World Trade Center. He tells a colleage who thought it was a cushy number that "they've always wanted to finish that job. I think they're going to try again.". This is August 2001.
John O'Neill died a hero and a patriot on 9/11 at his post in the WTC.
There are only a few reasons why no one would allow him to pursue what he saw as an urgent threat from a known enemy of America:
They didn't believe him. Or,
They did a cost/benefit calculation based on the previous OBL-back attack on the WTC and decided that such an attack was worth the cost for the benefits or that the costs of preventing it would outweigh the benefit of stopping it. Or,
They did a cost/benefit as above based on the knowledge that the towers would undergo a massive attack capable of destroying them and most everyone inside.
Number one looks to me impossible given the depth of the man's knowledge and experience with OBL. If he didn't know, no one did.
Number three is a conspiracy theory too far. Not even the most amoral of the NeoCons could stand by in the knowledge that perhaps 50000 Americans were going to be killed. Even if one did someone would blow the wistle.
Therefore, option two is the most likely: the pending attack was regarded as a minor irritant like the previous van bomb in the WTC. It would be allowed to take place because to act on the information would be to break the embargo on investigations into important Saudis.
Unfortunately everyone was wrong, including John O'Neill, about the scale of the attack.
Add to all this the fact that even after the attack the whole Bin Laden family was allowed to leave the US in specially provided planes and you see just how determined someone somewhere was to not rock that particular boat.
People all over the world have been picked up, tortured, imprisoned without trial or charge for years or simply killed because there was a suspicion by someone that they had something to do with Bin Laden. Yet the group of people most likely to know something, to have had some contact with him - his very large family - is allowed to walk out of the US, in fact is carried out of the US with no more than a few hours questioning about what they may know, even simply accidental information which is non-incriminating.
This is all public record. Unless you think O'Neill's widow, friends and colleages are all lying, in which case his action of quitting to lead the WTC security team seems slightly odd, although not outlandish.
That's why I think someone knew the attack was coming - they were told - and why I think they let it happen: they thought it would be shrugged off. They were wrong.
Depends on whose figures you use: "In London on Saturday, police said the turnout was 750,000, the largest demonstration ever in the British capital. The organizers put the figure at 2 million."
I was there and the number of people was clearly much larger than other demonstrations which the police had rated as 750K or even more; the official figure was clearly a substantial underestimate.
Muslim population almost as large as Iraq, a growing number of which are disgruntled, and Islamist extremists.
The increase in Muslim population is no worse or better than an increase in Christian population would be. Religion is bad no matter which one it is. The extremists are being boosted by US policy, a policy which is actually designed to do that and create a new terror threat to replace the old Soviet one. Frightened people are easier to fleece, all politicians knowe that.
Yes, that is simple. Wrong, but simple. The US could buy as much oil as it wanted before the war in Iraq, and it still can.
And so can China. Which is why control of the oil in Iraq was so important. If push comes to shove in the market place the US now has contractual agreements for preferential treatment.
This is not a secret, even if you are unaware of it. Wolfowitz published several articles in the 90's saying that Iraq's oil supply HAD to be secured for the US's "economic wellbeing". Saddam was seen as unreliable but until 9/11 there was no good excuse to go in and kick him out (other than a humanitarian one which he didn't care about). Once 9/11 happened it just needed a bit of fakery to link that with Saddam and in went the troops.
The odd thing is that Wolfy and the rest aren't even ashamed of this deception and are making no efforts to, for example, remove these papers from their websites. They know that people like you will believe any old tosh you're told by your TV; there's no need to be secretive when people won't look for the truth.
What about Viet Nam where the US fought so long in the 1960s?
Terror. It's all about terror. The ruling class of the US realised that Stalin (a true bastard, don't get me wrong) gave them great power over the people of the West due to the terror he generated. Gradually this became too useful to live without. Nam was part of that terror but with the end of the cold war a new terror had to be invented and AlQaeda (a name invented by a US lawyer and unused by islamists for years afterwards) was it. The attack on the WTO was allowed to go ahead because it was thought it would be more useful than stopping it. It turned out the attack was far worse than the car bomb that had been expected but, on the other hand, it was therefore much more useful in generating terror and gave the rulers more power than ever. For example, it let them seize Iraq. Terror has been the basis of US-Gov power over the US people for fifty+ years now, the bogey man has changed and changes but if Bin Laden had not existed he would have been invented.
And by the way, since you might be better placed than I am to comment on this... was the Falklands War about oil too?
