"Eurotech" "Technology for a better world" "Zypad"
Why should we believe people who'd name a company after "Euro" and "tech"? "Euro" is so 90s, and "tech" is more a 60s through 80s thing. And the idea that "Zy" (or anything beginning with "Z" or "X") is sexy? Right out of the 50s (although currently enjoying a revival in pharmeceuticals). And that company slogan - belongs back in the 40s somewhere.
From these clues, a good guess would be "fraud whose real aim in attracting foolish investors." Folks who really have the imagination to invent a great gadget also, far more often than not, have the imagination to name their company and gadget something that either means something specific - to help market it - or that at least stands out from the cliches. The last thing someone who's invented something unique wants is to be confused with all the me-too corporations out there; but for someone committing the same old scam of luring in investors, being confused with a thousand other "Euro" or "tech" or "better world" companies can be just the ticket.
The faults of youth are retained along with the virtues, he believes. These include short attention span, sensation and novelty-seeking, short cycles of arbitrary fashion and a sense of cultural shallowness.
This is a bizarre list. In my fifties now, I can recall as a teenager having a much longer attention span. For instance, if I began reading a book in the evening I'd often stay up through most of the night to finish it. I don't do that any more. Sometimes I'll get that focused on a programming problem - but the young have all the advantage in attention span there too.
Cultural shallowness? Most cultural depth comes from youth. Many of the greatest works of the greatest classical composers were achieved while they were young. And all of the great musical advances and inventions of the 60s - aside from those of Ornette Coleman and Miles Davis - were accomplished by people in their twenties - many of whom had encyclopedic knowledge of the musics they were extending from.
Short cycles? Sure, invention can move quickly. But arbitrary fashion? Are long-cycle fashions less arbitrary? Should we more respect the whale-bone corsette than bell bottoms on boys? Were the centuries of wearing powdered wigs more "mature" than the several years of goatees and mullets?
And are we better off in life with no sensation? Would this psychiatrist prefer we were all comfortably numb? Figures. But I'd hardly call his the "mature" approach.
Private firms, if the system is kept competitive, will not share their data with competitors, past a certain level of detail. If you have a history of not paying debts, they'll share that. But if you are a particularly good prospect, as compared to a bad one, they'll tend to hoard that information - selling it if they can to companies which don't compete with them, but never sharing it with their direct competitors. And those private firms have as their chief, often only, goal to sell you something. Now, it's true, if they sell you credit, to a small extent they own you - they own a slice of your future income.
Governments, by contrast, don't have to sell you anything. They get to take the money through taxation regardless of whether you're inclined to buy the services they offer. So they already own a slice of your future income. When they mine data they're after something more than that. Their ultimate goal, insofar as possible, is to own you outright.
It all comes down to who you're more threatened by, a salesman or a cop? The companies either rate you as worthy of a sales call, or not; the government rates you as worthy of a fine, imprisonment, or death, or not.
The people who are most opposed to overseas sweatshops are in the US labor movement, which has long been at the forefront of efforts to improve labor conditions abroad. Granted, this is in no small part because better labor conditions abroad result in US workers being more competitive, since those conditions make offshore labor more expensive. But the stereotype that it is primarily upscale, "liberal," Volvo drivers who care about workplace conditions (or environmental health, or a whole range of other issues) is utter bullshit propogated by those with a vested interest in employing foreign labor in near-slave conditions, while also radically reducing wages and benefits for workers still employed in the US. A large proportion of those who drive Volvos come precisely from this ownership class. And much of the opposition to neo-slavery comes from those who drive used Toyotas and Fords.
It's all about the 72 virgins. Who would commit jihad to get 72 virgins if he could get 72 virgins right here on Earth? Why go to another world to get your reward if you can get the same reward here, and not have to give up ties to your mother and buddies who are still living?
(Shit, I just Googled "jihad virgins" 'cause I couldn't remember the number. Am I in trouble now?)
Yup, as someone who's been using PHP in production environments including NY financial firms since about version 0.9, and MySQL along with it for nearly as long, I'm still using Apache 1 and PHP 4. Why? Because Apache 1 has had considerably fewer security problems of late than Apache 2, and while it runs much better on Windows has little real advantage on Linux. And PHP 4, while it has required security updates in parallel with PHP 5 lately, is still actively maintained and does the job solidly. So why worry about updating script syntax when for 5 it's all working pretty damn well in 4?
