It's all about intent. Researchers who study living systems by killing and mutilating other creatures without awareness and compassion do so at their own expense. I've met researchers who kill animals without having adequately made peace with themselves or the creatures involved. Instead, what often occurs is that they shut parts of themselves off and try to believe that "it's all for the greater good", (usually a lie). Some are better at convincing themselves of this than others. The ones who break down after ten minutes of discussing the problem have souls which are either budding or which have not yet been killed off. Those who do not are very often living in a self-delusion which carries a price.
All costs are tallied and will be paid back regardless of what people believe in the present moment. What comes around goes around.
Behaving with stupidity and barbarism is like buying on credit.
How do i disable that fucking live twitter feed on the right? I clicked on the link to read a Wired article, not listen to random dumbasses whining!
Actually, on any given screen other than your own, you appear as a random dumb-ass. And gee, you are also whining. --About a non-issue as it happens. If you want to insulate your precious self from the outside world, then it's entirely possible to do this by configuring your browser accordingly.
Just a few thoughts for you to consider. --If indeed you have the brain tissue required for such a feat. Which is very doubtful.
When your website is just a few font sizes shy of TimeCube, you've lost even me.
Insanity has a specific smell and that guy's site reeks of it. It's different from manic-depressive, from which real and useful innovations can arise. This guy just seems nuts.
But that's just the smell test. If somebody can reproduce his findings in a meaningful way, I'd be the first in line to shake his hand. Until then, I trust my nose.
I've seen several D&D groups destroyed by the single asshole who a friend brought along because they felt sorry and figured, "All s/he needs is a supportive group of other geeks where s/he can gain a little self-esteem."
And then the needy little vampire proceeds to piss everybody off, make the evening painful and totally un-fun, and one by one, the real people you wanted to play with get fed up and move on. The worst is when more assholes show up and infest your group, and the next thing you know, your light and energizing game night has become a dark drain upon your life.
Basic rule of gaming: Never, NEVER play with people who you don't like and wouldn't choose to spend time with normally. Seems straight forward enough, but the problem is very common. --People forget that it's a D&D game, not a therapy session for creeps. If you are foolish enough to get sucked into vampiric relationships with monster people, my heart goes out to you; we've all been there, but it's your job to figure it out and leave the leach at the door and not inflict your monster on everybody else.
The difficult part is that while many people are geeks by choice, others are geeks by default. There are a lot of cool people to be found at sci-fi conventions, but then there are the troll people who don't bathe, talk too loud, have no social graces and who hide from life in D&D land. No thank-you. If they are genuinely troubled souls trying their best to improve, well that's great, but they can do it elsewhere. One of the most memorable rock-bottom moments before I finally cashed in my chips and abandoned a D&D group, (I was the last of the real people to go), was when the creep in question began getting off on torturing NPC's in prolonged sessions, Reservoir Dogs style.
I felt sick for a whole day afterward and I was furious that a weakling little turd like him had single-handedly managed over the course of several months to destroy something which had been awesome, bright and powerful. I'm still angry with myself for not cutting him off in the beginning when it would have been easy and my gut had been telling me to do so. Never again.
Slashdot is a news re-server, and its power exists in the Slashcode comment system. It's like a stomach for news, where all the users are bacteria and enzymes breaking down the content tossed down its gullet.
Your current post is an apt example of this principal at work.
Collective editorial oversight in the wild. --It's great, because we are encouraged by the very ecosystem of Slashdot to question and hash out EVERYTHING. More often than not, when perusing the comments one will see the truth (or at least more of it than was previously available with just the official media), will bubble to the surface. And it's not authoritarian "truth"; rather, it's the kind which requires that the reader think and research and discern. Many people will not come away with full information because they choose not to; Lazy people want to be told how reality is. And that's great! It allows freedom. The freedom to be an idiot means that there also exists the freedom to be enlightened. Slashdot at its best encourages people to WORK to find out what reality is, which it does daily.
Some of the most powerful learning I've done has come through people telling me why I'm wrong about something and backing it up with solid details. Also, watching others go through the same process is a great way to learn.
...on this issue, he is a nutbar. How can he decry people who ignore all the scientific evidence of evolution or global warming, yet do the same thing himself on this issue?
Because the scientific evidence is far from unanimous and a good portion of it is coming from biased parties who stand to gain billions of dollars if their version of reality is accepted?
