The peoples of Israel and Palestine have had centuries of time to hate each other. This is a conflict that has been well over 2000 years in progress. Because we support Israel, many over there transfer the same conflict to us. Perhaps you might read the Holy Bible sometime- it documents the source of the conflict in detail and shows why it's not likely to ever go away as long as we're on this Earth.
Perhaps you might put down your Holy Bible and pick up a History Book, and find out that the "Middle East Conflict" around which we all walk so carefully is primarily a land-use, and not an ethnic, issue resulting from the colonialism of European powers [the UK]. In fact, up until the early 20th century and the resurgence of Zionism, semitic peoples, muslim and jew, lived together in mostly amicable, though often separate, enclaves. By arbitrarily, forcefully partitioning the land and then giving control of it to one group, the United Kingdom & other post-WWII powers forced the semites into vehemently opposed ethnic positions. Palestinians lost their homelands, and Israelis were cast into the terrible position of having to wage eternal war on the Palestinians in order to survive. Both sides are the victims of history.
The Bible is a great religious text, but it really disturbs me to know that Christians all assume that it is the only source of information, and so all other knowledge can be discarded.
Of course, if you take the Bible to be the record of Jehovah's covenant[s] with different humans and groups of humans over the last 6000 years, then you already believe that the land east of the Mediterranean was given to the Israelites for all eternity and that no one else has any valid claim to it. It is precisely this poor separation of religious practice and realistic policy that has us supporting Israel financially and militarily, as it practices apartheid in its area.
it's a good measure of both how dependent we have become upon the internet and how woefully inadequate it still is as a large-scale information outlet for important events [things other than pictures of Movie Star Julia Roberts eating her favorite B&J ice cream].
17.40 GMT: It would appear the immediate threat from more terrorist threats is over, although the States has gone into a state of panic. Hundreds of buildings across the US, viewed as possible targets, have been evacuated. All airports have been shut down. Borders shut. The flood of calls into New York has jammed switchboards. Companies are setting staff home early.
One person put the World Trade Center up for sale on eBay but the sick joke was removed almost immediately. News Web sites have started popping back up as the initial demand lifts and the blame seems to have fallen on notorious terrorist Usama Bin Laden.
The number of dead and injured remain impossible to predict except that they will probably be in the thousands. Press conferences are due to take place in the next few hours.
16.37PM GMT Thousands of people are feared dead following suicide plane-crash attacks on the World Trade Center, in New York today.
Twenty-five thousand people were thought to be working in the twin towers of World Trade Center in New York at the time of the kamikaze assaults. Both of the 110-storey towers collapsed within two hours of the onslaught.
A third plane has crashed into the Pentagon, Washington, part of which has collapsed, and a fourth plane has crashed south east of Pittsburgh. A fifth plane is reported to be heading towards Washington DC, according to Sky News.
American Airlines has confirmed that it has lost two planes with a total of 156 people on board, one from Boston and one from Washington DC.
Up to eight airplanes are said to have been hijacked,
US air authorities say that three planes are unaccounted for.
Yasser Arafat has condemned the attacks, but current speculation still puts the blame on Palestianian separatists. All Israeli embassies in the US have been evacuated as has the UK stock exchange. Part of the Pentagon has also collapsed. All civilian planes in the US are grounded.
Net News The incredible spate of terrorist attacks has knocked most the world's news sites off the Internet as people tried to find out the latest news.
CNN has been offline ever since the news that a second plane had crashed into the World trade Center. The BBC has fared little better, which the site now inaccessible. MSNBC was available for a short while but seems to have disappeared as well following the posting of a video of the second plane crashing.
[16.50PM GMT: Most news sites have now put up a simple front page with a list of stories in order to bring themselves back online]
The news that a bomb has gone off just outside the Pentagon and a third explosion near the World Trade Center have only added to the problems. All UK newspaper sites are struggling with demand, working at an incredibly slow rate. Only The Guardian and the FT are offering accessible information as we write.
The World Trade Centre Association Web site has also vanished, and access to any New York Webcams is impossible. Tony Blair has cancelled his speech at the TUC to fly back to London.
The only news sites that seem to have weathered the demand so far are the Press Association's Ananova site and Sky TV's Sky.com, although that too is having trouble now. Ananova reckons eight planes in total have been hijacked. All planes in US airspace have been ordered to land as soon as possible.
