travelling at 581 Km, heading West. Heading East, a conventional train leaves Chicago at 1:40 PM travelling at 97 MPH. Taking imperial versus metric measurment and the international date-line into account, and assuming that both trains can travel safely across the Atlantic. . , at what time will the two trains pass?
Sorry. And I have mod points, too. It seems I've got a back-log of 'irresponsible' to get out this week.
Do you have any fucking right to be a pedantic asshole?
Ha ha! Touche. Totally missed that! But spelling errors aside, I still find canned responses of zero imagination to be little better than spam.
Honestly. Do you find "Correlation != Causation" to be compelling or original in the least? There was virtually nothing in the comment section itself and you've seen the damned line used a hundred times before. The poster was on auto-pilot, for crying out loud! Sorry. But I can't see myself as being pedantic in the slightest for pointing and laughing at this kind of low watt, formulaic idiocy.
I'll repeat my devastated post for those who would like to see it. ..
I have only one thing to say. ..
GREEDY BASTARDS.
Oh, and. ..
Are people 'terrorists' if they become sickened with corporate/government leeches? Of course not, but that won't stop the Powers That Be from getting nervous when the masses start to steam with indignation. This is the reason for the push to remove freedoms and create a police state; fear of reprisal from the masses who are getting hurt and bled worse every day. This, and nothing more. Anybody who believes otherwise is a chump.
Now. . . Please, if somebody would like to actually disagree with this. . . I would love to hear their 'logic'. As I see it, there is no rational defense of the corporate/government desire to tax and bill the bejeezus out of people through needless charges and needless regulation. And anybody who believes that the 'terrorist' nonsense is actually what it is being sold as, is a damned, damned fool.
But then I don't expect a whole lot of rational thought around here. Fear and Ignorance? Sure, but Rational Thought is a rare bird in these parts.
Self-deluding Cowards afraid to look at the world objectively disgust me.
Are people 'terrorists' if they become sickened with corporate/government leeches? Of course not, but that won't stop the Powers That Be from getting nervous when the masses start to steam with indignation. This is the reason for the push to remove freedoms and create a police state; fear of reprisal from the masses who are getting hurt and bled worse every day. This, and nothing more. Anybody who believes otherwise is a chump.
Can people please just say, "Doesn't equal" already? This way I might actually take the time to read the attached argument because I'll know there is a chance it won't be just another appearance of pre-fab, bumper-sticker geek dogma. If you have something to say, take the time to argue it. "Correlation != Causation" has been keyed into subject lines so many damned times, I'm fairly sure that explanation point keys all over the West will soon need replacing from over-use.
Do you use 1's and 5's instead of I's and S's too?
The whole argument about violence in video games bores me. I guess I'm being desensitized to it.
Basically, people will obsess over what they will obsess over, and they will learn the lessons they will learn.
But if I ever have kids, and if they decide to drench themselves in needless media violence, then they can do it behind my back, thank you very much! That stuff I find upsetting and revolting on a gut level, and I don't want it in my home environment. If my kids are going to grow up to be television-watching losers, then it won't be because their home and hearth have been sacrificed to the god of Big Media. They may hate me for 'depriving' them, but by the time they are adults they will at least have sharp minds and strong spines which have not been turned to mush by television and Pastey 'success' stories like John Carmack.
Never seen one of my posts go up to a 5 and then down to a 1 in one afternoon before.
I have whiplash!
Look. Google is a useful tool but if nobody minds, I'll still be keeping my skills sharpened on alternative surfing methods, and my webpages well linked through other means. If Google decided tomorrow to cut you out of their search engine, what would happen to your business model?
May never happen, but before Google, this wasn't even a possibility of a problem. Now it is. And with Google wanting to make money. . . I'm glad that some moderators have the brains to recognize the inherent dangers here!
But then others have modded me down like a bunch of thoughtless, reactionary monkeys upset that their favorite search-engine through which they somehow define their meagre self images has been bad-mouthed. Whatever. If you'll excuse me, I'd just as soon the web were not set up in such a precarious manner.
When all the fish school off into predictable masses, that's when the trawling nets feast.
Centralize power, toss in Greed, hire ex-NSA employees (yes, this is the case), and WHAT DID YOU EXPECT????
Remember the days when you used Altavista? --And when there were millions of personal webpages with, what did they call them. . , LINKS??? which led you across the wide and complex internet to find amazing pools of data and knowledge? Where people were required to think and explore in order to find things? Where cool and interesting top ranking, easy to find information was decided upon by pro-active linking controlled by millions of small webmasters and not some Google algorithm and the corporate advertising dollar?
The web is not supposed to have ONE main junction for data retrieval. Google is like a news-bite. It's easy, it's fast, it's incomplete, and worst of all, it makes everybody lazy, dependant and the SAME.
I am sick to death with the geek world fawning over this massive problem waiting to happen. It's about bloody time people began to realize the potential hazards with this sort of consolidation of power.
What? Because Google happens to use a Fischer Price color scheme, people think it's incapable of harm?
I am actually slightly more disgusted with people over this subject than I am with their complicity in the bullshit going down in the Middle East. If people are determined to walk around in their comfy bubble of ignorant bliss while massive systems congregate to fuck them over, then they deserve exactly what they get. You will be drafted and you will have the internet taken away from you. --And the 'best' part is that the small number of aware people get fucked over right along with everybody else, thanks to the tectonic plate-moving population masses of the child-minded.
Lots of balanced slashdotters posting today. Nice to see.
However. . , being from the 'media as mind-control' camp, I'd like to add my two cents to round out the discussion.
'Command and Conquer' and 'MOO2' style games left a powerful impact upon the psyche of millions upon millions of gamers, many of whom are now grown up from those days and now participate in society as young, working voters.