I agree that it would be nice to live in "Future-world" where mature minds and real science rule the day (and there's a trustworthy Starfleet officer on every deck), but we don't live in that world. We live in a world of war, slavery, treachery and psychopaths and corrupt agendas. So when somebody comes at you with a needle, if you persist in pretending that your dream world is the real world, you're probably going to get used and abused in order to feed somebody further up the pyramid.
Far too many people struggle to live in false realities which suit their sensibilities and egos, etc.; what they wish the world was rather than what it is. These people are food.
--Face recognition software ought to be able to replace actors heads with yours in all the appropriate places, and get the lighting correct, etc. As well as being able to re-map whole environments according to taste.
With formula writing being what it is, you could probably even set up algorithms capable of recognizing romantic scenes versus actions sequences. Humans are quite predictable as to what they respond to. It sounds like you could just punch in, "Romantic comedy, straight couple, includes car chase, musical number, and a bitter-sweet ending."
How interesting. Artificial Intelligence might display its initial strengths through pop-art, the one place where we thought we were truly unique and strong.
I mean, come on. The man must have known that he would get caught, which leads me to wonder if in fact he really did anything wrong.
Anybody here who wrote a program for a prison system would consider it irresponsible to NOT set passwords. But before you are given a chance to explain the very good reasons for what you've done, the big men with truncheons who are already watching you like a hawk assume the worst and start running around like Chicken Little with the sky falling.
That's my guess.
And chickens just LOVE it when the sky falls; it gives them a sense of purpose and an excuse to play 'hero'. Heck, I know a couple of cops, and they are good people, but their world view is very slanted due to regular exposure to the criminal element. Without a healthy means of grounding to the real world, their sense of reality can become wildly inaccurate. Add to that some over-enlarged ego, lots of fear, pack-mentality and a bit of down-home stupid, and you're looking at a system where innocence is not assumed and some really terrible things can -and do- happen.
I'm not saying the guy was mister pure-heart, but I bet the whole story isn't being represented here. --What with the hysteria that both police and the media typically spin themselves into over anything to do with computer 'hackers', I think this is entirely likely.
But it appears that many posters here aren't capable of remembering the patterns they see in the news wrt this kind of story. Hackers!
Game designers build realities in which the narrative action takes place. The rules of that reality have to come from somewhere. Those rules are based on personal beliefs and dogma.
I remember back around the time when I realized I couldn't play video games anymore, I was playing this game involving soldiers and medieval towns and castles and such. If you performed certain actions, then the local economy responded in very specific ways which reflected a strong belief in the All American, "Let the Market Decide" form of Free Market monetary/social Darwinism which so many geeks are mesmerized by. --It was quite annoying to see unrealistic behavior in the game mechanic when I performed actions which should, in my mind, have resulted in different effects. It was like the game designers and I were in an argument, and they won because they'd set the parameters of the argument and none of it was taking place in the real world.
Dogma verses Dogma.
Games provide a soap box where geeks get to work out their frustrations by building a reality where they are always RIGHT! Very closely linked to this is the same geek desire to have a data jack implanted into the rear of one's skull so that this difficult reality we all live in can be escaped into the VR 'verse where nobody can hurt you or make fun of you.
Add to this that synaptic connections build up based on experience; Playing games for hundreds and hundreds of hours re-wires the brain so that it starts to solve problems based on what it perceived to be the reality in which its stress reactions are played out. So I'd say that video games are not just an effective way to express one's beliefs, but an excellent way to force adoption of those beliefs in others.
That this isn't immediately obvious is rather alarming.
The problem is that the media is begging the question, framing the data, and making stuff up so that reasonable people will say, "It sure seems that way!" --and then go along with the next incredibly stupid war on the agenda. Remember; the people driving this shit are the same ones who bankrupted the country and lied about WMD's in order to control oil and people and everything else.
No thank-you. I just don't believe the bullshit anymore. Iran may not be perfect, but frankly, I'm more concerned with religious fanatics of the Republican/Palin variety (Apocalypse NOW) at home with access to the button than I am about the weapons held by nations half a planet away. And who the hell cares about Israel anyway? The loony Zionists have been burning their bridges like crazy these past few years. The world is going to let out a collective grunt of righteousness when they finally get themselves nuked. And now organ harvesting? Ugh. Why doesn't the big media focus appropriate attention on THAT for a while?
But, personally, I never liked it. My recollection is that none of the stories ever resolved. That always seemed sloppy and lazy to me. The basic Twilight Zone plot always seemed to be: a) Creepy, weird, moderately intriguing things start to happen for no reason. b) Things continue to happen. c) Finally, things stop happening, for no reason. I always felt cheated.