Is my code bad? I'm no ace coder but PHP does functions well. My code is well modularized and readable, even parts I haven't had to update in years still make sense when I come back to them. PHP seems to do OO well enough too, but OO isn't my style, so I just deal with that for the few things where I piggyback on others' programming. Would I use MySQL to handle transactions? No. We use other DBs for those, and custom programs rather than Web frontends for our clients. The Web itself just isn't that robust - and Apache 1 and PHP 4 (and upwards) are plenty good for what the Web is good for.
We're drifting off topic, but the national unemployment rate doesn't take into account the number of discouraged workers, who have simply given up looking, which has got to be at an all time high because the number of new jobs created under Bush has consistently been lower than the number just to keep up, on a percentage basis, with the increase in population. Plus the median wages under Bush have not even kept up with inflation - after making real advances under Clinton for the first time since the sixties. Meanwhile the economy has kept going only by household debt raising to unprecidented heights, just as Bush has run the national debt to heights never seen before.
Okay, to come back to topic: We're really out on a limb here. Either we Americans will innovate our way out of the debt hole we've collectively dug under Bush's leadership, or we're going to see another Great Depression, as the dollar falls violently against other currencies (the Asians are already tiring of propping it up by buying our debt), and personal bankruptcies multiply as mortgages become unpayable. Most people who lose jobs now only find new jobs that pay much less. The only thing that can save us (aside from not electing any more Bushes) is radical economic innovation, of the sort we saw in the 90s before the Enron-style hucksters got ahold of it and milked the boom. And the only way to promote that innovation is to keep the Net neutral, and control of the economy away from the dinosaur-like old-line megacorps (particularly in communications and energy and banking) which have done so much to push us towards the precipice we risk falling over.
Hate to break it to you, but it wasn't Verizon. It was outfits like Global Crossing and Metromedia Fiber and so on, most of whom built out much too fast and then went belly up. Their investors and creditors paid for that fiber. Now a lot of it has been bought up by Verizon (and, apparently, Google) at pennies on the dollar. Verizon's gotten it almost free, most all of it is laid through public right-of-way. So you're saying because they've had this windfall in fiber capacity (most of which they've held off the market so far) they deserve a further windfall in being able to monopolize their sectors of the Internet?
Note when it was built the business plan was to make model under the old, network neutral, model. It was never an investment towards a proprietary net.
The top scores for eighth grade are North Dakota, Montana, Vermont and New Hampshire. Something must be leaking over the Canadian border (which they all share). What are the requirements for becoming a province?
these programs have bi-partisan Congressional oversight - but only by the security committee
Until last week not even the full committees were briefed on these programs, just the top person from each party. And Sen. Rockefeller - one of the people briefed - believed the program was seriously illegal but couldn't say anything about that, even to other senators, under penalty of law. That's "oversight"?!
Half of the people have an IQ less than 100
Not meaningfully true. It's a bell curve distribution where something like half the people have an IQ so close to 100 that it's within the margin of error. So 3/4ths of the people are of average or higher intelligence. And anecdotally (say, talking with strangers in bars) I can vouch that people with average intelligence can understand reasonably complex political arguments, operate reasonably complex machinery, handle basic math, and so on - and for those who can't it's a matter of education, not aptitude. The understanding of the importance of freedom is something that resonates particularly strongly with many average people. The "They don't really value freedom, so we might as well not 'give' it to them" argument is the worst sort of aristocratic nonsense - nonsense the Bush neo-cons have fallen for, which will be the cause of their fall.
Better than 40% of the common people repeatedly tell pollsters they already want Bush impeached for this stuff - despite no support in either the media or from most of the opposition party for the concept of impeachment.
Now we can as well say that Chimps are descended from humans! (Nice ethical quandry, that.) The new hypothesis is not just that chimps and humans have a common ancestor, but that even after the split you'd have a chimp breed with a human, producing a mule that, while it could not breed with other mules, could breed with either a human (in which case the human children have one chimp grandparent) or a chimp (in which case the chimp children have one human grandparent). Which kinda explains my mother in law.
Some of the discussion is in terms of quality of service traffic shaping versus net neutrality. But they are different things. You can implement QoS in a neutral way, for instance by treating streaming video differently than e-mail. Streaming video needs continuous throughput to work well; e-mail works just as well in sporadic packets. So setting your Cisco to treat the two differently enhances the one without cost to the other. It's, in real terms, neutral.
But if you set your Cisco to give better QoS to verizonporn.com streams, and to make the streams from qwestadult.com choppy (presumably because you're Verizon, or have been paid by them) that's not neutral.
Traffic shaping where different classes of packets are given different routing preferences should not be restricted by law - within reason it improves the Net for everyone. Traffic shaping where the origin of the packets causes them to be treated differently is not neutral, not "common carrier," and should be totally illegal.
