during the launch of the fascist American nation, illustrates through fiction, corruption in government, how to weed it out and create a functioning, healthy system of rule by the people?
And the voice box of American propaganda had it chopped?
Color me surprised, cuz I'm certainly not going to look shocked without face paint.
My guess is that Firefly was killed similarly for the Anti-Government message it traded on with every second episode.
Remember: Television was not invented to entertain and inform you. McLuhan was bang-on; "The medium IS the message." --That is, the medium is a flickering box which dilutes family cohesion and lulls people into a hypnotic state where the implanting of selected thought patterns is very easy. Ponder that message!)
Some people are so scared of the world hurting them that they feel the need to control every last inch of it.
If you don't give a cat the freedom to roam about, it will turn into a lazy and/or mentally ill indoor cat. I see this all the time. Compare any 'house' cat from the city with any outdoor cat in the country, and the difference is immediately obvious.
Freedom, Death and Danger are good teachers. If a people can't deal with this, then they should reconsider trying to 'own' a cat. --Cities are horrible places for all kinds of animal, except humans choose to live in cities. Cats and dogs are held prisoner by selfish/ignorant humans who are in the middle of learning lessons about freedom, emotional attachment and social control. This often takes several lives to get right.
To let your cat roam free is to be on the right path.
To lose your marbles and blame the world for killing your cat, is to slip and fall while walking the right path. (Receive without grace an important lesson about freedom.)
Controlling people with lasers is no better than keeping a cat locked up for life inside a one-bedroom apartment. People must be given the free range within which to live and get hurt and act without grace, or they will never learn anything and remain little better than mentally ill carpet ornaments.
Well, I suppose it's been demonstrated that Texans don't need as much mircowave numbing as the rest of the country in order to fall for the predatorial ploys of psychopathic political and business leaders.
Perhaps you should find a hobby other than trolling.
Define 'Trolling'.
I am discussing ideas and asking questions which are of genuine interest to me in a forum which has users well-versed in some of the language necessary to explore those ideas in a useful way.
The problem with much of Western culture is that if an idea or question happens to make people feel uncomfortable, they call it a 'Troll' (or something similar); they refuse to think about it. Exploring reality is fun! Pushing the envelope of what we perceive is fun!
We are living under the strictures of a real-time, false reality made of fake fronts and foolish lies which most of the population idly believe and structure their lives around from birth to death, never realizing just how astonishing and beautiful/terrifying the world really is. Anybody who bothers to do even the most minimal amount of honest research will recognize that not everything is as it appears. --Think of it as being in one of those Twilight Zone or Star Trek episodes where, "Something Isn't Right". Everybody thinks that they'd be the one with enough integrity and grit to be able to pick up on the signs and do the right and courageous thing.
Occam's razor says the government is too fucking incompetent to cover up proof of alien visitation.
Unfortunately, the public is so eager to accept a 'safe' version of reality that they will bend over backwards to look the other way when the government drops the ball, as they do on a very regular basis.
Two of the news stories you cite are at odds with each other. The first says the photographer gave NASA the photos and would not release a public version until NASA scientists had time to go over the data. The second claims that NASA "siezed" the photos and banned the first news source from publishing them. Finally, even the rense article didn't start wildly speculating about ET.
One of the best ways to obfuscate the path of research is to release many conflicting stories of varying degrees of foolishness.
You will notice that in most of these types of story, confusing and conflicting details are nearly always present, and they are very effective, as you have shown, in shutting down personal inquiry.
I'm sad that I just wasted 5 minutes of my life on this stupidity.
Perhaps it would be wise to spend somewhat more than five minutes of your life questioning things rather than looking for the easy way out.
Why is it invariably the unemployed that have nothing better to do than rave about alien conspiracies... Geez, man, get a job, get some education, and grow your brain.
Interesting perspective. . . (Though I would hardly call myself unemployed and uneducated.)
You could also say it this way:
"Why is it invariably those who are caught up within the exhausting distractions of life have so little ability to observe and question the true nature of their world?"
Pounding away at a ridiculous 50-hour a week job, then slumping down in front of the TV in the evenings doesn't leave much time or energy, (if any), for the real Work of understanding oneself and the world.
Grow my brain? That's the whole point. (Well, my mind, anyway.) --I would strongly recommend you do the same.
Do you really believe in all these alternative theories (who shot JFK, who killed 3,000 people in the World Trade Center, did aliens crash in Roswell, did an energy beam knock down the shuttle- y'know, b/c foam at 22-23 mph couldn't do it-, etc.), or do you just post them for fun to see the reaction of the community?
That question cannot be answered without a fair bit of qualification.
There are a LOT of false and mis-leading theories out there. So No, I do not believe in all of them. However, I DO believe that in virtually every instance where this kind of material comes up, that the 'official positions' presented by the big media, government, etc., are chief among the false and mis-leading stories.