It sounds like Scooby Doo was using the story-telling pattern which you click with best. Mysterious force appears, wrangling with said force, and then, "It was the theme-park operator the whole time! He just wanted the oil drilling rights! (--And he'd have gotten them too, if it weren't for those meddling kids!)
Twilight Zone (which I loved), was weirdness as it often unfolds for real; people are overwhelmed and incapable of pulling together the smarts, strength and social-support/networking required to unravel baffling and upsetting events. My only disappointment with Scooby Doo is that they never actually ran into something which didn't have a mundane explanation. I would have liked to have seen the Scooby Gang deal with the real supernatural while keeping their wits about them. Even super-weird stuff has its roots and reasons and can be worked out and understood.
I knew a guy who went off and fought in Iraq because of Starship Troopers. He came back reporting that he'd been a fool. I was tired at the time and gave a half-assed attempt to console him by saying, "Well, you gained a great deal of experience and insight into how the real world works. You got conned." He shot back, "Yeah, they say the military builds character, but it's the wrong kind of character. --It builds unquestioning idiots and killers and those who survive come back fucked up. I'm fucked up."
As for the right to vote; I have to agree, most people shouldn't be allowed to vote. They're too stupid and too easily fooled by propaganda into supporting idiotic things. --But to give the vote to that specific subsection of people who were fooled into becoming military killers. . ? That's insane. The world would need to be at war all the time to provide the initiatory test bed necessary to make the voting system possible. (And preparation for war always means war.) --Not only that, but those voting under such a scheme would have all gone through military training. --Which everybody knows is a punishing kind of brainwashing served up by the very Government they'd be voting for. A vote from somebody who has been brainwashed is the same as a confession beaten from a torture victim. Not worth a damn. --This would negate the whole idea of freedom of thought and democracy in general.
Basically, you're talking complete idiocy.
Here's a gem for you: In a world where all money printed by governments is borrowed from a small banking cartel at interest, how is it possible for governments to pay back the principal plus interest? --Well, they borrow more money, also at interest. This is exactly how it works. Thus one small collective of banks established god-knows how long ago when personal fortunes were first amassed by men, those shadowy creeps with their own secret services and their fingers in every important pot, own everything. Kennedy was killed in a large part because he tried to take them on by trying, (horrors) to introduce an actual American dollar, printed by the actual American government and not borrowed at interest from anybody. This could have changed everything. It could have broken the chains of world slavery to the banking cartels. So for this and other similar reasons, he had to go. Today's politicians know this and they play right along because they're cowards and they know that the only way to survive is to climb to the top of the power structure. Obama and Bush are cut from the same cloth. --You and I and your father and everybody else are slaves to this economic system burdened under ever-increasing world debt. Voting is a giant and meaningless scam. This is entirely by design and the military is just a means of generating big gobs of debt very quickly while conveniently providing a means to kill and brain-wash those men and women in the population who might actually be strong enough and righteous enough to do something about it. But they won't because the perfect method for systematically processing such people has obviously been found. Just distribute copies of fucking Heinlein to all the 18 year-olds and sit back.
Heinlein was either evil or he was a damned tool presenting a one-sided argument in such a charismatic and inspiring manner that young people reading it were blinded by its alpha-male logic and its glorious trumpet call to arms and general testosterone laden horseshit. --Drunk on this crap, readers missed the flaws in the argument. Try reading slower and thinking faster next time you pick it up. You'll be amazed.
You cannot dismiss the stars as unimportant and just say that it is the planet's position that matters. Why? Because the only way we can measure a planet's position is by comparing it with the location of stars.
I was tempted to leave this here because shortly after I hit the, "Submit" button I realized I was in rather gross error regarding the nature of how stars are used in Astrology. The planets are read against a backdrop of stars which determine which areas of the 'chart' they are in and what influences they correlate to. With regard to the Eastern model, however, my comments remain valid. The horoscopes are based on calendar readings so the shifting stars are not relevant. In any case, I thought, "Doh! I hate it when I state something firmly only to realize I was wrong.!" But so what? That's no excuse to run away. I'm also in love with science and learning.