It seems that the Internet has failed in its first truly hard test as a news disseminator. The best coverage is coming from the usual TV outlets.
That's my first idea. He seems the most likely suspect.
according to israely news, not Osama Bin Laden but Arafat. is to blame...
Yeah, him or one of those other nappy-headed guys in one of those no-electricity-having countries over there. What I don't understand is, why do all those brown people living in poverty caused by centuries of colonialism and the neo-colonial usury of the IMF, the WHO, and the WTO, and USA-funded Israeli apartheid, want so badly to kill us? it must be something genetic abount being brown, or maybe it's an unexpected amino acid in the Genetically Modified grains our corporations are using legal/financial pressures to force them to grow; or something...
It's not even necessary to say that those responsible need to be hunted down like dogs and killed. I'm really fucking pissed off.
yah, good solution.
Oh, and of course that will only make their family and friends and countrymen and political colleagues hate us the more, so we should kill all of them too.
Oh, and of course mass genocide would spark an outcry, or maybe military action, among the nations who aren't sympathetic to american imperialism and israeli apartheid, so we should overthrow those governments and install leaders who won't attack us.
Oh, and that would cause a bigger outcry among other nations who think, "jeez, if that could happen to those little countries, it could happen to us", so we should suppress their governments as well, and declare a PAX AMERICA and govern wisely, but absolutely -- all to protect our citizens.
Of course, some of our own citizens are just as angry and vengeful as those brown people in other countries, so maybe this quote from ALIENS is the best solution:
"I say we take off, nuke the site from the orbit. It 's the only way to be sure."
In the 10 years since I opened my first Internet email account [bounced once a day through a local BBS], I've been fortunate [or prophylactically paranoid enough] to never have any SPAM problem large enough to be annoying.
However, a co-worker of mine who uses her account much less than I do started to get anywhere from 4-19 porn ads per day on her hotmail account. The "junk mail folder" option helped considerably, but I told her that once she gets on an address list that gets passed around, the best thing to do is just change addresses -- a prospect which isn't really a big deal if you're using free, semi-permanent webmail anyway.
Although I can see the frustration it has caused her, I still think that SPAM is best left to technical, and not legal solutions [yes, I am talking about gray hat vigilantes here], because it's highly probable that the legal structures that would be effective against SPAM would all-too-easily be turned on the rest of us once govs/corps had grown accustomed to their use.
You can't ask a police force to keep your neighborhood crime-free without also creating the certainty that it will discover your "crimes" during its surveillance of your neighbours.
More like you're some loser who gets batted around by your parents/boss/guy who cut you off on the highway and this is your "outlet" for feeling superior to others because you know what ls or grep means. I pity you.
thank you. i salute your insult. however, you have far understated the situation.
i actually have no idea what either "ls" or "grep" means. i do not consider myself a computer geek. i do happen to have a job supporting several workstations, but it is nothing complex enough to warrant a feeling of technological superiority on my part.
instead, my enjoyment of portraying myself as superior is a life-long characteristic that exists irrespective of situation or occupation.
so you see, you could have not only accused me of being a booger-eating, tech-manual reading, quake-tshirt wearing, weak-limbed nerd -- but you could have further deepened the insult by also calling me not even a l33t nerd; just some guy who runs around feeling superior without even any special technical expertise.
whether you believe all this to be true is, of course, purely up to you. in any case, it's irrelevant to my enjoyment of amusing myself at the expense of others, which is precisely what you did in your chastising reply.
"pity" me all you want. 'sokay. i'm still going to consider everyone as fair game for humor.
Your average (ignorant) consumer will find it hard to believe that a slower MHz can actually be faster. Try explaining this to something not familiar with computers.
when dealing with mental midgets, never underestimate the value of a sports analogy:
"two guys are running a race. you notice that they make the same number of strides per second -- that is, their left feet both hit the ground at the same time, and then their right feet both hit at the same time, and then their left feet both hit at the same time.... however, one guy is 6'3" and the other guy is only 5'4". Obviously the taller guy wins because his stride is longer. even though both guys have the same stride rate, one guy's body gets more mileage out of each stride than the other's".
of course, if they're REALLY stupid, they won't understand that one because it doesn't bring in the NFL. so for extreme morons you may have to use the following:
"In the 2000 season, the New Orleans Saints' La'Roi Glover had 53 tackles and 17 sacks [the highest # of sacks for 2000]. Mr. Glover is 6'2" and weighs in at 285 pounds. Now, imagine you, at 5'9" and 176 pounds, are on the Texas side and Mr. Glover is on the Louisiana side of the TX-LA border, both of you are running towards each other at the same speed of 15 mph. If you and Mr. Glover collide right on the TX-LA borderline, where will they bury your body?"