In fact, yes. The Falklands sat in one of the biggest untapped gas and oil fields in the world, as well as a major fishery. That's why Argentena cared enough to invade and why the UK cared enough to kick them out.
Power generation is vitally important and becoming more so every day; you will miss a lot of nuances in world affairs if you dismiss it. In fact the security of supply is a legitamte goal of any government; the problem I have with the current approach is the lying about "freedom" and "democracy". If the alliance simply said "We're doing it so we have electricity this winter" then that would be at least an argument.
Here is where I'm stumped.... wouldn't those other countries be even more afraid and servile if they knew how much worse the US really was?
I don't know if you misread what I typed or is wasn't clear but that was in fact what I wa
It may be worth pointing out that the protest march against the Iraq war in the UK was the largest ever recorded in that country and actually consisted of almost 3% of the entire population of the country - men, women and children - travelling to and marching in the capital.
More Europeans will come to see the light as the Islamists continue attacking Europeans in Europe.
Except that we know we've become a target because of the US, who in fact created the whole mess in the first place. Not that Iraq has anything to do with fighting Islamists, since Saddam and the Islamists hated each other's guts. Iraq was about oil, pure and simple.
I'm not sure that counts as alone and mistrusted.
There are countries in Iraq with the US simply because they want share of the oil and are afraid of what the US will do to them politically if they don't support them. The UK is a classic example of this. The populations of those countries mostly hate being involved in this shabby and fake war on terror, but that's mostly because they don't realise just how ruthless the US is when it doesn't get its way. If they did then they would probably agree that a few trillion barrels of oil aren't worth starting a real war over.
The Cuban Missile Crisis, the Bay of Pigs, and then Viet Nam?
The US won the Cuban Missile Crisis, for which we're all very happy. The Bay of Pigs is a historical footnote of no importance and Nam ran on far longer after JFK's death than it did before, so who knows what he might have done different. It's hard to imagine it would have been worse!
Since he wasn't, Americans elected a Harvard MBA, former fighter pilot, and governor as president.
Ie, a drunk liar who's granddaddy got him out of the draft and bought him his governorship, while his brother won him the Presidency with fake fellon lists. An MBA is hardly a sign of great intelligence and GWB has displayed none since he came to power. His cabinet is stuffed with fantasists like Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz and oil barons like Chaney and Rice. To call him incompetent is to display the inadequacies of the English language when faced with truly monumental lack of ability on every conceivable front. No more hopeless or worthless human being has ever besmirched the office of President of the United States. No greater hypocrite has ever wrapped himself in the Flag and Jesus while taking actions so directly opposite to what those stand for. Other than that, he's okay I guess.
We joined this war at the beginning.
That's what happens when you start a war, you tend to be there at the beginning.
I think we are doing fine.
In the sense that the main war aims (oil and terrorising the people of America) are being achieved, then I would have to agree with you.
There is some cause for concern since some Americans are actively working to undermine the war effort.
Yes, reporting law-breaking at the heart of government is practically treason.
What is especially troubling is that it is over a question of policy with a strong legal basis supporting it, as noted by former Clinton Associate Attorney General John Schmidt, and a long history.
Schmidt's reasoning is full of holes and basically boils down to "The president can do anything if he says it's to fight nasty foreigners" and is obvious bullshit. The same reasoning would allow any person in the street to be picked up and locked away forever simply by the president saying he was sure that he was acting as an agent of a foreign power. On the other hand, evidence is mounting that he is actually doing just that so perhaps it's moot anyway. The bottom line is that there are clear and easily understood procedures for what he did which include simple and easily understood systems for acting quickly. He ignored them because, frankly, he doesn't much give a shit about law. His grandpappy never did and neither did his da
Having established that children are competant to make decisions and understand the issues about extreme sex and violence in the media, Ars Technica has started action to get "any child who can make a mark" signed up for voting.
A spokesperson said "It is a basic fact that any adult who says someone under the age of 17 can't do something is a fucking fascist bastard and should be hunted down like a dog."
They added that a more reasonable way of handling any problems parents might have about what material their children are viewing is to follow them around 24 hours a day and engage in random searches of their rooms and clothing. "That's taking your responsibilities seriously and not just handing them over to the Police State", he said.
Next week Ars Technica will be reviewing conversion kits which allow children to operate up to compact-sized cars and discussing plans to "get The Man out of kids' faces" when it comes to driving licencing.
But I was THERE. I knew Jon Postel at the IETF, and met with him several times on the governance of the.us TLD.