The problem is that based on my observations, Astrology simply works. I went in very skeptical as well, and I've certainly studied the ways in which people can be fooled. I went in with that knowledge, and guys like Randi were heroic in my eyes. But the signal to noise ratio I saw in Astrology was ridiculously strong and was not adequately explained by the predictions made by science. The experiment in the school room video is a good example. That particular aspect of human nature would have been in evidence regardless of whether the reading was accurate or not for some people. It only shows that people can fool themselves, and we know this to be true. But it doesn't say that the reading might not have fit very well for 1/12 of the people in the room and have required much more self-delusion for the rest. --I've seen accurate readings which would not have functioned well in that test because they were far too specific to certain personality types and would simply have made Randi's demonstration seem less convincing. It must never be forgotten that the man is a seasoned stage magician. He knows all about fooling an audience to achieve a certain effect. It would be very foolish to assume that he didn't hand-pick the astrological reading for that event to be well-suited to the performance he intended to put on. It cuts both ways.
The point is this; I've seen and done a lot of 'impossible' things which are not adequately explained by main-stream skepticism. At some point, one has to decide whether or not to trust one's senses, to live by what is seen, felt, heard, etc., Science is a very useful tool, but I don't trust all of its practitioners, (Randi and his huge ego least of all!), and I don't trust all of its processes. Even among researchers who have their egos in check, the lure of corruption in its many forms is often too much to resist. Science is valuable, but like astrology, it must not be taken whole-cloth without vetting.
Why does a clump of stars that looks to be close together from eath have any significance, when we now know that some of them might be 1000s of light years further away than others. Take Orion's belt for example, most cultures on earth have grouped this striking three star constellation together(including western and chinese). The furthest star is 600 light years further away than the nearest.
Well, a couple of things here. . . The first is that, as I presently think about things, the distant stars do not have the direct influences which are discussed in astrology. It's the planets, which still very far away are certainly not as far off as the stars. The stars provide a constant board against which the planetary positions can be accurately measured. As that board has moved a bit over the last few thousand years, the measurements of the planets ought, as you note, to no longer hold with the established rules of what each planet means when it is in such and such a 'house'. That I can't explain and it does indeed seem to be a fundamental flaw in the whole system. And yet the system keeps right on working, so I'm forced to conclude that something else is at work whi
Yes, James Randi is good at pointing out how humans can be easily fooled. The video you linked to is an apt example of why common newspaper astrology is pretty useless. It's also a good example of how a flakey astrologer with a turban and a crystal ball can con people. This is all very true, and I've seen countless versions of this argument, and the example Randi offers in that classroom video was an excellent presentation of that feature of the human psyche.
But it brings to mind the logical fallacy, "All cows are animals, therefore all animals are cows."
Randi is missing one key detail, as is everybody else who thinks that the above example is all there is to astrology. --And that detail is this: When you remove the con artists and the vague newspaper horoscope section, astrology actually works.
When you read a real astrology book, it is actually not so vague as one is led to believe all horoscope material is. A good book is filled with very specific descriptions which cannot apply to everybody, filled with key details which match up with the individual being described and which totally fail to describe those it does not apply to. I've never seen Randi look at that kind of astrology, and because he's such a giant ego himself who has based his entire reputation and self-worth on being right about his many assertions about reality, he will probably continue to avoid such sources. Some of his arguments when has been cornered have been childish and ridiculous and petty in the extreme. That's what happens when somebody cannot let go of their sacred cows.
If you want to test this out for yourself, (if you aren't scared of letting go of your own sacred cows), then I would recommend this book. Amazon appears to have used copies available for less than a dollar plus postage. You can probably own your very own for less than the price of a food court lunch. Most people will not do this, precisely because they assume they know everything already, or worse, they don't want to risk being wrong, but this is the kind of research I am talking about and which needs to be done before a valid opinion can been obtained. --It's easy to read all manner of studies and watch James Randi videos, but the research which skeptics never seem to do is to actually find a competent source and read a few horoscopes and gauge for themselves the accuracy. There's a very big difference between vague bullshit descriptions about what geminis and cancers might be like, -and having very specific details about your life described to you in a single paragraph.
In the book linked above, every eastern sign with its specific element is given a two paragraph specific treatment which is quite upsetting for the hardened skeptic because it blows them out of the water by describing them down to their shoelaces with stark accuracy in terms which cannot be handed back over their shoulders to accurately describe the student sitting behind them. It just doesn't work. --And it's a little humbling to discover that there are only 60 basic human templates walking around. Of course, there are infinite variations on each theme, but the hard specifics are frighteningly nailed down. This is something people find very upsetting, as it should. Everybody, with very, very few exceptions, is a slave to their robotic, automatic nature and astrology makes this plain. People hate that truth and so they fight it at every turn, but the only way to truly fight it is to look it straight in the face and learn how it works. Only then can one attempt to stop being a robot. But that's the advanced stuff. We're still on basic astrology at the moment. ..)