It takes very little research to realize this. The next question is, "So then what really IS going on?"
That is not an easy question to answer, and I've made many mistakes along the way. Most of the links you posted to my past efforts no longer reflect my current thinking. --I have found that one of the most difficult tasks is having the strength to recognize when I have made a mistake and to re-direct inquiries and continue building the most accurate picture of reality possible. The ego must be left behind if one is to become clear, which is why the ego is attacked so mercilessly in forums like Slashdot.
In the end, though, I am not worried about myself. I know that I have the ability to look and think and adapt. The ones who would do well to be concerned are those who use ridicule to fortify their perspectives. Those who use ridicule as a weapon, must also fear it. This leads to entrapment.
Foam tiling, or shot down? I've visited this question before, and I did a very half-assed job of presenting the 'Shot down' argument at the time. Since then, I've put various ducks in a row and rather than working from faulty memory, did the proper research. So here we go again. ..
1. NASA public relations and the media presented a very tight argument for falling insulation damage being the culprit in the Columbia disaster. --Historical evidence was presented from the NASA archives purporting that previous missions of both the Columbia and other shuttles had shown some limited damage to heat tiles resulting from foam insulation falling from the fuel tanks. The speculation and arguments were that a larger piece of foam striking in a certain way could cause a critical failure of the heat shielding.
2. Despite the recommendation by NASA engineers during the mission that the foam insulation strike in question did not pose a problem and that the mission was in no danger, the conclusion was reversed after the disaster and subsequent investigation.
3. In doing follow-up on this whole story, I ran across this curious item about a photographer who was shooting the Columbia as it first started to break up. He captured an image of an energy bolt striking the Columbia followed by a series of pictures showing a flash and the break-up.
The photographer was an electrical engineer who works for Sparks defense contractor Sierra Nevada Corp. He was at the time also a volunteer at the Fleischmann Planetarium at the University of Nevada, Reno. He captured his images of the shuttle from the Fleischmann facility.
This is a brief description of his video according to an article in the RENO GAZETTE-JOURNAL;
Peering up at the southern sky, he caught what appears to be some sort of explosion as Columbia re-entered the Earth's atmosphere. He did not realize that he might have caught the first visual evidence of trouble aboard the space shuttle until he went back inside and watched the tape on his big-screen television. Moments later, he watched the National Aeronautics and Space Administration television channel and realized the shuttle was gone.
There is no mention of the energy strike in this article; the reason I included it here was in part to show the value of his film. If you read the article, you can see that NASA sent a letter thanking him for what were considered to be valuable images which indeed showed the earliest stages of the break-up. --This article also seems important to me because these were apparently the images which came directly after the first frame which showed an energy bolt striking the shuttle. Why the energy bolt was not mentioned at all in the article seems very curious to me.
So anyway. . . What we have right now are two stories. The first is the big media story which broadcast the NASA claims regarding the incident; a piece of foam caused damage to heat tiles, which in turn resulted in a critical failure.
The second story is one which comes from two sources; a channeled source claiming an energy weapon was used to shoot down the Columbia, and a photograph of an energy bolt actually striking the shuttle just before it broke up.
So which is more likely. . ?
One:The U.S. Government can be counted on to not fabricate stories, and that NASA's own engineers who originally said the foam strike did
the work window doesn't auto re-size when I use the magnification tool. (They started doing this around version 6 or 7.)
Man, that drives me crazy! STOP trying to think FOR me, dammit! I don't want ANY auto features if I can't switch them off. I know how big I want my work window, so stop changing it according to some ill-inspired whim of whatever chief Adobe designer happened to be sprouting 'decisions' that week.
If I wanted my machine to treat me like a child, I'd use safety-scissors, mittens would dangle on strings from the sleeves of my winter coat, my Mom would still dress me and I'd have bought an Apple.
Their instruction manuals are insane. --Of course, I bought my main copy of PS way back when it was still on version 4, so perhaps this has changed.
The manuals were definitely written by aliens. From a Douglas Adams novel.
They actually had repeating loops:
Step 1. Do this.
Step 2. Do that.
Step 3. Go to page 80 and follow steps 4 through 7.
Step 6 on page 80 sends you back to step 2 on the original page. Endless loop, and you still don't know what the hell is going on.
Photoshop took me over three months to figure out enough just to do my job, and another year before I was confident with the lesser used aspects of it. But once you nail down the Ass-Hat dialect of Martian the guys at Adobe use, it's a simple enough program.
What? Are you under a dictatorship and nobody told me? Can't you vote them out of office?
No. The voting system is rigged at the psychological level.