Well the world (including the US) was lucky that JP was there and it wasn't just left to morons like you. What was the extent of your conversation with him: "Do you want fries with that"?
But to a child like you, history begins in the 1990's
Yeah, right. All that computer work I did in the 70's must have been a dream. Or, in the case of the COBOL stuff, a nightmare.
For all the little kiddies out there who were still in diapers when the US Gov't did the research, defined the protocols, and funded the construction that BUILT the original internet, here's a clue. The US magnanimously shared its incredible invention witht the rest of the world for the good of mankind.
Fuck off. What asshole modded this bullshit "insightful"? The Internet stopped being a US invention about the time the fourth computer was connected to it. The protocols and systems which make up today's version of that early network are derived from massive amounts of time a research by scientists and engineers from just about every country in the world.
If only the US had been involved in the design of the Internet no one outside of academia would ever have heard of it. If you can't kill people with it America isn't interested in it.
The problem is that experimental results rule out any "reasonable" hidden variables theory!
However the experiments are wrong and it's easy to see why: the cat does know if its alive or dead, just as we know both that we and the cat are alive or dead when the box is opened. The superposition theory assumes a special role for the human observer which is totally unjustified and arbitary. If the experiments can't show that this is the case then that simply means that something is wrong with the experiment, almost certainly it is not testing for the correct thing. I don't know what that "thing" is but I'm sure as hell not going to start beliving in souls just because Bell couldn't pinpoint the flaw.
Kids are the same as adults. No one should have to obey laws they don't like. Democracy is good when it applies other people. etc etc etc./. has a huge blind spot on this issue. If the law banned the sales totally that would be something, but this is a non-issue. Preventing young people from buying extremely violent or pornographic material is not radical, it's not fascist, and it wouldn't even rate as news in any other country, in most of which it is actually understood that parents can't track their children's actions 24/7 or conduct regular searches of their rooms.
What I don't understand is how a judge can be allowed the power to block the will of democratically elected representatives on such a minor issue. When did judges get to decide what laws they like and don't like just by claiming an obviously spurious constitutional connection?
Evidence that Wikipedia is actually doing pretty damn well: the Nature study.
The study that showed that in WP's strongest field (the sciences), it still had 30% more mistakes than a real encyclopaedia and that some of these were both major and basic? That's an endorsement alright!
WP is a bad idea done well. The code is fantastic, the content is worthless. Editing WP articles is a waste of time since you have to come back every day, preferably more than once per day, to fix errors that you already dealt with as well as new ones. That is a plain stupid system and the result is the pile of junk that we see today masquerading as a reference work.
They need to dump the "anyone edits" and have a small team of editors who have some knowledge in their fields and review submissions in those fields. The also desperately need sub-editors who can polish the language to make whatever useful information that is submitted clear.
In other words, if they want to be treated as a real encyclopaedia then they need to act like one.
Well, I'm actually saying that while they may be morally wrong but that we don't have any elected representatives who will pass laws to say that this is "unfair dismissal" and back it up with the police etc. But 2m flaming torches would do too.
idealogical criteria does get the privilege to superceed the constitution.
So if you had someone working for you you posted a blog saying you were a shit boss, you'd just smile and say "you're totally within your rights."?
I think you might tell them to exercise their consitutional rights off your property.
UNALIENABLE rights
There's no such thing. All rights ultimately come from the barrel of a gun and unless you have the biggest gun all your rights are alienable. If American history (and current foreign policy) tells us anything, it tells us that.
The only topics I'd trust Wikipedia for info on are things like zoology,
You must be NUTS! I wouldn't trust it on anything so technical. It's just about passable on TV shows, but anything else and the only point of Wikipedia is if you can't get to a real reference work for some reason.
The bias concerning coverage of the Church of Scientology in particular is utterly appalling.
There are lots of articles like this. The problem is that only one dissenting loon needs to support a view and Wiki's "no point of view" policy means that they are entitled to have their side added to an article. A real editor would introduce bias, of course, no matter how hard s/he tried but at least there would be a pattern to it. Plus, when a real editor fixes a mistake it doesn't just grow back the next day (or minute).
Wikipedia is where bloggers who can't even be bothered blogging go to mouth off.
Slashdot Mirror
!
What are you? Ten years old or something?
Corporations collectively spend billions on lobbying the government to bring in laws to "protect IP rights" specifically so that they can legally initiate force against you. It's called the FBI kicking in your door and seizing your property on the flimsiest of evidence and if you don't think that's force then you're welcome to tell the agents that you refuse to co-operate!