An ipod you can download the exact songs you want when you want them. Satellite radio you'd have to wait for the song to come up again to record it. Since satellite radio doesn't even cycle the same songs around again as quickly as broadcast radio, if you really want to sit there waiting to grab a particular song off satellite, you'll have to wait longer than you would to record it off broadcast.
And if you have satellite radio that timeshifts, isn't it the case that it's recording whole segments of shows, not segmenting them by individual song? And it has no way to extract individual songs for later, ipod-like replay?
XM would be totally, totally stupid not to follow this through - they just win it so easily.
Those complaining about Walmart are really complaining about capitalism itself.
This is bull, because there are a great many other retailers, large and small, who maintain better practices towards both their employees and their customers than Wal-Mart does, and work continuously to improve those practices. Check out Costco, which pays about twice what Wal-Mart does and makes better profits than Wal-Mart's comparable Sam's Club. Costco is the exception though, in being able to beat Wal-Mart on its own turf. That's because Wal-Mart outcompetes most firms by (1) forcing unpaid overtime, (2) avoiding providing health insurance, (3) giving one-year lucrative contracts to Chinese factories, then the next year, when the factories have made large investments in plant to produce for Wal-Mart, sharply cutting the prices offerred for their production. Oh, and Wal-Mart was busted for not just using illegal aliens to clean its stores, but for often locking them in overnight.
The rest of retailing hates Wal-Mart not just because of its competitive threat, but because it competes underhandedly, illegally, unethically. It's not just people who are "anti-capitalist" or "anti-American" who hate Wal-Mart - the rest of our retailing firms are not populated by un-American socialists.
According to some research consciousness is something that comes *after* the rest of your brain already made the choice. So you can't do anything consciously to begin with.
You're talking about Libet's well-known research, and mischaracterizing it. In his experiment people have already decided to move their arm, in cooperation with the researcher's request, at a "random" time. They're also watching a clock on a computer screen, and are to push a button at the time that they are aware of making the choice to move their arm. Meanwhile Libet is monitoring what he interprets as a "readiness potential" at a certain location in the brain, which is a good predictor of moving your arm. The finding is that the potential is there before the subject reports awareness of the volition relative to the clock. However, Libet also found that people can successfully decide not to move their arms even after the readiness potential was in evidence. These findings are still much debated. But what they do not show is anything about the efficacy of complex, conscious deliberations.
without defining "free" there is no way to talk about it in a meaningfull way
You're working from an old, bogus notion in philosophy that we must "define our terms" before we can talk about anything. It's a failed program. Terms don't get meaning that way. Rather, terms get meaning from context, and from overlay ("blending" is the technical term in modern cognitive linguistics) with other contexts. There are few if any things that we can define (1) without context, and (2) without being in some sense circular. Yet there are a great many things we can talk about in a meaningful way - although it depends who we're talking to. Still, most all of us know, from our contexts in life, what freedom is, and what it is to will something to happen. That you can befuddle yourself about what these words mean is nice; but we can befuddle ourselves about any word if we just repeat it to ourselves a few hundred times. And that's basically the whole trick about demanding a definition before allowing a discussion to proceed - with every repeated demand you're moving the word closer to that temporarily alienated state. But, since that can be done with any word, what you've done is just on the level of a psychological illusion, not a revelation of the ill-defined meaninglessness of whatever word you've targeted.
If you honestly believe you're not free, there are a number of things you might as well stop doing:
1. Why do you consciously try to deliberate over any choices? If you are not free, that effort you're putting forth - to the extent, you know, that you have decided to try to deliberate, is at best an epiphenomenal waste. So why not save the effort? On the one hand, that epiphenomenal sense of your own agency can't really do anything in the physical world, right? On the other, for the epiphenomenal to exist it must be draining energy from the actually useful parts of the brain, which might be able to run their deterministic algorithm better if you weren't shunting that energy into the appearance of phenomenal consciousness, with its illusion of free agency and all that. So why not just give it up?
2. The next time you blame your girlfriend or boyfriend or boss for anything, why bother? After all, they have no freedom in what they do. It was all determined from the beginning of time (if not before). So why not just give it up?
3. When others of us say that we believe - no, we know that we are free agents, in ways that are beyond Newtonian causal physics (although not beyond some interpretations of quantum theory, e.g. Henry Stapp's or Roger Penrose's), it is absolutely determined that we will be saying these things. You could not possibly persuade us to freely change our minds through conscious deliberation on these questions. So why not just give it up?