I found the insane zeal, (yes, insane), for the initial American advance into Iraq to be, well, 'shocking and awful'. You could especially see it on Slashdot during the first week. --All those RTS game fantasies and C&C visions being played out for 'real' in a war zone seemed to be a hard-on thrill for more Americans than you could shake a stick at. (A nuclear powered stick, even. --And you'd have needed to!)
All the guys I know who play 'Ghost Recon' as their primary source of interactive fun are either hard-core pro-war, or it was a slow process for them to realize that Iraq was a Big Fucking Mistake. (Though, now that Bush got his bloodmoney-making machine going, it doesn't matter now what anybody thinks. The screw is in and gamers waking up late to the reality no longer matter.)
Those who find those types of games distasteful, seemed to have a much more balanced view of things. --Of course, perhaps my sample is too small; I only know a dozen or so guys who play that stuff. . , but among them, the observation holds up well.
So were popular war games a form of media influence used to direct people into accepting the drive toward global war? Oh, yes. I think so. Was it deliberate? Were the bosses of game companies accepting manilla envelopes from shadow figures while feeding pigeons? Heh. Probably not.
But here's the thing. . , and yes, this sounds sci-fi, but I do think it works this way: millions of people are subjected to powerful and deliberate forces they do not understand. Ask any number of influential writers and creators where they get their ideas, and when it comes right down to it, most of the time they'll say, "Hell, I don't know. It just came to me." Or, "I was taken by inspiration and just had to write it!" Or, "It just seemed to write itself!"
Yes, yes. Tin-foil hats, "get back on your medication" and "boy you're nuts," blah, blah, blah. But this is the shape of the world that I see. And the proof, as always, is in the pudding.
Where knowledge leads to an understanding of love and in doing so 'illuminates', and therefore all three are derivitive of each other.
Nope. That's not what I meant. I meant that they're all the same.
The only way to understand love is to be in love.
Nope. That's not what I mean by love.
See, here we are caught in the clumsy grip of an English language totally insufficient to express what the hell we're each talking about.
Your thoughts all seem at first glance to be quite well formed, (anybody willing to write a whole page response to me on this kind of subject is probably fairly intelligent), but after realizing that we are using definitions and logical interpretations in completely different ways, I gave up.
See, today I am not bored. Another day, I would enjoy swapping philiosphical snafu-tangle-logic with you in an effort to construct co-linear understandings in a fascinating subject area, but sadly, this afternoon I have deadlines.
Bully the sword-wizard mistreats you however he pleases; kicks sand in your face, whatever.
"What? You got a problem with that? You chicken, McFly?! Draw!"
The only difference between this and highschool, (where the duel has basically been in practice since the first school bell ever rang), is that now there'd be a legal body count, the psychotic rush a bully gets from the transfer of power starts at a dangerously high level, and everybody gets to walk around with an extra fear in their gut.
In any case, I know adults who will roll up their sleeves and beat the shit out of each other to solve conflicts. (I live in a very rural area). No laws are broken, and its quite rare that lives are lost. Why involve lethality just to proove machismo? --And it would certainly come to that! With a 'legal dueling age,' young men eager to proove their masculinity and to justify all the practice they put into gun and sword training, would seek out idiot duels.
Feudal Japan once more? The Wild West once again? These days I can speak my mind to anybody I choose with the reasonable assurance that I won't be challenged to life or death combat over a political difference or for looking at some bozo's girlfriend. I do not think a return to the days of fear are a step toward a more civilized society. Those sorts of societies ALWAYS favor war-lords. Kings were abandoned in favor of democracy for a reason.
That is, the more you learn, and the more you become a conduit of knowledge, the closer you come to understanding 'love' --which is meant in a sense above and beyond hormones and bad 'Friends' episodes. It's Light side versus Dark side.
Now you're probably wincing like mad right now, and frankly, so am I. The New-Age bullshit has scarred everybody. Indeed, if a New-Ager uses the term, 'Love & Light' it is usually best to run. Run for the hills, because they're most likely flakes who don't know what the hell they're talking about, don't know how to help themselves, much less anybody else, and who have done more damage to the concept than will likely ever be repaired.
In any case. ..
The Universe as we experience it is entirely constructed of metaphor. --That is, all matter is energy, (we know that), but what is generally not understood is that all energy is consciousness. If you can accept this, then energy which, is expressed through the physical, remains an expression of consciousness. The world is one big Freudian Slip.
Anyway. ..
The more intense the 'thought form', the more likely it is that the metaphor will become very clear to the point of being a dead give-away.
But you will notice that Bullies are typically the kids who are already well adapted to taking advantage of such brutal systems. Indeed, your average bully would glow with pleasure if such tactics were made legal! I don't think most regular kids would be happy about needing to waste tons of energy mastering the art of violence just to be able to function in society.
Regular people just want to live their lives. They do not want to live in constant, shell-shocked fear of some false-bravado asshole waving a gun in their face at some percieved insult to their ego-impaired machismo.
This is an incredibly stupid idea which never fails to be trucked out by some short-sighted armchair logic nitwit. Move to a lawless country where this idiot idea is reality, or shut the hell up. --Or better yet, join a street gang where lack of respect is also punishable by death, because that system certainly works to keep people civilized and whining bullets out of school yards which are filled with everybody else who isn't a fucking moron.
So parents would rather their kids be exposed to beautiful lies rather than the web, where they have the ability to sift through the bullshit interactively and possibly find truth? To read opinions from multiple perspectives on any given issue?
Oooh. But, Porn. Nekkid people!
People who are going to become screwed up by this are going to do so regardless. If there are people walking around who aren't dangerously blithering only because they didn't have the option of exploring things on their own, then I am not encouraged. This is not television violence. This is not drug use. This is not fast food designed to be addictive. This is not video games. This is not culture and fashion as promoted by music videos.