'nuff said.
why everbody always accusing the black man
on
Mob Software
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· Score: 1
Me and Marcus Allen went over to see Nicole
When we heard a knock at the door, must have been Ron Gold'
Jumped behind the door, put the orgy on hold
Killed em both and smeared blood in a white Bronco (we did it!)
They still need votes. But how do they get those votes? That's right. Advertising. Where do they get the money to advertise? Right again. Corporate sponsors. To whom do they owe their allegiance in the end? To the corporations that gave them the money to get into office of course.
dangit, if i wasn't typing with one broken finger i would've posted this first! oh well, i guess i'll have to find some other way to justify my existence than witty blog repartee. [although my post, being non-AC, will make the archives].
You know... I almost wish that were true. That way they'd stop having to try to kiss my ass every November. It would really cut down on the political advertising I have to put up with, maintaining the usual level of idiocy in TV commercials.
er... that's the reason they're owned by the $$$$$-corps in the first place.
see, they need votes, that's you, to get elected to positions of power. they get those votes, again that's you, by running radio/tv spots, printing flyers, ordering yard signs etc, so that you know what a great american they are and how they are fer/agin' whatever you are fer or agin'. they get the money for all this paraphernalia from campaign contributions, such as the $20K checks sent by $$$$$Corp. once they have been elected, they are well-disposed to act favorably towards $$$$$Corp., being very careful to throw the occasional social bones of GettingToughOnCrime or some other fluff bill that won't, you can be sure, conflict with the interests of $$$$$Corp. when this cycle is firmly established, the votes, again that's you, become abstract demographic cattle to be manipulated by propaganda generated with more of $$$$$Corp's money; the elected officials then began to operate more like employees of $$$$$Corp. than public servants.
modern propaganda no longer is concerned with lying to all the people all of the time. modern propaganda has no need to convince all of the people that A is also not-A. modern propaganda does not even need to lie, explicitly. modern propaganda consists of portraying information in so many different ways that one group of people think A is A, one group thinks A is not-A, another group thinks A could be either, and another thinks that A is just another government fabrication anyway so why bother...
the american public in the late eighteenth century did not awaken in righteous anger and throw off the oppressive chains of the United Kingdom. there was no spontaneous consciousness-raising en masse. rather, the intellectuals of the time -- businessmen, public servants, lawyers -- published many persuasive texts over a period of time that provided an ideological foundation upon which vast amounts of human resources could be laid, body stacked upon body, to forcefully settle the argument.
the People, as conceived by dreamy-eyed libertymongers, simply does not exist. the People is a convenient fiction called into being at various times in history to suit the whims of intellectuals [who worship ideas above the People], revolutionaries [who worship violence above the People], and large-scale social forces [which serve the interests of nobody and nothing save survival probabilities]. the People is variously hardworking, honest, stupid, delusional, downtrodden, longsuffering, lazy, avaricious, hopeless, helpless, heartless, and directionless. the People is a blind golem. it knows neither what it wants nor how best to obtain the few things it can coherently conceive. numberless infinities of cells flake off your body and die every day as part of natural functioning. oppression, genocide, deception -- these are operational processes of the Body Politic which you idolize so zealously.
there will be no Great Awakening of the American Public.
Re:Who ese is getting tageted? (Score:2, Interesting) by Chakat (chakat@fuckhumanity.spamandibiteyou.org) on Monday July 02,
@07:52AM CST (#51)
Re:Who ese is getting tageted? (Score:1)
by Chakat (chakat@fuckhumanity.spamandibiteyou.org) on Monday July 02,
@09:24AM CST (#124) Quite all right. Sometimes I wish there was a remote control for life where I could pause life so I could get a few extra hours sleep, or rewind an especially dreadful monday so I could fix those faux pas I've made.
your computer has a built-in reclaim-your-life remote control function. it's called the On/Off button. log off/.; push the button; close your eyes; awaken later feeling refreshed and whole once more.