What these experiments may show is that the weights of particular desires are represented in particular cells in particular regions. Did you think, for instance, that thirst wouldn't be represented somewhere in the brain? What they don't (and probably can't) show is that it is merely a certain "weight" of thirst, balanced against certain "weights" of other desires, that results in action in some deterministic way. Think of it like a dashboard. There's a certain "weight" of the gas running low, a certain "weight" of the speed you're going, a certain "weight" of the oil light coming on, and even the "weight" of how many miles are on the vehicle. None of these prevent your free operation of the wheel and pedals (until the gas runs out, or a cop stops you, or the engine blows a rod, or the transmission falls on the road). Why should a dashboard in the mind representing how thirsty you are, how horny you are, how clever you think you are with your doubting of the common sense about our freedom... why should the mere presense of any of these representations in physical instantiation imply any diminishment of your capacity to will? I'd rather say the more representations on the dashboard, the more the driver is freely in control.
Someone quick go out and patent the camera/cell phone that instantly transmits every image taken to the government. It might optionally prevent the picture-taker from making any use of the images until the government had cleared them for civillian use. A software skin-tone filter can send any pictures which may contain nakedness onward to special government offices, where employees with hands down their pants can judge if those images arouse their "purient interest." Integrated GPS will allow immediate apprehension of the photographers and their subjects. Subjects deemed to have been "willing" can be drafted for national service, either in the baby factories, or building the morale of our troops, or both.
You're assuming that someone "pro-business" will favor an Intel monopoly, while someone who isn't "pro-business" will favor a level playing field on which AMD (and others) can fairly compete with Intel. So here we are, in a time and place where business is supposed to be capitalist and capitalism is supposed to both thrive on and require free competition, yet it seems like a reasonable thing (to at least some of us) to say that the "pro-business" course is actually the one where competition is stifled and monopoly imposed - even though every business person who does not currently enjoy a monopoly (that is, most of us) will tell you that monopolies are very bad things indeed.
Pro-monopoly, when pushed far enough, is indifferentiable from communism. You thought we'd gotten rid of that, right?
There are various wind farms being opposed in Vermont, the most currently notable of which is proposed for a former radar base on top of a remote mountain which already has a road up it to the base. In more populous parts of the state (which is the most rural in population distribution of any state), a totally assinine outfit calling itself the Glebe Mountain Group had been running seriously dishonest advertisements in all the local papers claiming that due to energy credits wind power generation just enables more coal generation elsewhere, so is bad for the environment. They also lie and claim that intermittency means that wind has no real effect in reducing generation needs from other sources. They'll say anything, and their refrain is always that they're revealing the "facts" the the evil, "corporate" people are hiding - totally perverse considering these idiots almost entirely consist of retired corporate hacks and their various whores.
Is anyone appreciating that this isn't a simple substitution cypher? Let's say you get the string:
"211720125" - just checking it for substitution doesn't tell you where to break the numbers. Is it the "2" on the front end that matches a letter? Or the "21"? Or even the "211"? Then what does the next number consist of? 1? 11? 17? 170? 720? Only if you surmise that any 1 or 2 includes the next digit, and only that next digit, does it become a simple substitution.
1. The US plans include using bunker-busting nukes. So what little international goodwill we have left will be gone for a generation.
2. Iran's planned response involves international terrorist capabilities our intelligence agencies rate as much greater than al Qeda's ever was. So there will be major losses in US and other population centers (which those other nations' peoples will blame on the US nuclear attack on Iran).
At that point, given the "terrorist threat" having flared up into actual, massive retaliatory attacks, American politics will enter into seriously fascist territory, especially if Cheney manages to set this all off before the next elections -- whose odds of actually ever happenning will then approach zero.
The problem's like this: There's an inverse relationship between corruption and overall, long-term, culture-wide profitability. Yeah, somebody usually manages to get rich even in the most corrupt places. But it's a far smaller proportion that manages it. And even armored cars and bodyguards don't prevent the kidnappings and assasinations that go along with that sort of culture.
Do you really think Western Europe and North America would be better off if our business cultures fully embraced the models of Nigeria and Russia?
I don't want the FCC or Congress telling me what I can and cannot see or do online. Fuck them and the horse they rode in on.
Was going to make some joke about whether you'd put this horse fucking online, but then got totally grossed out by the image of the fucking also involving the members of Congress.
Slashdot Mirror
What amount of plastic explosives can this robot carry? What's its range?
..." BOOM!