--Didja know that Britney Spears' videos were created by none other than, Greg Dark, noted for his previous work in distributing child-porn? He was making the infamous Tracy Lords films when the girl was 13. Today he's also today making videos for Mandy Moore and the pre-pubescent Leslie Carter. This guy should be bloody knighted for his work in screwing up culture and creating an environment which has caused a ballooning of the multi-billion dollar pedephillia market, which today dwarfs even Disney as a money-making engine. People blame the web? Wrong! The web is simply a means to express individual will. Television is the mind-programmer. Television is the culture destroyer.
Of all things in pop-culture, I think that the web is one of the very few which may not be directly destructive at all. By raw necessity it incorporates the user's choice in every click and action, and because it is possible for regular PEOPLE to create powerful content, not just the corporations. Channel surfing only provides choices from a barrel of mostly rotten apples. The web gives you an entire orchard.
Further, there is nothing, (to my knowledge), about the web which is directly physiologically addictive/destructive. The web is nothing more than ideas and images and sounds, all of which can be turned off without exiting the web itself. Even the freekin' advertising is an option! Amazing! The web, unlike television, does not almost instantly lull the brain into a hypnotic state of scientifically measurable suggestibility! People think they are not affected by television media? STUPID! People aren't even properly conscious when they watch television, for crying out loud! But with the web, brain activity actually increases! --Depending, of course on the choices of the user. One can just as easily slide into stupidity on the web if they want to. --But it is through choice, not through an addictive craving to sit down in front of 'Friends' or 'CNN' or some other bullshit, you know; to relax after a hard day's work.
--Yes, young kids should be taught to exercise caution in chat rooms, etc., because there are predatory adults in this world. (A lot more of them today thanks to the likes of Greg Dark.) This is a sad truth, and it's best to learn these survival skills. If you want to protect your kids, teach them about the ugliness in the world; teach them not to be afraid of it, but how to recognize trouble and how to deal with it. You are not helping them by looking over their shoulders, re-enforcing guilt culture while they seek to learn about sexuality. Oooh, sexuality and guilt. There's a healthy combo!
Frankly, I'd be more concerned about a kid's exposure to the EM bubble created by a CRT monitor, and by that soothing flicker which plays a role in the creating of hypnotic states of awareness in the viewer. Get them a flat screen, tell them about the world and how it works, teach them not to fear or shy away from ugly truths, and encourage balanced activities in their lives. Happiness comes from self-determination, and self-determination comes from awareness and action. Soothing lies deplete and destroy.
And this relates to Quantum Theory and infinite streams of reality. ..
-Is that Awareness determines the outcome of your experienced reality.
Okay, it's Qunatum Theory with the Fantastic Lad twist. ..
All there is are lessons. As such, in the best interest of efficiency, there is no need to duplicate experiences. Being fully cogniscent of a possible outcome, planning and imagining it in full detail in your mind is often enough to complete the lesson without the need for the physical manifestation. As such, you will experience some variation of events you did not prepare for.
Ever wonder why the conversation with that girl/boy you like never goes the way you hoped? Or why worst case scenarios you fret over never seem to unfold? Or more the point, why you sometimes are able to prevent disaster with subtle actions taken on an instinct?
This is why it is important to NOT believe the lies. --The lies told by the Bush administration are warm and fuzzy lies, and if you believe them and embrace them and imagine them, then they have no need to happen. --They will happen in some other reality where they are unexpected outcomes. In this reality, where so many people expect outcomes to be warm and fuzzy, we are ripe for being hit with extremely miserable turns of events.
Look at the reality people hoped for in Iraq. "The war is expected to last for only 10 weeks." "The Iraqis are joyful of their liberators." "We will find many Weapons of Mass Destruction." Etc.
The interesting truth of guys like me is that we spit and scream about the ugliness which is unfolding. We even make predictions, (and will continue to do so), and if we are lucky, if enough people start to become aware, then those possibilities become unglued. They do not happen.
Diebold is such an example. Enough people are becomming aware, and see? The Diebold threat is beginning to unravel. If the pressure is kept up, then perhaps that battle will be won in this war. But the pressure must be kept up.
I like that: "[. ..]the first abuse of the ingenuity that so calssically defines american people, [. ..]"
Yep. You pretty much have to do that. People in North America, (that's Canadians, too!), have been trained not to respond unless made to feel special first.
The fact that it's true, helps, although I'd cough soundly at the idea that this was the first time this sort of abuse has been perpetrated!
I think it should be clarified that while there is some blind flag-waving stemming from sheer enthusiasm, 'Technology Geeks' are not simply pro-technology. Rather, they are fascinated by the possibilities presented by technology, and thus are familiar with how those possibilities can be negative as well as positive.
Banks trust electronic payments and ATM to be accurate to the last cent. Why could e-voting not also be that accurate ?
Of course e-voting could be that accurate. The problem is that Banks have an obsessive interest in keeping their numbers straight. They're obsessed with money. However, those who exert influence over political voting systems are obssessed with power, and keeping the numbers straight is exactly the sort of thing which can often prevent the acquisition of power.
Wasn't that one of the coolest days ever? It was like Sci-Fi come to life!
Of course, it became an annoyance, but I still think the idea is pretty darned interesting. If somebody was writing about our world as a piece of speculative fiction, (and this is indeed what our world seems like most of the time to me, especially today), then the computer virus was probably one of the more inventive and award-winning ideas which pushed the book onto the best-seller list.
At least I hope so. Our present world seems kind of like a Neal Stephenson novel which isn't on crack. Maybe it isn't a best-seller.
In any case, I wonder who the main character is? Sure isn't me. I feel like a back-ground noise supporting cast member if anything. Might have brushed shoulders with him/her for a minute somewhere.
Either that, or I am the main character, and it's a really boring novel!