TWW
Not entirely. There is hypocrisy in Gates' actions of copying others and lobbying (successfully) for stonger IP laws knowing that he has the cash to ignore those same laws. It seems fair enough to me to criticise both actions.
TWW
In plants, a "viable breeding population" could be a single fertile individual.
Not if the offspring are sterile.
TWW
Fine talk from someone who's argument was "Me take back MY ball!"
TWW
However there is no agreed method of measuring this so age is the least-worst approximation. Regardless of this, the article and a lot of the /. postings are taking the line that there should be no restrictions other than what parents can enforce by some method of total surveillance. That seems to me to be utterly moronic and unreasonable, not to mention oppressive.
No system is perfect and some innocent people go to gaol and some guilty walk free but is it worth the same effort to prevent a slightly immature person from voting or allow a mature child to vote early as it is to ensure the right people are locked up? Probably not. So, pick an age and dry your eyes; you'll be past that barrier and looking back soon enough. And I say that with the experience of age ;)
TWW
Here's my chain of reasoning:
Number one looks to me impossible given the depth of the man's knowledge and experience with OBL. If he didn't know, no one did.
Number three is a conspiracy theory too far. Not even the most amoral of the NeoCons could stand by in the knowledge that perhaps 50000 Americans were going to be killed. Even if one did someone would blow the wistle.
Therefore, option two is the most likely: the pending attack was regarded as a minor irritant like the previous van bomb in the WTC. It would be allowed to take place because to act on the information would be to break the embargo on investigations into important Saudis.
Unfortunately everyone was wrong, including John O'Neill, about the scale of the attack.
Add to all this the fact that even after the attack the whole Bin Laden family was allowed to leave the US in specially provided planes and you see just how determined someone somewhere was to not rock that particular boat.
People all over the world have been picked up, tortured, imprisoned without trial or charge for years or simply killed because there was a suspicion by someone that they had something to do with Bin Laden. Yet the group of people most likely to know something, to have had some contact with him - his very large family - is allowed to walk out of the US, in fact is carried out of the US with no more than a few hours questioning about what they may know, even simply accidental information which is non-incriminating.
This is all public record. Unless you think O'Neill's widow, friends and colleages are all lying, in which case his action of quitting to lead the WTC security team seems slightly odd, although not outlandish.
That's why I think someone knew the attack was coming - they were told - and why I think they let it happen: they thought it would be shrugged off. They were wrong.
What do you think?
TWW
When talking about cross-breeding species the term is "viable", as in "the resulting offspring can form a viable breeding population".
TWW
That's a different argument from saying there's no line at all.
TWW
I was there and the number of people was clearly much larger than other demonstrations which the police had rated as 750K or even more; the official figure was clearly a substantial underestimate.
Muslim population almost as large as Iraq, a growing number of which are disgruntled, and Islamist extremists.
The increase in Muslim population is no worse or better than an increase in Christian population would be. Religion is bad no matter which one it is. The extremists are being boosted by US policy, a policy which is actually designed to do that and create a new terror threat to replace the old Soviet one. Frightened people are easier to fleece, all politicians knowe that.
Yes, that is simple. Wrong, but simple. The US could buy as much oil as it wanted before the war in Iraq, and it still can.
And so can China. Which is why control of the oil in Iraq was so important. If push comes to shove in the market place the US now has contractual agreements for preferential treatment.
This is not a secret, even if you are unaware of it. Wolfowitz published several articles in the 90's saying that Iraq's oil supply HAD to be secured for the US's "economic wellbeing". Saddam was seen as unreliable but until 9/11 there was no good excuse to go in and kick him out (other than a humanitarian one which he didn't care about). Once 9/11 happened it just needed a bit of fakery to link that with Saddam and in went the troops.
The odd thing is that Wolfy and the rest aren't even ashamed of this deception and are making no efforts to, for example, remove these papers from their websites. They know that people like you will believe any old tosh you're told by your TV; there's no need to be secretive when people won't look for the truth.
What about Viet Nam where the US fought so long in the 1960s?