"Oh look Mommy, a cute
"Eurotech" "Technology for a better world" "Zypad"
Why should we believe people who'd name a company after "Euro" and "tech"? "Euro" is so 90s, and "tech" is more a 60s through 80s thing. And the idea that "Zy" (or anything beginning with "Z" or "X") is sexy? Right out of the 50s (although currently enjoying a revival in pharmeceuticals). And that company slogan - belongs back in the 40s somewhere.
From these clues, a good guess would be "fraud whose real aim in attracting foolish investors." Folks who really have the imagination to invent a great gadget also, far more often than not, have the imagination to name their company and gadget something that either means something specific - to help market it - or that at least stands out from the cliches. The last thing someone who's invented something unique wants is to be confused with all the me-too corporations out there; but for someone committing the same old scam of luring in investors, being confused with a thousand other "Euro" or "tech" or "better world" companies can be just the ticket.
This is a bizarre list. In my fifties now, I can recall as a teenager having a much longer attention span. For instance, if I began reading a book in the evening I'd often stay up through most of the night to finish it. I don't do that any more. Sometimes I'll get that focused on a programming problem - but the young have all the advantage in attention span there too.
Cultural shallowness? Most cultural depth comes from youth. Many of the greatest works of the greatest classical composers were achieved while they were young. And all of the great musical advances and inventions of the 60s - aside from those of Ornette Coleman and Miles Davis - were accomplished by people in their twenties - many of whom had encyclopedic knowledge of the musics they were extending from.
Short cycles? Sure, invention can move quickly. But arbitrary fashion? Are long-cycle fashions less arbitrary? Should we more respect the whale-bone corsette than bell bottoms on boys? Were the centuries of wearing powdered wigs more "mature" than the several years of goatees and mullets?
And are we better off in life with no sensation? Would this psychiatrist prefer we were all comfortably numb? Figures. But I'd hardly call his the "mature" approach.
Private firms, if the system is kept competitive, will not share their data with competitors, past a certain level of detail. If you have a history of not paying debts, they'll share that. But if you are a particularly good prospect, as compared to a bad one, they'll tend to hoard that information - selling it if they can to companies which don't compete with them, but never sharing it with their direct competitors. And those private firms have as their chief, often only, goal to sell you something. Now, it's true, if they sell you credit, to a small extent they own you - they own a slice of your future income.
Governments, by contrast, don't have to sell you anything. They get to take the money through taxation regardless of whether you're inclined to buy the services they offer. So they already own a slice of your future income. When they mine data they're after something more than that. Their ultimate goal, insofar as possible, is to own you outright.
It all comes down to who you're more threatened by, a salesman or a cop? The companies either rate you as worthy of a sales call, or not; the government rates you as worthy of a fine, imprisonment, or death, or not.
About those "upscale Volvo-driving fans":
The people who are most opposed to overseas sweatshops are in the US labor movement, which has long been at the forefront of efforts to improve labor conditions abroad. Granted, this is in no small part because better labor conditions abroad result in US workers being more competitive, since those conditions make offshore labor more expensive. But the stereotype that it is primarily upscale, "liberal," Volvo drivers who care about workplace conditions (or environmental health, or a whole range of other issues) is utter bullshit propogated by those with a vested interest in employing foreign labor in near-slave conditions, while also radically reducing wages and benefits for workers still employed in the US. A large proportion of those who drive Volvos come precisely from this ownership class. And much of the opposition to neo-slavery comes from those who drive used Toyotas and Fords.
It's all about the 72 virgins. Who would commit jihad to get 72 virgins if he could get 72 virgins right here on Earth? Why go to another world to get your reward if you can get the same reward here, and not have to give up ties to your mother and buddies who are still living?
(Shit, I just Googled "jihad virgins" 'cause I couldn't remember the number. Am I in trouble now?)
Yup, as someone who's been using PHP in production environments including NY financial firms since about version 0.9, and MySQL along with it for nearly as long, I'm still using Apache 1 and PHP 4. Why? Because Apache 1 has had considerably fewer security problems of late than Apache 2, and while it runs much better on Windows has little real advantage on Linux. And PHP 4, while it has required security updates in parallel with PHP 5 lately, is still actively maintained and does the job solidly. So why worry about updating script syntax when for 5 it's all working pretty damn well in 4?
Is my code bad? I'm no ace coder but PHP does functions well. My code is well modularized and readable, even parts I haven't had to update in years still make sense when I come back to them. PHP seems to do OO well enough too, but OO isn't my style, so I just deal with that for the few things where I piggyback on others' programming. Would I use MySQL to handle transactions? No. We use other DBs for those, and custom programs rather than Web frontends for our clients. The Web itself just isn't that robust - and Apache 1 and PHP 4 (and upwards) are plenty good for what the Web is good for.