And after the fall of rome, it took humanity a millenium to get back to the point they were at before rome started becoming corrupt.
I sincerely hope we're not in for such a waste of time yet again.
broadband = less time per incident
on
Virtual Addiction
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· Score: 2
i've had cable for almost two years, and it's been my experience that it actually decreases my time spent on the web, especially time per incident.
as opposed to dialup, i no longer feel like i need to visit every page i possibly can right then -- i can be in the middle of reading, chatting, submitting a form, whatever... and stop to go rotate laundry loads or pop bread in the toaster and then just come back whenver i'm done.
and since each page is loading faster, i spend less time sitting there doing little ghost-circles with the mouse, waiting for it to load. meaning, i get in, scan the page i want, follow a few links, scan them, and after 15-20 minutes i've caught up. then, if none of the new items really caught my eye, i go read a book or play with the dogs or whatever.
while i depend upon the web for more information -- movie times, directions, etc. -- there are more individual incidences like i may be working through an emulated game and pause it to go check something on gamefaqs.com, and then go right back to the game, but overall broadband has made spend LESS time online than I did with dialup.
of course, individual results may vary.
digital infrastructure costs money. hope won't help send money .
i've been a donor to my local PBS/NPR affiliate for three years -- i started out at $30 and can now afford $120.
it's PER YEAR, people. like, a dime a day.
your hope is worth less than nothing, because it falsely assuages your conscience without doing anything to solve the problem.
slashdot is a relatively good place for hearing about certain stories that won't get covered by ABCTIMEWARNERMSNBC.COM. But networks like NPR are invaluable to disseminating in-depth cultural, financial, scientific information [instead of everything being standard soundbytes, stories/issues get anywhere from brief to a full day of coverage.
your money is your vote. please cast your vote for Public Broadcasting, even if it's only a few bucks.
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self-reinforcing helplessness
on
Noir
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· Score: 1
i would posit that violence is not endemic to our society, but rather that it is endemic to our culture -- books, movies, tv programming, music.
modern sensational journalism has ruinously distorted our picture of the world, making us afraid of our own neighbors.
this in turn stimulates the deterioration of community behaviors, which does promote people to feel helpless and lawless.
i would like to rest the blame for this cycle of fear, uncertainty, and doubt squarely on the media that depend upon it for their job security.
I've had hotmail accounts since before MS bought them, and what finally made me stop using it [as someone has already mentioned, they never really delete you, they just put your info offline after awhile -- which is one of the important issues: how much inactivity constitutes your release from the TOS?], was when they started pushing MSN IM, so that every time I sent a message to anyone, the confirmation page pleads:
"1 Person wants to exchange instant messages with you. Download MSN Messenger NOW!!!"
I know my friends well enough to know that if it was one of them, they would have just emailed me to say so. I created a completely new account and sent an email back to myself... Sure enough, "1 Person wants to exchange instant messages with you!!"
dickheads.
And while we're griping about MS, it REALLY pisses me off that they've apparently decided that Outlook Express is "essential to the Windows Operating System" just like Internet Explorer, because I upgraded a machine to Win2k yesterday just to see what the differences were, if any, and I discovered that OE can't be removed by any conventional means.
I'm wondering how they would try to convince the Justice Department that OE was part of the core OS? Microsoft VP: "So, as the court can see, we have discarded the old, inconvenient drag-and-drop file copying in favor of our new innovative system of using Outlook Express to email attached files between folders and drives. It's an inseparable part of our Windows Operating System!"
The problem is that I don't provide, and don't want to provide, email on my mini-net. But there it sits anyway, unnecessary bloat.
Gee. Thanks guys.
heheh, even the Dallas Morning News ran an article about AYBABTU as a "new, hot internet craze" on the front page of their "Texas Living" section...
last week.
this is why i get almost all my news online -- i like the reporting of 'news' to at least occur during the same calendar year as when the event itself occurs.
I'm not sure which Bible you're reading, Bungie, but it must be one of those New Testament + Psalms hotel-drawer versions, because each of the thirty-or-so bibles in my house contains ample description of the orgiastic genocidal pleasure exhibited by God throughout history.