2D animation was always a queer, unlikely sort of creature.
Regular motion picture film is already an odd thing; a machine with a lense and some moving parts which captures a series of 2D images of the 3D world which can later be projected as a moving picture? That works? Weird.
But when you go the next step and consider rooms full of people drawing single frames at a time to achieve the same end. ..
Argh! That's so bizarre! You're kidding, right? Nobody would ever do something crazy like that, would they? That sort of effort is only undertaken by colonies of ants which are basically biological nano-bots with limited individual awareness, not by groups of people who come equipped all that extra thinking power. Rooms full of people scratching out hundreds of thousands of still images? It's mad!
I think it is because of this that animation still seems to me one of the most magical things I can imagine. It seems impossible, and yet, there it is.
3D animation projects like Monsters Inc, or Shrek, or Toys aren't the same sort of thing at all. Those are more like engineering projects using CAD programs. All based on mathematical algorithms. Digital versus analog. --Sure there is a heavy creative aspect involved, but all those films, despite their sharp comedic timing and bright visuals, felt stamped with the inhuman to me. Manufactured. They felt like clever simulations of art.
Maybe it's just because I'm from an older generation. Maybe the logical distinctions are merely emotionally based and hold no real objective meaning. But to me, classical animation seems like real art. It seems warm and magical. Computer animation leaves me cold.
As such, a good artist with a stick of graphite and a sheet of paper will always be able to amaze me. An artist with a mouse (rat?) and an expensive computer system will never be able to reach my soul.
I don't like digital photography either. Try this sometime. ..
Spend a year being exposed only to digital camera images, (that's most of you, I suspect). Then have somebody hand to you a packet of paper slicks from a photo-lab of your non-computer savvy friend's holiday as captured on a 35 millimeter SLR, and thumb through those. You'll be blown away by just how much you missed but never realized.
1. Deliberately create laws which allow spammers to proliferate.
2. Deliberately create and enforce the use of shoddy OS software vulnerable to virus attacks.
3. Deliberately allow the water to boil until the public is going out of their tiny minds. ..
4. Quietly start introducing draconian controls to the web. People, if not begging for them, will at the very least be more likely to tolerate such measures. (And, yes, that would be, 'Profit!')
In my ideal world. . . People and people's families would be allowed to hold a copyright for, say, 60 years, after which the material would go into the public domain.
Corporations, because they are souless entities and not people, should be only be allowed to hold copyright for say, 40 years, (the approximate length of time the original people who worked on the project can be expected to remain employed at the company.) After that, the work should go into public domain.
Further, I think that the transfer/sale of copyright should be completely illegal. The origin of a creation doesn't change simply because you sign a paper. The ability to sell and trade copyrights has been an undermining factor Western society for a long time.
Corporations, if they are dissolved or sold, should be considered as dead and all their works should become public domain. --Or perhaps the copyright should defer to a coalition of the original creators should they choose to create a co-operative holding company, underwhich the copyright would remain in effect for however many years remain of the original 40.
And public domain isn't so bad. It means ANY company can publish a creative work. This, dare I use the word, would result in a COMPETETIVE market place, rather than the (communist) state-supported monopoly market which America has devolved into. Disney and WB and, heck, most major American companies are Anti-competetive despite their bullshit complaints to the contrary.
This voucher idea is insane. The DCMA is insane. Everybody is insane.
The more I think about it, the more convinced I am that the coming planetary cleansing is in fact a blessing in disguise.
The Masters Of The Universe do not want you to be free. Period.
Ergo, Open Source, non-corporate software MUST be destroyed. By whatever means. SCO, whether they realize it or not, (and I suspect they do), exists for the sole purpose of disabling this aspect of humanity.
Waaay back when the first industrial grain grinding mills were being built by the land owners, the town sherif, (i.e., the hired representative of the gentry), would go around and see that all the hand mills in all the peasant households were dragged out and smashed. It was now illegal for people to mill their own corn. What was once free, was now something they HAD to pay for. --All in the best interest of social advancement, of course. The gentry always had a rational-sounding argument, which in the end, just reduced the power of the populace. The the same reasoning is used today in order to shift publically owned utilities over to private and corporate ownership. And many people, (you can witness many examples right here on Slashdot) still believe they are not being lied to. --The argument for competition, being that it creates real incentive to make the best products sounds great except this line of argument ALWAYS leaves out the undeniable reality that when a handful of corporations own everything, it is virtually guranteed that artificial price-fixing WILL take place, and that products will start to decline in quality and effectiveness in such a way that people will need to buy twice as much as before in order to get the same job done. It's all about the elite trying to squeeze an under-educated public into supporting them.
In regard to SCO, nothing has changed since the days of the illegal hand mills, except in the level of sneakiness through which the ends are achieved. SCO's primary purpose, while it is profit motivated, it is not all in the way most people believe it to be. It's much, much bigger, and it's part of a war which has been going on for centuries.
I was in Toronto for the SARS thing. I was in Toronto for the huge black-out. Then I was on the East Coast for the weird hurricane which hit Halifax. I know people who have been financially screwed because of the Mad Cow thing, and this solar activity is happening right now. This is all within the last six months.
When I was a kid, it was a rare and noteworthy thing when even one of these sorts of events would occur.
Also within the last six months was the killer heat wave in France, and the drying up of numerous old rivers throughout Europe, and the crazy brush fires in California. --All of which, (with maybe the exception of the Danuabe drying up), are the sorts of things which would have been reported by the world press when I was a kid.
Now when it comes to earthquakes, perhaps you are right, but then who knows? There have certainly been dozens lately. And Old Faithful in Yellowstone has been spouting eratically for the last couple of years now, which has all the geologists wringing their hands.