When people are a bunch of mind-controlled brain slugs, then it is very easy to make them 'choose' that which is not good for them. Controlling populations through a host of on-going and very effective techniques, from drugs and television and religion, to the very manner in which society itself has been built, establishes the illusion of a democratic system when really nothing could be further from the truth. --And when mind-control is not enough, then there are always ways of ensuring that the systems give up the desired results. The last U.S. election offered prime example of some of these methods. (Unless one is of of the camp that no mis-doings were in evidence.)
Democracy is an illusion. People are cattle. Yes, it's true that on a deep level, this is as they choose to be, but it doesn't make me content to play along just because my soul-sleeping neighbors are willing to be slaughtered.
I'll keep yelling about this, but I'll be abandoning ship when the critical time comes, and everybody left aboard can drown as they will.
Christ was quoted as saying once, "Wide is the road that leads to destruction, and thousands walk it every day. Narrow is the path that leads to Life, and few follow it." (Or words to that effect.)
-FL
Re:Bezos or Bozos?
on
Book 'Em, Dano
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I'd agree except for the fact that more than half of the politicians are crooks and more than half of the civil servants are lazy, over-paid fools.
If it were a fair system, I'd have the option of saying, "No thanks. I don't want to buy the services you are selling." Tax is no different than paying protection money. I'll be physically punished if I decide not to.
The Government is the only body allowed to shoot me 'legally'. And they have nearly all the guns anyway. It's a total racket, and voluntarily paying taxes and pretending that it's the right thing to do is almost entirely an act of denial. The sad truth is that the Government is a sham designed to dull-down, enslave and bleed the populace.
An interesting note. . . In my country, (Canada), one of the biggest personal tax-dodgers (to the tune of millions), is the current prime minister. Hipocricy? You bet. --And nobody has the balls to do anything about it. At the same time, on parliament hill last year a cadre of the highest ranking ministers granted themselves a pay raise putting their take home pay at over $100,000 each. There was no way to vote against this.
People who proudly pay tax are self-deluding chumps who don't want to admit they're being raped.
At what desk in the editorial process does the brain damage occur?
I would think that the condition should be easily detectable. --A medical professional should be hired to follow the process of making a screen play proposal along its natural path. Each time somebody says, "No, No! The public doesn't want a screen play written in close parallel to an amazingly popular book which was practically written in movie format to begin with! No! Listen to my small ego! Listen to MEEEE! We have to completely change things around!"
Then simply have the brain-damaged individual put all of his desk things into a cardboard box and walk him kindly to the exit.
Repeat the process until all the brain damage has been detected and burned away, (fired).
The practice of medicine and film making ought to naturally go hand in hand, I think.
He was quoted as saying it is rediculous that copyright could ever run out on a living author. I decided not to read any more of his books after that.
The whole original point of copyright is to make sure the author is able to make a living from his or her work. Once the author is dead, then sure, copyright should end, but until then, I don't understand your point. Particularly when in old age, earning new income can become harder to do.
The time between the writing of a book and the author's death is often shorter than fifty years anyway.
EM radiation at power levels far lower than are able to cause ionization damage can still have a significant impact on brain chemistry. Look up Cyclotronic Resonance. --The cell phone industry would like very much for people to believe that damage can only happen through one vector and they work hard to promote that idea and then discount it. There are far more complex issues at hand than whether or not microwaves can burn something. The brain is an electrochemical organ.
Penn and Teller are not nearly as wise as they believe.
In the original, when using the word processor, the screen would automatically jump up about five lines whenever the cursor came within a certain distance of the bottom of the screen.
I found this feature disorienting and irritating, and while I could understand the pupropse behind it, I really wanted to be able to turn it off and just have non-intelligent scrolling. This is not a small thing! Typing and scrolling are what Word Processing is 90% about. If the process of making and reading through documents is not comfortable, then it's a big, big deal.
--After realizing that it was not possible to shut off this feature, I uninstalled OO and threw my lot in with Abiword, which scrolls like any regular text editor with no jarring jumps in what is displayed on the screen.
I do think, however, that it would be useful to have an integrated office suite. Does the new version of OO offer control over the way the text scrolling system works?
Man. The high, high-speed of tech development sure seems pretty normal when you're in the middle of it.
Three-thousand years of steppe farming and then WHAM, Steam Engines. Nukes. Donkey Kong. (The atom bomb pre-dates Mario. Think about that.)
So pardon me while I pause to reflect on this. Strangely, I find the awe with it all only registers on the intellectual level. The actual, "Wow!" factor feels kind of dead in the water. That's the part which impresses me. Humans adapt to new stuff really well. When the shit hits the fan, I bet there won't be badly dubbed Japanese crowds running amok in the street.
Even many Linux zealots don't use Firefox... that's pretty telling.
Uh, okay. So they use Oprah.