Example: Numbers 33:50-53
[When the Hebrews were coming from Egypt to Canaan, a land well inhabited in the many generations of their absence] Then the Lord spoke unto Moses saying, "Speak to the sons of Israel and say to them, 'When you cross over the Jordan into the land of Canaan, then you shall drive out all the inhabitants of the land from before you, and destroy all their molten images and demolish all their high places; and you shall take possession of the land and live in it, for I have given the land to you to possess it.'"
Deuteronomy 7 is simmering with the juicy sentiments of ethnic cleansing:
When the LORD thy God shall bring thee into the land whither thou goest to possess it, and hath cast out many nations before thee, the Hittites, and the Girgashites, and the Amorites, and the Canaanites, and the Perizzites, and the Hivites, and the Jebusites, seven nations greater and mightier than thou;
And when the LORD thy God shall deliver them before thee; thou shalt smite them, and utterly destroy them; thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor shew mercy unto them:
Neither shalt thou make marriages with them; thy daughter thou shalt not give unto his son, nor his daughter shalt thou take unto thy son.
For they will turn away thy son from following me, that they may serve other gods: so will the anger of the LORD be kindled against you, and destroy thee suddenly... ...For thou art an holy people unto the LORD thy God: the LORD thy God hath chosen thee to be a special people unto himself, above all people that are upon the face of the earth... ...And thou shalt consume all the people which the LORD thy God shall deliver thee; thine eye shall have no pity upon them: neither shalt thou serve their gods; for that will be a snare unto thee.
That sounds worthy of a Sieg Heil or two doesn't it?
"But that's just the Old Testament!!" I hear you saying. "Jesus taught tolerance and brotherhood!"
"Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword. For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law.
And a man's foes shall be they of his own household.
He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.
" Matthew 10:34-37
Not exactly the nappy-headed peacenik from sunday school flannel-graph display boards is he?
Now don't those people deserve some kind of compensation for this?
Moral Philosophy says that all people have rights and responsibilities. Ethics tries to decide whose rights and responsibilities are more important in a given situation. To answer your question: Yes the pharm corps do deserve some kind of compensation. But the people whose bodies are disintegrating under the onslaught of AIDS and ARC deserve life more.
Think about authors of books. An author could spend months or years working on a specific book. Most authors, AFAIK (anyone comment?) do not get paid by the hour for work they spend on a book. Sure, most books sell for more than they paper they are printed on. Does this then make it moral to photocopy or OCR/distribute multiple copies of a book just because the publisher is "ripping people off"? What about the author who could be trying to make a living for himself and his family, where every little bit helps?
Whether your 8-year-old gets to read Harry Potter for free/reduced cost is wholly different from whether your 8-year-old dying of AIDS gets to live long enough to read the sequel.
Please don't get me wrong, I do realize if companies are selling things for "oo-gobs" of money then they are just trying to exploit the consumer. But the very nature of capitalism makes it so that it is in the best interests of any supplier to keep prices at a reasonable level, so that the consumer will want to purchase their good.
The original post was about an AIDS cure. This is incomparable to the normal supply/demand relationships of the average luxury item like movies, CDs, cigarettes, etc. Charging high prices for a product with a guaranteed [and medically essential] demand may not be exploitative in every case, but it is certainly something that merits very careful scrutiny.
Consider a corporation that produces an AIDS cure, patents it, and sells it for oo-gobs of money which would make it difficult for those from poorer countries to get a hold of it. Now imagine that somehow you were able to figure out a way that people with the right materials could create the cure on their own without as much cost.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps you might put down your Holy Bible and pick up a History Book, and find out that the "Middle East Conflict" around which we all walk so carefully is primarily a land-use, and not an ethnic, issue resulting from the colonialism of European powers [the UK]. In fact, up until the early 20th century and the resurgence of Zionism, semitic peoples, muslim and jew, lived together in mostly amicable, though often separate, enclaves. By arbitrarily, forcefully partitioning the land and then giving control of it to one group, the United Kingdom & other post-WWII powers forced the semites into vehemently opposed ethnic positions. Palestinians lost their homelands, and Israelis were cast into the terrible position of having to wage eternal war on the Palestinians in order to survive. Both sides are the victims of history.