As well, there have been a lot of big metorites in the last year, many actually striking the earth. --Another two events just since the beginning of November alone. Again, I don't recall any rocks falling out of the sky being reported when I was young, and that was during the seventies when the news industry was well established and quite robust. --And when all things related to space exploration were exciting and cool.
The human experiential cycle is reflected by the goings on in the natural world. Things are heating up!
Floods, Earthquakes, Heatwaves, Plagues, Mad Cows, Wildfires and Hurricanes in odd locations, anyone? Sure, this stuff happens, but all within such a short period of time?
Mind you, I doubt very much that the Earth is in any danger from the recent Solar activity. A few power problems, perhaps. (Not like those are anything new these days, either.)
It's the asteroid impacts, I expect, which could cause the, um, deepest impression.
No need to be afraid. It's happened before, it'll happen again. Kick back and enjoy the show. It's why you're here.
Oh, and the deadline for getting the heck out of the U.S. is rolling ever nearer. The government has been quietly re-staffingdraft boards. But then nobody listens to the tin-foil hatter. It's easier to laugh than to actually do something.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry. And I have mod points, too. It seems I've got a back-log of 'irresponsible' to get out this week.
-FL
Do you have any fucking right to be a pedantic asshole?
Ha ha! Touche. Totally missed that! But spelling errors aside, I still find canned responses of zero imagination to be little better than spam.
Honestly. Do you find "Correlation != Causation" to be compelling or original in the least? There was virtually nothing in the comment section itself and you've seen the damned line used a hundred times before. The poster was on auto-pilot, for crying out loud! Sorry. But I can't see myself as being pedantic in the slightest for pointing and laughing at this kind of low watt, formulaic idiocy.
-FL
Or as Buckaroo would ferociously point and cry, "EVIL!"
Yes. That about summs it up entirely, no mincing about. The war is on, and Mordor is at your doorstep. Where did I put my light sabre. . ?
-FL
Modded into the ground for speaking the truth.
I'll repeat my devastated post for those who would like to see it. .
Now. . . Please, if somebody would like to actually disagree with this. . . I would love to hear their 'logic'. As I see it, there is no rational defense of the corporate/government desire to tax and bill the bejeezus out of people through needless charges and needless regulation. And anybody who believes that the 'terrorist' nonsense is actually what it is being sold as, is a damned, damned fool.
But then I don't expect a whole lot of rational thought around here. Fear and Ignorance? Sure, but Rational Thought is a rare bird in these parts.
Self-deluding Cowards afraid to look at the world objectively disgust me.
-FL
Oh, and. .
Are people 'terrorists' if they become sickened with corporate/government leeches? Of course not, but that won't stop the Powers That Be from getting nervous when the masses start to steam with indignation. This is the reason for the push to remove freedoms and create a police state; fear of reprisal from the masses who are getting hurt and bled worse every day. This, and nothing more. Anybody who believes otherwise is a chump.
-FL
Do you use 1's and 5's instead of I's and S's too?
(Pardon me. I'm grouchy today. DO carry on.)
-FL
Basically, people will obsess over what they will obsess over, and they will learn the lessons they will learn.
But if I ever have kids, and if they decide to drench themselves in needless media violence, then they can do it behind my back, thank you very much! That stuff I find upsetting and revolting on a gut level, and I don't want it in my home environment. If my kids are going to grow up to be television-watching losers, then it won't be because their home and hearth have been sacrificed to the god of Big Media. They may hate me for 'depriving' them, but by the time they are adults they will at least have sharp minds and strong spines which have not been turned to mush by television and Pastey 'success' stories like John Carmack.
What they become after that will be up to them.
-FL
I have whiplash!
Look. Google is a useful tool but if nobody minds, I'll still be keeping my skills sharpened on alternative surfing methods, and my webpages well linked through other means. If Google decided tomorrow to cut you out of their search engine, what would happen to your business model?
May never happen, but before Google, this wasn't even a possibility of a problem. Now it is. And with Google wanting to make money. . . I'm glad that some moderators have the brains to recognize the inherent dangers here!
But then others have modded me down like a bunch of thoughtless, reactionary monkeys upset that their favorite search-engine through which they somehow define their meagre self images has been bad-mouthed. Whatever. If you'll excuse me, I'd just as soon the web were not set up in such a precarious manner.
When all the fish school off into predictable masses, that's when the trawling nets feast.
-FL
Remember the days when you used Altavista? --And when there were millions of personal webpages with, what did they call them. . , LINKS??? which led you across the wide and complex internet to find amazing pools of data and knowledge? Where people were required to think and explore in order to find things? Where cool and interesting top ranking, easy to find information was decided upon by pro-active linking controlled by millions of small webmasters and not some Google algorithm and the corporate advertising dollar?
The web is not supposed to have ONE main junction for data retrieval. Google is like a news-bite. It's easy, it's fast, it's incomplete, and worst of all, it makes everybody lazy, dependant and the SAME.
I am sick to death with the geek world fawning over this massive problem waiting to happen. It's about bloody time people began to realize the potential hazards with this sort of consolidation of power.
What? Because Google happens to use a Fischer Price color scheme, people think it's incapable of harm?
I am actually slightly more disgusted with people over this subject than I am with their complicity in the bullshit going down in the Middle East. If people are determined to walk around in their comfy bubble of ignorant bliss while massive systems congregate to fuck them over, then they deserve exactly what they get. You will be drafted and you will have the internet taken away from you. --And the 'best' part is that the small number of aware people get fucked over right along with everybody else, thanks to the tectonic plate-moving population masses of the child-minded.
-FL
However. . , being from the 'media as mind-control' camp, I'd like to add my two cents to round out the discussion.
'Command and Conquer' and 'MOO2' style games left a powerful impact upon the psyche of millions upon millions of gamers, many of whom are now grown up from those days and now participate in society as young, working voters.