Look. You use a piece of software made by a corporation with zero ethics and two and a half stars out of five for progamming acumen. And nobody really cares, so quit yelling about it. If you can only take pride in your choices by thumping your chest and making half-assed arguments, then you have more pressing issues to deal with than which browser you use.
devices charge themselves on all the ambient RF flying around? Why not? More reliable than sunlight. On 24/7. Kind of like how you can illuminate a neon bulb by holding it near a microwave oven.
I notice that people who live in high RF traffic zones or who regularly use wireless tech are also missing out on a whole range of perceptive abilities which those who don't expose themselves are already beginning to take for granted. Those of you who know what I mean, know what I mean. Those who don't, can't.
-The choices you make today are who you become tomorrow.
-Let it happen naturally. If not, it will find a way to force itself into your life.
I remember waaay back, looking at inkjet versus laser printers.
I thought, "Wow. This whole thing is a big, stupid scam. I want a printer where I can buy straight ink and just re-fill the machine. Buying cartridges is for chumps. This is a big, giant rip-off and in a few years people are going to be screaming."
Then I thought:
"Of course, there are two levels at which people will put up with this bullshit; the business level and the personal level. --The business level is tighter; they can't afford to be pushed as far as individuals, and so they won't be. --The average office simply couldn't function if they had to replace ink cartridges every sixty pages! So it's better to buy whatever a medium-sized office would use rather than what Joe and Jenny Average want to put on their hallway desk. Spend the extra four hundred bucks and get a half-decent laser printer."
Boy was I ever right on that count. I go through maybe one toner unit every two years, (2500 pages, approx). --This is still a stupid rip-off, but it's better than having to replace a thirty-five dollar ink cartridge every month, (before tax!)
Back when the home office computer equipment market was still establishing itself. . . (Make good stuff to establish market share, then slowly start to suck.)
The HP Laserjet II was one of the best pieces of hardware I've ever seen. I miss that indestructible, ultra-reliable monster. Sigh. Back when HP was a good company which had ethics. I'm sure glad I don't work for them now! Their Karma is sinking fast. Must be a misery to be there today.
One of the worst things in the world you can do for your mental and physical health is to work for a company you don't respect. Imagine, a million people silently cursing you. ..
The easiest solution which anybody can implement immediately is to get up and move some furniture around. It'll take an hour of huffing and puffing and dust-bunny hunting, but in the end, it's well worth the effort.
I've been fortunate enough to be able to organize my work spaces over the last few years so that the computer desk is always next to a closet. The computer stays in the closet with cables coming out to plug into all the various components. (Also, I use an LCD thinscreen rather than a CRT. CRT's are horrid, horrid devices, and anybody who hasn't replaced theirs has only themselves to blame for their misery! If you can afford to run a computer, then you can also save up and spend $300 on an LCD monitor!) Anyway, with the computer behind a closed door, the noise level is cut by about one half to two-thirds, I find. Insulating the inside of the closet with a blanket helps even further. When I want to change a disk, I reach over, open closet door and pop the disk. It's a little more effort, but I don't even think about it these days. The payoff in reduced mental fatigue due to sound pollution is well worth the effort. I find these days when I visit other people's work spaces, I am amazed by the level of noise they put up with.
To further reduce the annoyance factor, I hope to get a fanless power supply next time I build a computer. (Another $300 or so.)
But. . . I keep thinking that it should be possible to build an active noise reduction device which simply broadcasts a waveform opposite to that being produced by the computer. Why not? Computer hum is a very regular noise which should be relatively easy to cancel. . . (Or not.)
Another option is a set of noise cancellation headphones. Put 'em on, flip the on-switch, and you are in blissful quiet. --And you can also play music through them. (But then how would you know when the office phone rings. . ?) Hm.
And yet, somehow, hundreds of millions of people survived their lives without worry-warts nervously watching over their every move. Heck, I and all my grade managed -somehow- to get through our entire engagement with the educational system without once being abducted or rolled in a bus or lost in a lake. The accidents I remember during those ten years in my community which served about 1500 kids were the following. ..
Three deaths over the years from kids crossing a four lane main street while not using the crosswalk.
One death from suicide.
Two eye injuries, one in a food fight, another from slipping on a mopped floor and falling down a set of stairs.
One severe burn victim from a guy who climbed into a neighborhood power transformer while stoned and poking his fingers where he shouldn't have.
And THAT'S IT.
You have fallen prey to the Fear Mongers who want to sell you anti-theft devices and missile defense shields.
If your kid is going to die, it'll be for a good reason which you can't and probably shouldn't be able to foresee or prevent. So do the best you can as a parent, don't over-protect and generally chill out.