The Bible is a great religious text, but it really disturbs me to know that Christians all assume that it is the only source of information, and so all other knowledge can be discarded.
Of course, if you take the Bible to be the record of Jehovah's covenant[s] with different humans and groups of humans over the last 6000 years, then you already believe that the land east of the Mediterranean was given to the Israelites for all eternity and that no one else has any valid claim to it. It is precisely this poor separation of religious practice and realistic policy that has us supporting Israel financially and militarily, as it practices apartheid in its area.
it's a good measure of both how dependent we have become upon the internet and how woefully inadequate it still is as a large-scale information outlet for important events [things other than pictures of Movie Star Julia Roberts eating her favorite B&J ice cream].
From The Register:
Yeah, him or one of those other nappy-headed guys in one of those no-electricity-having countries over there. What I don't understand is, why do all those brown people living in poverty caused by centuries of colonialism and the neo-colonial usury of the IMF, the WHO, and the WTO, and USA-funded Israeli apartheid, want so badly to kill us? it must be something genetic abount being brown, or maybe it's an unexpected amino acid in the Genetically Modified grains our corporations are using legal/financial pressures to force them to grow; or something...
yah, good solution.
Oh, and of course that will only make their family and friends and countrymen and political colleagues hate us the more, so we should kill all of them too.
Oh, and of course mass genocide would spark an outcry, or maybe military action, among the nations who aren't sympathetic to american imperialism and israeli apartheid, so we should overthrow those governments and install leaders who won't attack us.
Oh, and that would cause a bigger outcry among other nations who think, "jeez, if that could happen to those little countries, it could happen to us", so we should suppress their governments as well, and declare a PAX AMERICA and govern wisely, but absolutely -- all to protect our citizens.
Of course, some of our own citizens are just as angry and vengeful as those brown people in other countries, so maybe this quote from ALIENS is the best solution:
In the 10 years since I opened my first Internet email account [bounced once a day through a local BBS], I've been fortunate [or prophylactically paranoid enough] to never have any SPAM problem large enough to be annoying.
However, a co-worker of mine who uses her account much less than I do started to get anywhere from 4-19 porn ads per day on her hotmail account. The "junk mail folder" option helped considerably, but I told her that once she gets on an address list that gets passed around, the best thing to do is just change addresses -- a prospect which isn't really a big deal if you're using free, semi-permanent webmail anyway.
Although I can see the frustration it has caused her, I still think that SPAM is best left to technical, and not legal solutions [yes, I am talking about gray hat vigilantes here], because it's highly probable that the legal structures that would be effective against SPAM would all-too-easily be turned on the rest of us once govs/corps had grown accustomed to their use.
You can't ask a police force to keep your neighborhood crime-free without also creating the certainty that it will discover your "crimes" during its surveillance of your neighbours.
More like you're some loser who gets batted around by your parents/boss/guy who cut you off on the highway and this is your "outlet" for feeling superior to others because you know what ls or grep means. I pity you.
thank you. i salute your insult. however, you have far understated the situation.
i actually have no idea what either "ls" or "grep" means. i do not consider myself a computer geek. i do happen to have a job supporting several workstations, but it is nothing complex enough to warrant a feeling of technological superiority on my part.
instead, my enjoyment of portraying myself as superior is a life-long characteristic that exists irrespective of situation or occupation.
so you see, you could have not only accused me of being a booger-eating, tech-manual reading, quake-tshirt wearing, weak-limbed nerd -- but you could have further deepened the insult by also calling me not even a l33t nerd; just some guy who runs around feeling superior without even any special technical expertise.
whether you believe all this to be true is, of course, purely up to you. in any case, it's irrelevant to my enjoyment of amusing myself at the expense of others, which is precisely what you did in your chastising reply.
"pity" me all you want. 'sokay. i'm still going to consider everyone as fair game for humor.
c-ya
Why do /. ers like to insult people who aren't programmers or engineers or in some tech related field?
...because we can.
when dealing with mental midgets, never underestimate the value of a sports analogy:
of course, if they're REALLY stupid, they won't understand that one because it doesn't bring in the NFL. so for extreme morons you may have to use the following:
'nuff said.