We're drifting off topic, but the national unemployment rate doesn't take into account the number of discouraged workers, who have simply given up looking, which has got to be at an all time high because the number of new jobs created under Bush has consistently been lower than the number just to keep up, on a percentage basis, with the increase in population. Plus the median wages under Bush have not even kept up with inflation - after making real advances under Clinton for the first time since the sixties. Meanwhile the economy has kept going only by household debt raising to unprecidented heights, just as Bush has run the national debt to heights never seen before.
Okay, to come back to topic: We're really out on a limb here. Either we Americans will innovate our way out of the debt hole we've collectively dug under Bush's leadership, or we're going to see another Great Depression, as the dollar falls violently against other currencies (the Asians are already tiring of propping it up by buying our debt), and personal bankruptcies multiply as mortgages become unpayable. Most people who lose jobs now only find new jobs that pay much less. The only thing that can save us (aside from not electing any more Bushes) is radical economic innovation, of the sort we saw in the 90s before the Enron-style hucksters got ahold of it and milked the boom. And the only way to promote that innovation is to keep the Net neutral, and control of the economy away from the dinosaur-like old-line megacorps (particularly in communications and energy and banking) which have done so much to push us towards the precipice we risk falling over.
Hate to break it to you, but it wasn't Verizon. It was outfits like Global Crossing and Metromedia Fiber and so on, most of whom built out much too fast and then went belly up. Their investors and creditors paid for that fiber. Now a lot of it has been bought up by Verizon (and, apparently, Google) at pennies on the dollar. Verizon's gotten it almost free, most all of it is laid through public right-of-way. So you're saying because they've had this windfall in fiber capacity (most of which they've held off the market so far) they deserve a further windfall in being able to monopolize their sectors of the Internet?
Note when it was built the business plan was to make model under the old, network neutral, model. It was never an investment towards a proprietary net.
The top scores for eighth grade are North Dakota, Montana, Vermont and New Hampshire. Something must be leaking over the Canadian border (which they all share). What are the requirements for becoming a province?
these programs have bi-partisan Congressional oversight - but only by the security committee
Until last week not even the full committees were briefed on these programs, just the top person from each party. And Sen. Rockefeller - one of the people briefed - believed the program was seriously illegal but couldn't say anything about that, even to other senators, under penalty of law. That's "oversight"?!
Half of the people have an IQ less than 100
Not meaningfully true. It's a bell curve distribution where something like half the people have an IQ so close to 100 that it's within the margin of error. So 3/4ths of the people are of average or higher intelligence. And anecdotally (say, talking with strangers in bars) I can vouch that people with average intelligence can understand reasonably complex political arguments, operate reasonably complex machinery, handle basic math, and so on - and for those who can't it's a matter of education, not aptitude. The understanding of the importance of freedom is something that resonates particularly strongly with many average people. The "They don't really value freedom, so we might as well not 'give' it to them" argument is the worst sort of aristocratic nonsense - nonsense the Bush neo-cons have fallen for, which will be the cause of their fall.
Better than 40% of the common people repeatedly tell pollsters they already want Bush impeached for this stuff - despite no support in either the media or from most of the opposition party for the concept of impeachment.
Now we can as well say that Chimps are descended from humans! (Nice ethical quandry, that.) The new hypothesis is not just that chimps and humans have a common ancestor, but that even after the split you'd have a chimp breed with a human, producing a mule that, while it could not breed with other mules, could breed with either a human (in which case the human children have one chimp grandparent) or a chimp (in which case the chimp children have one human grandparent). Which kinda explains my mother in law.
Some of the discussion is in terms of quality of service traffic shaping versus net neutrality. But they are different things. You can implement QoS in a neutral way, for instance by treating streaming video differently than e-mail. Streaming video needs continuous throughput to work well; e-mail works just as well in sporadic packets. So setting your Cisco to treat the two differently enhances the one without cost to the other. It's, in real terms, neutral.
But if you set your Cisco to give better QoS to verizonporn.com streams, and to make the streams from qwestadult.com choppy (presumably because you're Verizon, or have been paid by them) that's not neutral.
Traffic shaping where different classes of packets are given different routing preferences should not be restricted by law - within reason it improves the Net for everyone. Traffic shaping where the origin of the packets causes them to be treated differently is not neutral, not "common carrier," and should be totally illegal.
An ipod you can download the exact songs you want when you want them. Satellite radio you'd have to wait for the song to come up again to record it. Since satellite radio doesn't even cycle the same songs around again as quickly as broadcast radio, if you really want to sit there waiting to grab a particular song off satellite, you'll have to wait longer than you would to record it off broadcast.