Terror. It's all about terror. The ruling class of the US realised that Stalin (a true bastard, don't get me wrong) gave them great power over the people of the West due to the terror he generated. Gradually this became too useful to live without. Nam was part of that terror but with the end of the cold war a new terror had to be invented and AlQaeda (a name invented by a US lawyer and unused by islamists for years afterwards) was it. The attack on the WTO was allowed to go ahead because it was thought it would be more useful than stopping it. It turned out the attack was far worse than the car bomb that had been expected but, on the other hand, it was therefore much more useful in generating terror and gave the rulers more power than ever. For example, it let them seize Iraq. Terror has been the basis of US-Gov power over the US people for fifty+ years now, the bogey man has changed and changes but if Bin Laden had not existed he would have been invented.
And by the way, since you might be better placed than I am to comment on this... was the Falklands War about oil too?
In fact, yes. The Falklands sat in one of the biggest untapped gas and oil fields in the world, as well as a major fishery. That's why Argentena cared enough to invade and why the UK cared enough to kick them out.
Power generation is vitally important and becoming more so every day; you will miss a lot of nuances in world affairs if you dismiss it. In fact the security of supply is a legitamte goal of any government; the problem I have with the current approach is the lying about "freedom" and "democracy". If the alliance simply said "We're doing it so we have electricity this winter" then that would be at least an argument.
Here is where I'm stumped.... wouldn't those other countries be even more afraid and servile if they knew how much worse the US really was?
I don't know if you misread what I typed or is wasn't clear but that was in fact what I wa
It may be worth pointing out that the protest march against the Iraq war in the UK was the largest ever recorded in that country and actually consisted of almost 3% of the entire population of the country - men, women and children - travelling to and marching in the capital.
More Europeans will come to see the light as the Islamists continue attacking Europeans in Europe.
Except that we know we've become a target because of the US, who in fact created the whole mess in the first place. Not that Iraq has anything to do with fighting Islamists, since Saddam and the Islamists hated each other's guts. Iraq was about oil, pure and simple.
I'm not sure that counts as alone and mistrusted.
There are countries in Iraq with the US simply because they want share of the oil and are afraid of what the US will do to them politically if they don't support them. The UK is a classic example of this. The populations of those countries mostly hate being involved in this shabby and fake war on terror, but that's mostly because they don't realise just how ruthless the US is when it doesn't get its way. If they did then they would probably agree that a few trillion barrels of oil aren't worth starting a real war over.
The Cuban Missile Crisis, the Bay of Pigs, and then Viet Nam?
The US won the Cuban Missile Crisis, for which we're all very happy. The Bay of Pigs is a historical footnote of no importance and Nam ran on far longer after JFK's death than it did before, so who knows what he might have done different. It's hard to imagine it would have been worse!
Since he wasn't, Americans elected a Harvard MBA, former fighter pilot, and governor as president.
Ie, a drunk liar who's granddaddy got him out of the draft and bought him his governorship, while his brother won him the Presidency with fake fellon lists. An MBA is hardly a sign of great intelligence and GWB has displayed none since he came to power. His cabinet is stuffed with fantasists like Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz and oil barons like Chaney and Rice. To call him incompetent is to display the inadequacies of the English language when faced with truly monumental lack of ability on every conceivable front. No more hopeless or worthless human being has ever besmirched the office of President of the United States. No greater hypocrite has ever wrapped himself in the Flag and Jesus while taking actions so directly opposite to what those stand for. Other than that, he's okay I guess.
We joined this war at the beginning.
That's what happens when you start a war, you tend to be there at the beginning.
I think we are doing fine.
In the sense that the main war aims (oil and terrorising the people of America) are being achieved, then I would have to agree with you.
There is some cause for concern since some Americans are actively working to undermine the war effort.
Yes, reporting law-breaking at the heart of government is practically treason.
What is especially troubling is that it is over a question of policy with a strong legal basis supporting it, as noted by former Clinton Associate Attorney General John Schmidt, and a long history.
Schmidt's reasoning is full of holes and basically boils down to "The president can do anything if he says it's to fight nasty foreigners" and is obvious bullshit. The same reasoning would allow any person in the street to be picked up and locked away forever simply by the president saying he was sure that he was acting as an agent of a foreign power. On the other hand, evidence is mounting that he is actually doing just that so perhaps it's moot anyway. The bottom line is that there are clear and easily understood procedures for what he did which include simple and easily understood systems for acting quickly. He ignored them because, frankly, he doesn't much give a shit about law. His grandpappy never did and neither did his da
The ban is against violent video games, period. It makes no mention of making violent video games legal for children to buy.
You mean apart from the bit that says "The State Senator is proposing legislation that would restrict the sale of video games to minors,"?