[although my post, being non-AC, will make the archives].
see, they need votes, that's you, to get elected to positions of power.
they get those votes, again that's you, by running radio/tv spots, printing flyers, ordering yard signs etc, so that you know what a great american they are and how they are fer/agin' whatever you are fer or agin'.
they get the money for all this paraphernalia from campaign contributions, such as the $20K checks sent by $$$$$Corp.
once they have been elected, they are well-disposed to act favorably towards $$$$$Corp., being very careful to throw the occasional social bones of GettingToughOnCrime or some other fluff bill that won't, you can be sure, conflict with the interests of $$$$$Corp.
when this cycle is firmly established, the votes, again that's you, become abstract demographic cattle to be manipulated by propaganda generated with more of $$$$$Corp's money; the elected officials then began to operate more like employees of $$$$$Corp. than public servants.
when did UID#s hit 500k?!?!
talk about immanitizing the eschaton!
modern propaganda no longer is concerned with lying to all the people all of the time. modern propaganda has no need to convince all of the people that A is also not-A. modern propaganda does not even need to lie, explicitly. modern propaganda consists of portraying information in so many different ways that one group of people think A is A, one group thinks A is not-A, another group thinks A could be either, and another thinks that A is just another government fabrication anyway so why bother...
the american public in the late eighteenth century did not awaken in righteous anger and throw off the oppressive chains of the United Kingdom. there was no spontaneous consciousness-raising en masse. rather, the intellectuals of the time -- businessmen, public servants, lawyers -- published many persuasive texts over a period of time that provided an ideological foundation upon which vast amounts of human resources could be laid, body stacked upon body, to forcefully settle the argument.
the People, as conceived by dreamy-eyed libertymongers, simply does not exist. the People is a convenient fiction called into being at various times in history to suit the whims of intellectuals [who worship ideas above the People], revolutionaries [who worship violence above the People], and large-scale social forces [which serve the interests of nobody and nothing save survival probabilities]. the People is variously hardworking, honest, stupid, delusional, downtrodden, longsuffering, lazy, avaricious, hopeless, helpless, heartless, and directionless. the People is a blind golem. it knows neither what it wants nor how best to obtain the few things it can coherently conceive. numberless infinities of cells flake off your body and die every day as part of natural functioning. oppression, genocide, deception -- these are operational processes of the Body Politic which you idolize so zealously.
there will be no Great Awakening of the American Public.
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i've had cable for almost two years, and it's been my experience that it actually decreases my time spent on the web, especially time per incident.
as opposed to dialup, i no longer feel like i need to visit every page i possibly can right then -- i can be in the middle of reading, chatting, submitting a form, whatever... and stop to go rotate laundry loads or pop bread in the toaster and then just come back whenver i'm done.
and since each page is loading faster, i spend less time sitting there doing little ghost-circles with the mouse, waiting for it to load. meaning, i get in, scan the page i want, follow a few links, scan them, and after 15-20 minutes i've caught up. then, if none of the new items really caught my eye, i go read a book or play with the dogs or whatever.
while i depend upon the web for more information -- movie times, directions, etc. -- there are more individual incidences like i may be working through an emulated game and pause it to go check something on gamefaqs.com, and then go right back to the game, but overall broadband has made spend LESS time online than I did with dialup.
of course, individual results may vary.
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digital infrastructure costs money.
hope won't help
send money . i've been a donor to my local PBS/NPR affiliate for three years -- i started out at $30 and can now afford $120.
it's PER YEAR, people. like, a dime a day.
your hope is worth less than nothing, because it falsely assuages your conscience without doing anything to solve the problem.
slashdot is a relatively good place for hearing about certain stories that won't get covered by ABCTIMEWARNERMSNBC.COM. But networks like NPR are invaluable to disseminating in-depth cultural, financial, scientific information [instead of everything being standard soundbytes, stories/issues get anywhere from brief to a full day of coverage.
your money is your vote. please cast your vote for Public Broadcasting, even if it's only a few bucks.
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i would posit that violence is not endemic to our society, but rather that it is endemic to our culture -- books, movies, tv programming, music.
modern sensational journalism has ruinously distorted our picture of the world, making us afraid of our own neighbors.
this in turn stimulates the deterioration of community behaviors, which does promote people to feel helpless and lawless.
i would like to rest the blame for this cycle of fear, uncertainty, and doubt squarely on the media that depend upon it for their job security.
of course, we all eagerly consume those media...