I found the insane zeal, (yes, insane), for the initial American advance into Iraq to be, well, 'shocking and awful'. You could especially see it on Slashdot during the first week. --All those RTS game fantasies and C&C visions being played out for 'real' in a war zone seemed to be a hard-on thrill for more Americans than you could shake a stick at. (A nuclear powered stick, even. --And you'd have needed to!)
All the guys I know who play 'Ghost Recon' as their primary source of interactive fun are either hard-core pro-war, or it was a slow process for them to realize that Iraq was a Big Fucking Mistake. (Though, now that Bush got his bloodmoney-making machine going, it doesn't matter now what anybody thinks. The screw is in and gamers waking up late to the reality no longer matter.)
Those who find those types of games distasteful, seemed to have a much more balanced view of things. --Of course, perhaps my sample is too small; I only know a dozen or so guys who play that stuff. . , but among them, the observation holds up well.
So were popular war games a form of media influence used to direct people into accepting the drive toward global war? Oh, yes. I think so. Was it deliberate? Were the bosses of game companies accepting manilla envelopes from shadow figures while feeding pigeons? Heh. Probably not.
But here's the thing. . , and yes, this sounds sci-fi, but I do think it works this way: millions of people are subjected to powerful and deliberate forces they do not understand. Ask any number of influential writers and creators where they get their ideas, and when it comes right down to it, most of the time they'll say, "Hell, I don't know. It just came to me." Or, "I was taken by inspiration and just had to write it!" Or, "It just seemed to write itself!"
Yes, yes. Tin-foil hats, "get back on your medication" and "boy you're nuts," blah, blah, blah. But this is the shape of the world that I see. And the proof, as always, is in the pudding.
-FL
Nope. That's not what I meant. I meant that they're all the same.
The only way to understand love is to be in love.
Nope. That's not what I mean by love.
See, here we are caught in the clumsy grip of an English language totally insufficient to express what the hell we're each talking about.
Your thoughts all seem at first glance to be quite well formed, (anybody willing to write a whole page response to me on this kind of subject is probably fairly intelligent), but after realizing that we are using definitions and logical interpretations in completely different ways, I gave up.
See, today I am not bored. Another day, I would enjoy swapping philiosphical snafu-tangle-logic with you in an effort to construct co-linear understandings in a fascinating subject area, but sadly, this afternoon I have deadlines.
Take care, dude!
-Fl
"What? You got a problem with that? You chicken, McFly?! Draw!"
The only difference between this and highschool, (where the duel has basically been in practice since the first school bell ever rang), is that now there'd be a legal body count, the psychotic rush a bully gets from the transfer of power starts at a dangerously high level, and everybody gets to walk around with an extra fear in their gut.
In any case, I know adults who will roll up their sleeves and beat the shit out of each other to solve conflicts. (I live in a very rural area). No laws are broken, and its quite rare that lives are lost. Why involve lethality just to proove machismo? --And it would certainly come to that! With a 'legal dueling age,' young men eager to proove their masculinity and to justify all the practice they put into gun and sword training, would seek out idiot duels.
Feudal Japan once more? The Wild West once again? These days I can speak my mind to anybody I choose with the reasonable assurance that I won't be challenged to life or death combat over a political difference or for looking at some bozo's girlfriend. I do not think a return to the days of fear are a step toward a more civilized society. Those sorts of societies ALWAYS favor war-lords. Kings were abandoned in favor of democracy for a reason.
-FL
Love is Knowledge is Light.
That is, the more you learn, and the more you become a conduit of knowledge, the closer you come to understanding 'love' --which is meant in a sense above and beyond hormones and bad 'Friends' episodes. It's Light side versus Dark side.
Now you're probably wincing like mad right now, and frankly, so am I. The New-Age bullshit has scarred everybody. Indeed, if a New-Ager uses the term, 'Love & Light' it is usually best to run. Run for the hills, because they're most likely flakes who don't know what the hell they're talking about, don't know how to help themselves, much less anybody else, and who have done more damage to the concept than will likely ever be repaired.
In any case. .
The Universe as we experience it is entirely constructed of metaphor. --That is, all matter is energy, (we know that), but what is generally not understood is that all energy is consciousness. If you can accept this, then energy which, is expressed through the physical, remains an expression of consciousness. The world is one big Freudian Slip.
Anyway. .
The more intense the 'thought form', the more likely it is that the metaphor will become very clear to the point of being a dead give-away.
Ransom Love. .
How much more obvious can you get?
-FL
Regular people just want to live their lives. They do not want to live in constant, shell-shocked fear of some false-bravado asshole waving a gun in their face at some percieved insult to their ego-impaired machismo.
This is an incredibly stupid idea which never fails to be trucked out by some short-sighted armchair logic nitwit. Move to a lawless country where this idiot idea is reality, or shut the hell up. --Or better yet, join a street gang where lack of respect is also punishable by death, because that system certainly works to keep people civilized and whining bullets out of school yards which are filled with everybody else who isn't a fucking moron.
-FL
Oooh. But, Porn. Nekkid people!
People who are going to become screwed up by this are going to do so regardless. If there are people walking around who aren't dangerously blithering only because they didn't have the option of exploring things on their own, then I am not encouraged. This is not television violence. This is not drug use. This is not fast food designed to be addictive. This is not video games. This is not culture and fashion as promoted by music videos.
--Didja know that Britney Spears' videos were created by none other than, Greg Dark, noted for his previous work in distributing child-porn? He was making the infamous Tracy Lords films when the girl was 13. Today he's also today making videos for Mandy Moore and the pre-pubescent Leslie Carter. This guy should be bloody knighted for his work in screwing up culture and creating an environment which has caused a ballooning of the multi-billion dollar pedephillia market, which today dwarfs even Disney as a money-making engine. People blame the web? Wrong! The web is simply a means to express individual will. Television is the mind-programmer. Television is the culture destroyer.