Bar-coding your kid isn't going to make him or her stronger in life. It'll just turn out a messed up loser who will have a hard time dealing with the real world. Skipping class kept me sane. The amount of bullshit being shoveled in class by the administration was obvious to me as a teen. I consider myself very lucky to have seen through the lie; the other kids who did as they were instructed have nearly all gone on to live very crappy lives of general servitude. Anybody who takes school as it is meant to be taken is putting themselves at a serious disadvantage; the main thing school was good for was teaching social lessons and providing a BIG TEST. --Getting out of school with your brain in one piece was like trying to escape from one of those lost-memory, Holodeck-illusion, time-loop episodes of Star Trek. Only heros manage such things. Red Shirts always die because they join the army and do as they are told by ass-hat ego-maniacal captains.
You say you got away with too much when you were a kid? --That you would have benefitted from being jammed a little harder into that round hole? I doubt it. You learned from those un-supervised events; social lessons which pushed your limits in real-life scenarios and made you who you are today. Without them, you would have been tested against Life to a much lesser degree, and what would that have taught you, do you think? More sit-at-your-desk-and-do-as-you-are-told skills? How to respect your superiors better?
Winning Freedom from Slave-School is to Fail by their standards.
Slashdot Mirror
And the voice box of American propaganda had it chopped?
Color me surprised, cuz I'm certainly not going to look shocked without face paint.
My guess is that Firefly was killed similarly for the Anti-Government message it traded on with every second episode.
Remember: Television was not invented to entertain and inform you. McLuhan was bang-on; "The medium IS the message." --That is, the medium is a flickering box which dilutes family cohesion and lulls people into a hypnotic state where the implanting of selected thought patterns is very easy. Ponder that message!)
-FL
Some people are so scared of the world hurting them that they feel the need to control every last inch of it.
If you don't give a cat the freedom to roam about, it will turn into a lazy and/or mentally ill indoor cat. I see this all the time. Compare any 'house' cat from the city with any outdoor cat in the country, and the difference is immediately obvious.
Freedom, Death and Danger are good teachers. If a people can't deal with this, then they should reconsider trying to 'own' a cat. --Cities are horrible places for all kinds of animal, except humans choose to live in cities. Cats and dogs are held prisoner by selfish/ignorant humans who are in the middle of learning lessons about freedom, emotional attachment and social control. This often takes several lives to get right.
To let your cat roam free is to be on the right path.
To lose your marbles and blame the world for killing your cat, is to slip and fall while walking the right path. (Receive without grace an important lesson about freedom.)
Controlling people with lasers is no better than keeping a cat locked up for life inside a one-bedroom apartment. People must be given the free range within which to live and get hurt and act without grace, or they will never learn anything and remain little better than mentally ill carpet ornaments.
-FL
-FL
Define 'Trolling'.
I am discussing ideas and asking questions which are of genuine interest to me in a forum which has users well-versed in some of the language necessary to explore those ideas in a useful way.
The problem with much of Western culture is that if an idea or question happens to make people feel uncomfortable, they call it a 'Troll' (or something similar); they refuse to think about it. Exploring reality is fun! Pushing the envelope of what we perceive is fun!
We are living under the strictures of a real-time, false reality made of fake fronts and foolish lies which most of the population idly believe and structure their lives around from birth to death, never realizing just how astonishing and beautiful/terrifying the world really is. Anybody who bothers to do even the most minimal amount of honest research will recognize that not everything is as it appears. --Think of it as being in one of those Twilight Zone or Star Trek episodes where, "Something Isn't Right". Everybody thinks that they'd be the one with enough integrity and grit to be able to pick up on the signs and do the right and courageous thing.
What kind of person are you?
-FL
Unfortunately, the public is so eager to accept a 'safe' version of reality that they will bend over backwards to look the other way when the government drops the ball, as they do on a very regular basis.
Two of the news stories you cite are at odds with each other. The first says the photographer gave NASA the photos and would not release a public version until NASA scientists had time to go over the data. The second claims that NASA "siezed" the photos and banned the first news source from publishing them. Finally, even the rense article didn't start wildly speculating about ET.
One of the best ways to obfuscate the path of research is to release many conflicting stories of varying degrees of foolishness.
You will notice that in most of these types of story, confusing and conflicting details are nearly always present, and they are very effective, as you have shown, in shutting down personal inquiry.
I'm sad that I just wasted 5 minutes of my life on this stupidity.
Perhaps it would be wise to spend somewhat more than five minutes of your life questioning things rather than looking for the easy way out.
-FL
Interesting perspective. . . (Though I would hardly call myself unemployed and uneducated.)
You could also say it this way:
"Why is it invariably those who are caught up within the exhausting distractions of life have so little ability to observe and question the true nature of their world?"
Pounding away at a ridiculous 50-hour a week job, then slumping down in front of the TV in the evenings doesn't leave much time or energy, (if any), for the real Work of understanding oneself and the world.