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so we can't say those things on tv or radio, and yet the government can put them up on a public webpage that doesn't require age authentication?
explain this censorship thing to me again, i must be missing something...
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I've had hotmail accounts since before MS bought them, and what finally made me stop using it [as someone has already mentioned, they never really delete you, they just put your info offline after awhile -- which is one of the important issues: how much inactivity constitutes your release from the TOS?], was when they started pushing MSN IM, so that every time I sent a message to anyone, the confirmation page pleads:
"1 Person wants to exchange instant messages with you. Download MSN Messenger NOW!!!"
I know my friends well enough to know that if it was one of them, they would have just emailed me to say so. I created a completely new account and sent an email back to myself... Sure enough, "1 Person wants to exchange instant messages with you!!"
dickheads.
And while we're griping about MS, it REALLY pisses me off that they've apparently decided that Outlook Express is "essential to the Windows Operating System" just like Internet Explorer, because I upgraded a machine to Win2k yesterday just to see what the differences were, if any, and I discovered that OE can't be removed by any conventional means.
I'm wondering how they would try to convince the Justice Department that OE was part of the core OS?
Microsoft VP: "So, as the court can see, we have discarded the old, inconvenient drag-and-drop file copying in favor of our new innovative system of using Outlook Express to email attached files between folders and drives. It's an inseparable part of our Windows Operating System!"
The problem is that I don't provide, and don't want to provide, email on my mini-net. But there it sits anyway, unnecessary bloat.
Gee. Thanks guys.
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heheh, even the Dallas Morning News ran an article about AYBABTU as a "new, hot internet craze" on the front page of their "Texas Living" section...
last week.
this is why i get almost all my news online -- i like the reporting of 'news' to at least occur during the same calendar year as when the event itself occurs.
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I'm not sure which Bible you're reading, Bungie, but it must be one of those New Testament + Psalms hotel-drawer versions, because each of the thirty-or-so bibles in my house contains ample description of the orgiastic genocidal pleasure exhibited by God throughout history.
Example: Numbers 33:50-53
[When the Hebrews were coming from Egypt to Canaan, a land well inhabited in the many generations of their absence]
Then the Lord spoke unto Moses saying,
"Speak to the sons of Israel and say to them, 'When you cross over the Jordan into the land of Canaan,
then you shall drive out all the inhabitants of the land from before you, and destroy all their molten images and demolish all their high places;
and you shall take possession of the land and live in it, for I have given the land to you to possess it.'"
Deuteronomy 7 is simmering with the juicy sentiments of ethnic cleansing:
When the LORD thy God shall bring thee into the land whither thou goest to possess it, and hath cast out many nations before thee, the Hittites, and the Girgashites, and the Amorites, and the Canaanites, and the Perizzites, and the Hivites, and the Jebusites, seven nations greater and mightier than thou;
And when the LORD thy God shall deliver them before thee; thou shalt smite them, and utterly destroy them; thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor shew mercy unto them:
Neither shalt thou make marriages with them; thy daughter thou shalt not give unto his son, nor his daughter shalt thou take unto thy son.
For they will turn away thy son from following me, that they may serve other gods: so will the anger of the LORD be kindled against you, and destroy thee suddenly...
That sounds worthy of a Sieg Heil or two doesn't it?
"But that's just the Old Testament!!" I hear you saying. "Jesus taught tolerance and brotherhood!"
"Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword.
For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law.
And a man's foes shall be they of his own household.
He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. " Matthew 10:34-37
Not exactly the nappy-headed peacenik from sunday school flannel-graph display boards is he?
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To answer your question: Yes the pharm corps do deserve some kind of compensation. But the people whose bodies are disintegrating under the onslaught of AIDS and ARC deserve life more.
Whether your 8-year-old gets to read Harry Potter for free/reduced cost is wholly different from whether your 8-year-old dying of AIDS gets to live long enough to read the sequel.
The original post was about an AIDS cure. This is incomparable to the normal supply/demand relationships of the average luxury item like movies, CDs, cigarettes, etc. Charging high prices for a product with a guaranteed [and medically essential] demand may not be exploitative in every case, but it is certainly something that merits very careful scrutiny.
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Imagine?
Imagine?
No need to Imagine
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