Of all things in pop-culture, I think that the web is one of the very few which may not be directly destructive at all. By raw necessity it incorporates the user's choice in every click and action, and because it is possible for regular PEOPLE to create powerful content, not just the corporations. Channel surfing only provides choices from a barrel of mostly rotten apples. The web gives you an entire orchard.
Further, there is nothing, (to my knowledge), about the web which is directly physiologically addictive/destructive. The web is nothing more than ideas and images and sounds, all of which can be turned off without exiting the web itself. Even the freekin' advertising is an option! Amazing! The web, unlike television, does not almost instantly lull the brain into a hypnotic state of scientifically measurable suggestibility! People think they are not affected by television media? STUPID! People aren't even properly conscious when they watch television, for crying out loud! But with the web, brain activity actually increases! --Depending, of course on the choices of the user. One can just as easily slide into stupidity on the web if they want to. --But it is through choice, not through an addictive craving to sit down in front of 'Friends' or 'CNN' or some other bullshit, you know; to relax after a hard day's work.
--Yes, young kids should be taught to exercise caution in chat rooms, etc., because there are predatory adults in this world. (A lot more of them today thanks to the likes of Greg Dark.) This is a sad truth, and it's best to learn these survival skills. If you want to protect your kids, teach them about the ugliness in the world; teach them not to be afraid of it, but how to recognize trouble and how to deal with it. You are not helping them by looking over their shoulders, re-enforcing guilt culture while they seek to learn about sexuality. Oooh, sexuality and guilt. There's a healthy combo!
Frankly, I'd be more concerned about a kid's exposure to the EM bubble created by a CRT monitor, and by that soothing flicker which plays a role in the creating of hypnotic states of awareness in the viewer. Get them a flat screen, tell them about the world and how it works, teach them not to fear or shy away from ugly truths, and encourage balanced activities in their lives. Happiness comes from self-determination, and self-determination comes from awareness and action. Soothing lies deplete and destroy.
-FL
-Is that Awareness determines the outcome of your experienced reality.
Okay, it's Qunatum Theory with the Fantastic Lad twist. .
All there is are lessons. As such, in the best interest of efficiency, there is no need to duplicate experiences. Being fully cogniscent of a possible outcome, planning and imagining it in full detail in your mind is often enough to complete the lesson without the need for the physical manifestation. As such, you will experience some variation of events you did not prepare for.
Ever wonder why the conversation with that girl/boy you like never goes the way you hoped? Or why worst case scenarios you fret over never seem to unfold? Or more the point, why you sometimes are able to prevent disaster with subtle actions taken on an instinct?
This is why it is important to NOT believe the lies. --The lies told by the Bush administration are warm and fuzzy lies, and if you believe them and embrace them and imagine them, then they have no need to happen. --They will happen in some other reality where they are unexpected outcomes. In this reality, where so many people expect outcomes to be warm and fuzzy, we are ripe for being hit with extremely miserable turns of events.
Look at the reality people hoped for in Iraq. "The war is expected to last for only 10 weeks." "The Iraqis are joyful of their liberators." "We will find many Weapons of Mass Destruction." Etc.
The interesting truth of guys like me is that we spit and scream about the ugliness which is unfolding. We even make predictions, (and will continue to do so), and if we are lucky, if enough people start to become aware, then those possibilities become unglued. They do not happen.
Diebold is such an example. Enough people are becomming aware, and see? The Diebold threat is beginning to unravel. If the pressure is kept up, then perhaps that battle will be won in this war. But the pressure must be kept up.
Awareness!
-FL
Yep. You pretty much have to do that. People in North America, (that's Canadians, too!), have been trained not to respond unless made to feel special first.
The fact that it's true, helps, although I'd cough soundly at the idea that this was the first time this sort of abuse has been perpetrated!
-FL
Banks trust electronic payments and ATM to be accurate to the last cent. Why could e-voting not also be that accurate ?
Of course e-voting could be that accurate. The problem is that Banks have an obsessive interest in keeping their numbers straight. They're obsessed with money. However, those who exert influence over political voting systems are obssessed with power, and keeping the numbers straight is exactly the sort of thing which can often prevent the acquisition of power.
-FL
Wasn't that one of the coolest days ever? It was like Sci-Fi come to life!
Of course, it became an annoyance, but I still think the idea is pretty darned interesting. If somebody was writing about our world as a piece of speculative fiction, (and this is indeed what our world seems like most of the time to me, especially today), then the computer virus was probably one of the more inventive and award-winning ideas which pushed the book onto the best-seller list.
At least I hope so. Our present world seems kind of like a Neal Stephenson novel which isn't on crack. Maybe it isn't a best-seller.
In any case, I wonder who the main character is? Sure isn't me. I feel like a back-ground noise supporting cast member if anything. Might have brushed shoulders with him/her for a minute somewhere.
Either that, or I am the main character, and it's a really boring novel!
-FL
Regular motion picture film is already an odd thing; a machine with a lense and some moving parts which captures a series of 2D images of the 3D world which can later be projected as a moving picture? That works? Weird.
But when you go the next step and consider rooms full of people drawing single frames at a time to achieve the same end. .
Argh! That's so bizarre! You're kidding, right? Nobody would ever do something crazy like that, would they? That sort of effort is only undertaken by colonies of ants which are basically biological nano-bots with limited individual awareness, not by groups of people who come equipped all that extra thinking power. Rooms full of people scratching out hundreds of thousands of still images? It's mad!
I think it is because of this that animation still seems to me one of the most magical things I can imagine. It seems impossible, and yet, there it is.