Grow my brain? That's the whole point. (Well, my mind, anyway.) --I would strongly recommend you do the same.
-FL
That question cannot be answered without a fair bit of qualification.
There are a LOT of false and mis-leading theories out there. So No, I do not believe in all of them. However, I DO believe that in virtually every instance where this kind of material comes up, that the 'official positions' presented by the big media, government, etc., are chief among the false and mis-leading stories.
It takes very little research to realize this. The next question is, "So then what really IS going on?"
That is not an easy question to answer, and I've made many mistakes along the way. Most of the links you posted to my past efforts no longer reflect my current thinking. --I have found that one of the most difficult tasks is having the strength to recognize when I have made a mistake and to re-direct inquiries and continue building the most accurate picture of reality possible. The ego must be left behind if one is to become clear, which is why the ego is attacked so mercilessly in forums like Slashdot.
In the end, though, I am not worried about myself. I know that I have the ability to look and think and adapt. The ones who would do well to be concerned are those who use ridicule to fortify their perspectives. Those who use ridicule as a weapon, must also fear it. This leads to entrapment.
-FL
Foam tiling, or shot down? I've visited this question before, and I did a very half-assed job of presenting the 'Shot down' argument at the time. Since then, I've put various ducks in a row and rather than working from faulty memory, did the proper research. So here we go again. .
1. NASA public relations and the media presented a very tight argument for falling insulation damage being the culprit in the Columbia disaster. --Historical evidence was presented from the NASA archives purporting that previous missions of both the Columbia and other shuttles had shown some limited damage to heat tiles resulting from foam insulation falling from the fuel tanks. The speculation and arguments were that a larger piece of foam striking in a certain way could cause a critical failure of the heat shielding.
2. Despite the recommendation by NASA engineers during the mission that the foam insulation strike in question did not pose a problem and that the mission was in no danger, the conclusion was reversed after the disaster and subsequent investigation.
3. In doing follow-up on this whole story, I ran across this curious item about a photographer who was shooting the Columbia as it first started to break up. He captured an image of an energy bolt striking the Columbia followed by a series of pictures showing a flash and the break-up.
This is a follow up on that story.
The photographer was an electrical engineer who works for Sparks defense contractor Sierra Nevada Corp. He was at the time also a volunteer at the Fleischmann Planetarium at the University of Nevada, Reno. He captured his images of the shuttle from the Fleischmann facility.
This is a brief description of his video according to an article in the RENO GAZETTE-JOURNAL;
There is no mention of the energy strike in this article; the reason I included it here was in part to show the value of his film. If you read the article, you can see that NASA sent a letter thanking him for what were considered to be valuable images which indeed showed the earliest stages of the break-up. --This article also seems important to me because these were apparently the images which came directly after the first frame which showed an energy bolt striking the shuttle. Why the energy bolt was not mentioned at all in the article seems very curious to me.
Here is the first photo showing the energy bolt.
So anyway. . . What we have right now are two stories. The first is the big media story which broadcast the NASA claims regarding the incident; a piece of foam caused damage to heat tiles, which in turn resulted in a critical failure.
The second story is one which comes from two sources; a channeled source claiming an energy weapon was used to shoot down the Columbia, and a photograph of an energy bolt actually striking the shuttle just before it broke up.
So which is more likely. . ?
One:The U.S. Government can be counted on to not fabricate stories, and that NASA's own engineers who originally said the foam strike did
Thanks.
-FL
Man, that drives me crazy! STOP trying to think FOR me, dammit! I don't want ANY auto features if I can't switch them off. I know how big I want my work window, so stop changing it according to some ill-inspired whim of whatever chief Adobe designer happened to be sprouting 'decisions' that week.
If I wanted my machine to treat me like a child, I'd use safety-scissors, mittens would dangle on strings from the sleeves of my winter coat, my Mom would still dress me and I'd have bought an Apple.
-FL
The manuals were definitely written by aliens. From a Douglas Adams novel.
They actually had repeating loops:
Step 6 on page 80 sends you back to step 2 on the original page. Endless loop, and you still don't know what the hell is going on.
Photoshop took me over three months to figure out enough just to do my job, and another year before I was confident with the lesser used aspects of it. But once you nail down the Ass-Hat dialect of Martian the guys at Adobe use, it's a simple enough program.
-FL
No. The voting system is rigged at the psychological level.
When people are a bunch of mind-controlled brain slugs, then it is very easy to make them 'choose' that which is not good for them. Controlling populations through a host of on-going and very effective techniques, from drugs and television and religion, to the very manner in which society itself has been built, establishes the illusion of a democratic system when really nothing could be further from the truth. --And when mind-control is not enough, then there are always ways of ensuring that the systems give up the desired results. The last U.S. election offered prime example of some of these methods. (Unless one is of of the camp that no mis-doings were in evidence.)