TWW
A spokesperson said "It is a basic fact that any adult who says someone under the age of 17 can't do something is a fucking fascist bastard and should be hunted down like a dog."
They added that a more reasonable way of handling any problems parents might have about what material their children are viewing is to follow them around 24 hours a day and engage in random searches of their rooms and clothing. "That's taking your responsibilities seriously and not just handing them over to the Police State", he said.
Next week Ars Technica will be reviewing conversion kits which allow children to operate up to compact-sized cars and discussing plans to "get The Man out of kids' faces" when it comes to driving licencing.
TWW
Well the world (including the US) was lucky that JP was there and it wasn't just left to morons like you. What was the extent of your conversation with him: "Do you want fries with that"?
But to a child like you, history begins in the 1990's
Yeah, right. All that computer work I did in the 70's must have been a dream. Or, in the case of the COBOL stuff, a nightmare.
TWW
Fuck off. What asshole modded this bullshit "insightful"? The Internet stopped being a US invention about the time the fourth computer was connected to it. The protocols and systems which make up today's version of that early network are derived from massive amounts of time a research by scientists and engineers from just about every country in the world.
If only the US had been involved in the design of the Internet no one outside of academia would ever have heard of it. If you can't kill people with it America isn't interested in it.
TWW
However the experiments are wrong and it's easy to see why: the cat does know if its alive or dead, just as we know both that we and the cat are alive or dead when the box is opened. The superposition theory assumes a special role for the human observer which is totally unjustified and arbitary. If the experiments can't show that this is the case then that simply means that something is wrong with the experiment, almost certainly it is not testing for the correct thing. I don't know what that "thing" is but I'm sure as hell not going to start beliving in souls just because Bell couldn't pinpoint the flaw.
TWW
11. Get to be slaves to US policies, laws, and culture.
What I don't understand is how a judge can be allowed the power to block the will of democratically elected representatives on such a minor issue. When did judges get to decide what laws they like and don't like just by claiming an obviously spurious constitutional connection?
TWW
The study that showed that in WP's strongest field (the sciences), it still had 30% more mistakes than a real encyclopaedia and that some of these were both major and basic? That's an endorsement alright!
WP is a bad idea done well. The code is fantastic, the content is worthless. Editing WP articles is a waste of time since you have to come back every day, preferably more than once per day, to fix errors that you already dealt with as well as new ones. That is a plain stupid system and the result is the pile of junk that we see today masquerading as a reference work.
They need to dump the "anyone edits" and have a small team of editors who have some knowledge in their fields and review submissions in those fields. The also desperately need sub-editors who can polish the language to make whatever useful information that is submitted clear.
In other words, if they want to be treated as a real encyclopaedia then they need to act like one.
TWW
Which is pretty well what WP is guilty of: guilding a tower of ignorance with fancy words like "encyclopaedia", for example.
TWW
It's been said, but Wikipedia may not be "humanity's Greatest Working", but it is a "grand experiment."
Actually, it's a "failed experiment".
Except, you know, when it can be cross-referenced with other sources.
The next logical step being to not waste any time on Wikipedia and just go to some reliable sources.
TWW
TWW
Which surely backs up my point that all rights area alienable if you don't have the means to fight for them?
TWW
So if you had someone working for you you posted a blog saying you were a shit boss, you'd just smile and say "you're totally within your rights."?
I think you might tell them to exercise their consitutional rights off your property.
UNALIENABLE rights
There's no such thing. All rights ultimately come from the barrel of a gun and unless you have the biggest gun all your rights are alienable. If American history (and current foreign policy) tells us anything, it tells us that.
TWW
Er, no. Does anyone?
If not, how about the CIA's World Factbook?
Which does say: "Macedonia; note - the provisional designation used by the UN, EU, and NATO is Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM)".
Any group of people can draw a shape on a map and call it anything they like, but what the rest of the world calls it is important too.
TWW
You must be NUTS! I wouldn't trust it on anything so technical. It's just about passable on TV shows, but anything else and the only point of Wikipedia is if you can't get to a real reference work for some reason.
The bias concerning coverage of the Church of Scientology in particular is utterly appalling.
There are lots of articles like this. The problem is that only one dissenting loon needs to support a view and Wiki's "no point of view" policy means that they are entitled to have their side added to an article. A real editor would introduce bias, of course, no matter how hard s/he tried but at least there would be a pattern to it. Plus, when a real editor fixes a mistake it doesn't just grow back the next day (or minute).
Wikipedia is where bloggers who can't even be bothered blogging go to mouth off.
TWW