3D animation projects like Monsters Inc, or Shrek, or Toys aren't the same sort of thing at all. Those are more like engineering projects using CAD programs. All based on mathematical algorithms. Digital versus analog. --Sure there is a heavy creative aspect involved, but all those films, despite their sharp comedic timing and bright visuals, felt stamped with the inhuman to me. Manufactured. They felt like clever simulations of art.
Maybe it's just because I'm from an older generation. Maybe the logical distinctions are merely emotionally based and hold no real objective meaning. But to me, classical animation seems like real art. It seems warm and magical. Computer animation leaves me cold.
As such, a good artist with a stick of graphite and a sheet of paper will always be able to amaze me. An artist with a mouse (rat?) and an expensive computer system will never be able to reach my soul.
I don't like digital photography either. Try this sometime. .
Spend a year being exposed only to digital camera images, (that's most of you, I suspect). Then have somebody hand to you a packet of paper slicks from a photo-lab of your non-computer savvy friend's holiday as captured on a 35 millimeter SLR, and thumb through those. You'll be blown away by just how much you missed but never realized.
-FL
2. Deliberately create and enforce the use of shoddy OS software vulnerable to virus attacks.
3. Deliberately allow the water to boil until the public is going out of their tiny minds. .
4. Quietly start introducing draconian controls to the web. People, if not begging for them, will at the very least be more likely to tolerate such measures. (And, yes, that would be, 'Profit!')
It's getting close, kids. Cuz, you know, Terrorism, blah blah blah.
-FL
Things weren't quite so messed up ten years ago.
In my ideal world. . . People and people's families would be allowed to hold a copyright for, say, 60 years, after which the material would go into the public domain.
Corporations, because they are souless entities and not people, should be only be allowed to hold copyright for say, 40 years, (the approximate length of time the original people who worked on the project can be expected to remain employed at the company.) After that, the work should go into public domain.
Further, I think that the transfer/sale of copyright should be completely illegal. The origin of a creation doesn't change simply because you sign a paper. The ability to sell and trade copyrights has been an undermining factor Western society for a long time.
Corporations, if they are dissolved or sold, should be considered as dead and all their works should become public domain. --Or perhaps the copyright should defer to a coalition of the original creators should they choose to create a co-operative holding company, underwhich the copyright would remain in effect for however many years remain of the original 40.
And public domain isn't so bad. It means ANY company can publish a creative work. This, dare I use the word, would result in a COMPETETIVE market place, rather than the (communist) state-supported monopoly market which America has devolved into. Disney and WB and, heck, most major American companies are Anti-competetive despite their bullshit complaints to the contrary.
This voucher idea is insane. The DCMA is insane. Everybody is insane.
The more I think about it, the more convinced I am that the coming planetary cleansing is in fact a blessing in disguise.
-FL
The Masters Of The Universe do not want you to be free. Period.
Ergo, Open Source, non-corporate software MUST be destroyed. By whatever means. SCO, whether they realize it or not, (and I suspect they do), exists for the sole purpose of disabling this aspect of humanity.
Waaay back when the first industrial grain grinding mills were being built by the land owners, the town sherif, (i.e., the hired representative of the gentry), would go around and see that all the hand mills in all the peasant households were dragged out and smashed. It was now illegal for people to mill their own corn. What was once free, was now something they HAD to pay for. --All in the best interest of social advancement, of course. The gentry always had a rational-sounding argument, which in the end, just reduced the power of the populace. The the same reasoning is used today in order to shift publically owned utilities over to private and corporate ownership. And many people, (you can witness many examples right here on Slashdot) still believe they are not being lied to. --The argument for competition, being that it creates real incentive to make the best products sounds great except this line of argument ALWAYS leaves out the undeniable reality that when a handful of corporations own everything, it is virtually guranteed that artificial price-fixing WILL take place, and that products will start to decline in quality and effectiveness in such a way that people will need to buy twice as much as before in order to get the same job done. It's all about the elite trying to squeeze an under-educated public into supporting them.
In regard to SCO, nothing has changed since the days of the illegal hand mills, except in the level of sneakiness through which the ends are achieved. SCO's primary purpose, while it is profit motivated, it is not all in the way most people believe it to be. It's much, much bigger, and it's part of a war which has been going on for centuries.
-FL
When I was a kid, it was a rare and noteworthy thing when even one of these sorts of events would occur.
Also within the last six months was the killer heat wave in France, and the drying up of numerous old rivers throughout Europe, and the crazy brush fires in California. --All of which, (with maybe the exception of the Danuabe drying up), are the sorts of things which would have been reported by the world press when I was a kid.
Now when it comes to earthquakes, perhaps you are right, but then who knows? There have certainly been dozens lately. And Old Faithful in Yellowstone has been spouting eratically for the last couple of years now, which has all the geologists wringing their hands.
As well, there have been a lot of big metorites in the last year, many actually striking the earth. --Another two events just since the beginning of November alone. Again, I don't recall any rocks falling out of the sky being reported when I was young, and that was during the seventies when the news industry was well established and quite robust. --And when all things related to space exploration were exciting and cool.
But think as you will.
-FL
Floods, Earthquakes, Heatwaves, Plagues, Mad Cows, Wildfires and Hurricanes in odd locations, anyone? Sure, this stuff happens, but all within such a short period of time?
Mind you, I doubt very much that the Earth is in any danger from the recent Solar activity. A few power problems, perhaps. (Not like those are anything new these days, either.)
It's the asteroid impacts, I expect, which could cause the, um, deepest impression.
No need to be afraid. It's happened before, it'll happen again. Kick back and enjoy the show. It's why you're here.
Oh, and the deadline for getting the heck out of the U.S. is rolling ever nearer. The government has been quietly re-staffing draft boards. But then nobody listens to the tin-foil hatter. It's easier to laugh than to actually do something.
Knowledge protects. Ignorance endangers.
-FL