Democracy is an illusion. People are cattle. Yes, it's true that on a deep level, this is as they choose to be, but it doesn't make me content to play along just because my soul-sleeping neighbors are willing to be slaughtered.
I'll keep yelling about this, but I'll be abandoning ship when the critical time comes, and everybody left aboard can drown as they will.
Christ was quoted as saying once, "Wide is the road that leads to destruction, and thousands walk it every day. Narrow is the path that leads to Life, and few follow it." (Or words to that effect.)
-FL
If it were a fair system, I'd have the option of saying, "No thanks. I don't want to buy the services you are selling." Tax is no different than paying protection money. I'll be physically punished if I decide not to.
The Government is the only body allowed to shoot me 'legally'. And they have nearly all the guns anyway. It's a total racket, and voluntarily paying taxes and pretending that it's the right thing to do is almost entirely an act of denial. The sad truth is that the Government is a sham designed to dull-down, enslave and bleed the populace.
An interesting note. . . In my country, (Canada), one of the biggest personal tax-dodgers (to the tune of millions), is the current prime minister. Hipocricy? You bet. --And nobody has the balls to do anything about it. At the same time, on parliament hill last year a cadre of the highest ranking ministers granted themselves a pay raise putting their take home pay at over $100,000 each. There was no way to vote against this.
People who proudly pay tax are self-deluding chumps who don't want to admit they're being raped.
-FL
-FL
I would think that the condition should be easily detectable. --A medical professional should be hired to follow the process of making a screen play proposal along its natural path. Each time somebody says, "No, No! The public doesn't want a screen play written in close parallel to an amazingly popular book which was practically written in movie format to begin with! No! Listen to my small ego! Listen to MEEEE! We have to completely change things around!"
Then simply have the brain-damaged individual put all of his desk things into a cardboard box and walk him kindly to the exit.
Repeat the process until all the brain damage has been detected and burned away, (fired).
The practice of medicine and film making ought to naturally go hand in hand, I think.
-FL
The whole original point of copyright is to make sure the author is able to make a living from his or her work. Once the author is dead, then sure, copyright should end, but until then, I don't understand your point. Particularly when in old age, earning new income can become harder to do.
The time between the writing of a book and the author's death is often shorter than fifty years anyway.
-FL
Penn and Teller are not nearly as wise as they believe.
-FL
In the original, when using the word processor, the screen would automatically jump up about five lines whenever the cursor came within a certain distance of the bottom of the screen.
I found this feature disorienting and irritating, and while I could understand the pupropse behind it, I really wanted to be able to turn it off and just have non-intelligent scrolling. This is not a small thing! Typing and scrolling are what Word Processing is 90% about. If the process of making and reading through documents is not comfortable, then it's a big, big deal.
--After realizing that it was not possible to shut off this feature, I uninstalled OO and threw my lot in with Abiword, which scrolls like any regular text editor with no jarring jumps in what is displayed on the screen.
I do think, however, that it would be useful to have an integrated office suite. Does the new version of OO offer control over the way the text scrolling system works?
-FL
Three-thousand years of steppe farming and then WHAM, Steam Engines. Nukes. Donkey Kong. (The atom bomb pre-dates Mario. Think about that.)
So pardon me while I pause to reflect on this. Strangely, I find the awe with it all only registers on the intellectual level. The actual, "Wow!" factor feels kind of dead in the water. That's the part which impresses me. Humans adapt to new stuff really well. When the shit hits the fan, I bet there won't be badly dubbed Japanese crowds running amok in the street.
-FL
Uh, okay. So they use Oprah.
Look. You use a piece of software made by a corporation with zero ethics and two and a half stars out of five for progamming acumen. And nobody really cares, so quit yelling about it. If you can only take pride in your choices by thumping your chest and making half-assed arguments, then you have more pressing issues to deal with than which browser you use.
-FL
Congratulations on your choice of corporate software. Keep repeating your mantra to ensure the flow of happy-good feelings.
I wonder if you were truly proud of yourself, if you would feel the need to profess it so loudly. .
-FL
I notice that people who live in high RF traffic zones or who regularly use wireless tech are also missing out on a whole range of perceptive abilities which those who don't expose themselves are already beginning to take for granted. Those of you who know what I mean, know what I mean. Those who don't, can't.
-The choices you make today are who you become tomorrow.
-Let it happen naturally. If not, it will find a way to force itself into your life.
-FL
I thought, "Wow. This whole thing is a big, stupid scam. I want a printer where I can buy straight ink and just re-fill the machine. Buying cartridges is for chumps. This is a big, giant rip-off and in a few years people are going to be screaming."