And if you have satellite radio that timeshifts, isn't it the case that it's recording whole segments of shows, not segmenting them by individual song? And it has no way to extract individual songs for later, ipod-like replay?
XM would be totally, totally stupid not to follow this through - they just win it so easily.
By US law any cell phone can dial 911 - even if it's not paid up. But a disconnected land line is ... disconnected.
There are groups that distribute old cell phones to people who may need to make emergency calls but can't afford to pay for the capability.
Those complaining about Walmart are really complaining about capitalism itself.
This is bull, because there are a great many other retailers, large and small, who maintain better practices towards both their employees and their customers than Wal-Mart does, and work continuously to improve those practices. Check out Costco, which pays about twice what Wal-Mart does and makes better profits than Wal-Mart's comparable Sam's Club. Costco is the exception though, in being able to beat Wal-Mart on its own turf. That's because Wal-Mart outcompetes most firms by (1) forcing unpaid overtime, (2) avoiding providing health insurance, (3) giving one-year lucrative contracts to Chinese factories, then the next year, when the factories have made large investments in plant to produce for Wal-Mart, sharply cutting the prices offerred for their production. Oh, and Wal-Mart was busted for not just using illegal aliens to clean its stores, but for often locking them in overnight.
The rest of retailing hates Wal-Mart not just because of its competitive threat, but because it competes underhandedly, illegally, unethically. It's not just people who are "anti-capitalist" or "anti-American" who hate Wal-Mart - the rest of our retailing firms are not populated by un-American socialists.
According to some research consciousness is something that comes *after* the rest of your brain already made the choice. So you can't do anything consciously to begin with.
You're talking about Libet's well-known research, and mischaracterizing it. In his experiment people have already decided to move their arm, in cooperation with the researcher's request, at a "random" time. They're also watching a clock on a computer screen, and are to push a button at the time that they are aware of making the choice to move their arm. Meanwhile Libet is monitoring what he interprets as a "readiness potential" at a certain location in the brain, which is a good predictor of moving your arm. The finding is that the potential is there before the subject reports awareness of the volition relative to the clock. However, Libet also found that people can successfully decide not to move their arms even after the readiness potential was in evidence. These findings are still much debated. But what they do not show is anything about the efficacy of complex, conscious deliberations.
without defining "free" there is no way to talk about it in a meaningfull way
You're working from an old, bogus notion in philosophy that we must "define our terms" before we can talk about anything. It's a failed program. Terms don't get meaning that way. Rather, terms get meaning from context, and from overlay ("blending" is the technical term in modern cognitive linguistics) with other contexts. There are few if any things that we can define (1) without context, and (2) without being in some sense circular. Yet there are a great many things we can talk about in a meaningful way - although it depends who we're talking to. Still, most all of us know, from our contexts in life, what freedom is, and what it is to will something to happen. That you can befuddle yourself about what these words mean is nice; but we can befuddle ourselves about any word if we just repeat it to ourselves a few hundred times. And that's basically the whole trick about demanding a definition before allowing a discussion to proceed - with every repeated demand you're moving the word closer to that temporarily alienated state. But, since that can be done with any word, what you've done is just on the level of a psychological illusion, not a revelation of the ill-defined meaninglessness of whatever word you've targeted.
If you honestly believe you're not free, there are a number of things you might as well stop doing:
... why should the mere presense of any of these representations in physical instantiation imply any diminishment of your capacity to will? I'd rather say the more representations on the dashboard, the more the driver is freely in control.
1. Why do you consciously try to deliberate over any choices? If you are not free, that effort you're putting forth - to the extent, you know, that you have decided to try to deliberate, is at best an epiphenomenal waste. So why not save the effort? On the one hand, that epiphenomenal sense of your own agency can't really do anything in the physical world, right? On the other, for the epiphenomenal to exist it must be draining energy from the actually useful parts of the brain, which might be able to run their deterministic algorithm better if you weren't shunting that energy into the appearance of phenomenal consciousness, with its illusion of free agency and all that. So why not just give it up?
2. The next time you blame your girlfriend or boyfriend or boss for anything, why bother? After all, they have no freedom in what they do. It was all determined from the beginning of time (if not before). So why not just give it up?
3. When others of us say that we believe - no, we know that we are free agents, in ways that are beyond Newtonian causal physics (although not beyond some interpretations of quantum theory, e.g. Henry Stapp's or Roger Penrose's), it is absolutely determined that we will be saying these things. You could not possibly persuade us to freely change our minds through conscious deliberation on these questions. So why not just give it up?
What these experiments may show is that the weights of particular desires are represented in particular cells in particular regions. Did you think, for instance, that thirst wouldn't be represented somewhere in the brain? What they don't (and probably can't) show is that it is merely a certain "weight" of thirst, balanced against certain "weights" of other desires, that results in action in some deterministic way. Think of it like a dashboard. There's a certain "weight" of the gas running low, a certain "weight" of the speed you're going, a certain "weight" of the oil light coming on, and even the "weight" of how many miles are on the vehicle. None of these prevent your free operation of the wheel and pedals (until the gas runs out, or a cop stops you, or the engine blows a rod, or the transmission falls on the road). Why should a dashboard in the mind representing how thirsty you are, how horny you are, how clever you think you are with your doubting of the common sense about our freedom
Someone quick go out and patent the camera/cell phone that instantly transmits every image taken to the government. It might optionally prevent the picture-taker from making any use of the images until the government had cleared them for civillian use. A software skin-tone filter can send any pictures which may contain nakedness onward to special government offices, where employees with hands down their pants can judge if those images arouse their "purient interest." Integrated GPS will allow immediate apprehension of the photographers and their subjects. Subjects deemed to have been "willing" can be drafted for national service, either in the baby factories, or building the morale of our troops, or both.
You're assuming that someone "pro-business" will favor an Intel monopoly, while someone who isn't "pro-business" will favor a level playing field on which AMD (and others) can fairly compete with Intel. So here we are, in a time and place where business is supposed to be capitalist and capitalism is supposed to both thrive on and require free competition, yet it seems like a reasonable thing (to at least some of us) to say that the "pro-business" course is actually the one where competition is stifled and monopoly imposed - even though every business person who does not currently enjoy a monopoly (that is, most of us) will tell you that monopolies are very bad things indeed.
Pro-monopoly, when pushed far enough, is indifferentiable from communism. You thought we'd gotten rid of that, right?
There are various wind farms being opposed in Vermont, the most currently notable of which is proposed for a former radar base on top of a remote mountain which already has a road up it to the base. In more populous parts of the state (which is the most rural in population distribution of any state), a totally assinine outfit calling itself the Glebe Mountain Group had been running seriously dishonest advertisements in all the local papers claiming that due to energy credits wind power generation just enables more coal generation elsewhere, so is bad for the environment. They also lie and claim that intermittency means that wind has no real effect in reducing generation needs from other sources. They'll say anything, and their refrain is always that they're revealing the "facts" the the evil, "corporate" people are hiding - totally perverse considering these idiots almost entirely consist of retired corporate hacks and their various whores.
... well, me.
Meanwhile, Vermont is getting most of its energy from a vibrating nuclear plant and Hydro Quebec dams, which have flooded large areas of Native American land and release massive amounts of mercury from the flooded soils. Yeah, fucking Vermont, home of
Is anyone appreciating that this isn't a simple substitution cypher? Let's say you get the string:
"211720125" - just checking it for substitution doesn't tell you where to break the numbers. Is it the "2" on the front end that matches a letter? Or the "21"? Or even the "211"? Then what does the next number consist of? 1? 11? 17? 170? 720? Only if you surmise that any 1 or 2 includes the next digit, and only that next digit, does it become a simple substitution.
You miss two important factoids:
1. The US plans include using bunker-busting nukes. So what little international goodwill we have left will be gone for a generation.
2. Iran's planned response involves international terrorist capabilities our intelligence agencies rate as much greater than al Qeda's ever was. So there will be major losses in US and other population centers (which those other nations' peoples will blame on the US nuclear attack on Iran).
At that point, given the "terrorist threat" having flared up into actual, massive retaliatory attacks, American politics will enter into seriously fascist territory, especially if Cheney manages to set this all off before the next elections -- whose odds of actually ever happenning will then approach zero.
The problem's like this: There's an inverse relationship between corruption and overall, long-term, culture-wide profitability. Yeah, somebody usually manages to get rich even in the most corrupt places. But it's a far smaller proportion that manages it. And even armored cars and bodyguards don't prevent the kidnappings and assasinations that go along with that sort of culture.
Do you really think Western Europe and North America would be better off if our business cultures fully embraced the models of Nigeria and Russia?
I don't want the FCC or Congress telling me what I can and cannot see or do online. Fuck them and the horse they rode in on.
Was going to make some joke about whether you'd put this horse fucking online, but then got totally grossed out by the image of the fucking also involving the members of Congress.