Then I thought:
"Of course, there are two levels at which people will put up with this bullshit; the business level and the personal level. --The business level is tighter; they can't afford to be pushed as far as individuals, and so they won't be. --The average office simply couldn't function if they had to replace ink cartridges every sixty pages! So it's better to buy whatever a medium-sized office would use rather than what Joe and Jenny Average want to put on their hallway desk. Spend the extra four hundred bucks and get a half-decent laser printer."
Boy was I ever right on that count. I go through maybe one toner unit every two years, (2500 pages, approx). --This is still a stupid rip-off, but it's better than having to replace a thirty-five dollar ink cartridge every month, (before tax!)
Back when the home office computer equipment market was still establishing itself. . . (Make good stuff to establish market share, then slowly start to suck.)
The HP Laserjet II was one of the best pieces of hardware I've ever seen. I miss that indestructible, ultra-reliable monster. Sigh. Back when HP was a good company which had ethics. I'm sure glad I don't work for them now! Their Karma is sinking fast. Must be a misery to be there today.
One of the worst things in the world you can do for your mental and physical health is to work for a company you don't respect. Imagine, a million people silently cursing you. .
-FL
The easiest solution which anybody can implement immediately is to get up and move some furniture around. It'll take an hour of huffing and puffing and dust-bunny hunting, but in the end, it's well worth the effort.
I've been fortunate enough to be able to organize my work spaces over the last few years so that the computer desk is always next to a closet. The computer stays in the closet with cables coming out to plug into all the various components. (Also, I use an LCD thinscreen rather than a CRT. CRT's are horrid, horrid devices, and anybody who hasn't replaced theirs has only themselves to blame for their misery! If you can afford to run a computer, then you can also save up and spend $300 on an LCD monitor!) Anyway, with the computer behind a closed door, the noise level is cut by about one half to two-thirds, I find. Insulating the inside of the closet with a blanket helps even further. When I want to change a disk, I reach over, open closet door and pop the disk. It's a little more effort, but I don't even think about it these days. The payoff in reduced mental fatigue due to sound pollution is well worth the effort. I find these days when I visit other people's work spaces, I am amazed by the level of noise they put up with.
To further reduce the annoyance factor, I hope to get a fanless power supply next time I build a computer. (Another $300 or so.)
But. . . I keep thinking that it should be possible to build an active noise reduction device which simply broadcasts a waveform opposite to that being produced by the computer. Why not? Computer hum is a very regular noise which should be relatively easy to cancel. . . (Or not.)
Another option is a set of noise cancellation headphones. Put 'em on, flip the on-switch, and you are in blissful quiet. --And you can also play music through them. (But then how would you know when the office phone rings. . ?) Hm.
Just some thoughts.
-FL
And yet, somehow, hundreds of millions of people survived their lives without worry-warts nervously watching over their every move. Heck, I and all my grade managed -somehow- to get through our entire engagement with the educational system without once being abducted or rolled in a bus or lost in a lake. The accidents I remember during those ten years in my community which served about 1500 kids were the following. .
Three deaths over the years from kids crossing a four lane main street while not using the crosswalk.
One death from suicide.
Two eye injuries, one in a food fight, another from slipping on a mopped floor and falling down a set of stairs.
One severe burn victim from a guy who climbed into a neighborhood power transformer while stoned and poking his fingers where he shouldn't have.
And THAT'S IT.
You have fallen prey to the Fear Mongers who want to sell you anti-theft devices and missile defense shields.
If your kid is going to die, it'll be for a good reason which you can't and probably shouldn't be able to foresee or prevent. So do the best you can as a parent, don't over-protect and generally chill out.
Bar-coding your kid isn't going to make him or her stronger in life. It'll just turn out a messed up loser who will have a hard time dealing with the real world. Skipping class kept me sane. The amount of bullshit being shoveled in class by the administration was obvious to me as a teen. I consider myself very lucky to have seen through the lie; the other kids who did as they were instructed have nearly all gone on to live very crappy lives of general servitude. Anybody who takes school as it is meant to be taken is putting themselves at a serious disadvantage; the main thing school was good for was teaching social lessons and providing a BIG TEST. --Getting out of school with your brain in one piece was like trying to escape from one of those lost-memory, Holodeck-illusion, time-loop episodes of Star Trek. Only heros manage such things. Red Shirts always die because they join the army and do as they are told by ass-hat ego-maniacal captains.
You say you got away with too much when you were a kid? --That you would have benefitted from being jammed a little harder into that round hole? I doubt it. You learned from those un-supervised events; social lessons which pushed your limits in real-life scenarios and made you who you are today. Without them, you would have been tested against Life to a much lesser degree, and what would that have taught you, do you think? More sit-at-your-desk-and-do-as-you-are-told skills? How to respect your superiors better?
Winning Freedom from Slave-School is to Fail by their standards.
-FL