Now, you bring up a fascinating point. . . The fact that the stars have moved over the last thousand years or so.
However, in Western astrology this simple doesn't represent any difficulties. Western astrology is based not on stars but planets, and the planets
Theodora Lau's Handbook of Chinese Horoscopes. (A good book for Eastern Astrology).
Susan Miller's website is a fairly robust example of the Western model.
Those two sources offer clean(ish) versions of the basic starter material. But the most effective research is done using such sources in conjunction with long personal observations.
I have researched this and know what I am talking about!
Okay!
And am I correct in assuming from your poster, (mister), that you hold Astrology in a dim view? I just want to know what kind of person I'm talking with so as to avoid making any false assumptions at the outset.
Just a little remark: there's no company called the "Fox Channels". The Fox brand is spread over dozens of semi-independent companies of News Corp., which have little relation to each other in terms of their management and PR. Saying "Fox Something" when you deal with huge corporations is simply useless. Waggener Edstrom has been doing some work for "Fox International Channels" in particular, which are doing work broadcasting and producing shows for public outside USA. [. ..] What is the company Microsoft previously worked with? Crispin Porter + Boguski, also considered one of the "smartest marketing firms on the planet", who have done work for Burger King, Coca Cola, American Express, Domino's and more. And now they have Microsoft on their portfolio thanks to their work few months back, which was poorly received, and mostly forgotten by now, with frequent strategy shifts, awkward moments and prematurely ending projects and relationships. This is how these "big smart marketing companies" build portfolio and you better get used to being tricked by their statements when "googling a little" as you say you do.
Fair enough, re the Fox Channels remark. It was ten seconds of Googling after all. My point, and I should think this would be clear to you, is that large and successful PR companies have studied psychology extensively and they don't look stupid unless they want to look stupid. You bring up the hopelessly mis-used Occam without understanding, it seems, the principal behind Occam. Let me put it this way. ..
Is it more reasonable that a group well versed in psychology put out a series of ads, (keeping in mind that this is their primary focus of trade upon which their livelihoods depend) for a huge and important client like Microsoft desperate at this point to make sure that their new OS doesn't fail in the market place, but that through simple negligence they just happened to make the ad series pathetic. . ? -OR- is it more likely that they used the skills and knowledge they are trained in to deliberately make the ad series APPEAR pathetic because they understand how humans in large groups tend to react to stimuli?
You seem to be suggesting that, all things being equal, it is more likely that they are just a bunch of bumbling fools who don't care if they shoot videos which look like bad student films even when their reputations with a large client at a crucial marketing period -during a recession- are on the line. And you have the audacity to bring up Occam?
Also. ..
Crispin Porter & Boruski were responsible for the Seinfeld-Bill Gates team up. That move, (despite their almost certainly self-edited entry in Wikipedia which declares it to be a giant and embarrassing flop), was largely responsible for the positive reaction Windows 7 has been receiving. Here's the message which hit home in that 'Flop': "Gates is a socially awkward dork who went walkabout, leaving MS in the hands of Ballmer who screwed up the farm with Vista. BUT Gates is back now! And THAT's what you want as an investor in MS. You don't want Bill to be cool and savvy. You want him to be a social-retard who happens to be a brilliant computer/business genius who will make you lots of money when he gets back to work. Vista wasn't his fault, and now that he's back at the helm, the next Windows product is going to kick ass, and you the audience, are going to WANT it to kick ass because it's so painful to see Bill look like an idiot that you want him to have a success."
And that's not a retroactive excuse. That's exactly how it read at the time, and that's exactly what went on to happen. And THAT is public relations magic at its most effective.
I'm missing your point. Even I have written a tool for analyzing tweets, as I bet anyone who toyed with Twitter's API. Can I get lots of money now? All I get out of the above is that you're easily impressed by buzz-words. The amount of Second Life, Twitter and Facebook apps a marketing company has may have sur
People are asking, "How could Microsoft, with all its wealth and power, produce such a stupid series of ads?"
Because they're smarter than you?
--Because they have enough wealth and power to hire one of the smartest public relations firms on the planet. Waggener Edstrom is the same firm in charge of the Fox Channels. If there's any one thing they know how to do, it's identify a market and then lock down that market forever and ever and sell them whatever the hell 'truth' they feel like selling.
Here's a small clip from a page I found after about 10 seconds of Google searching. ..
Like many tech PR firms, WaggEd also monitors religiously Twitter trends involving its biggest client. On March 11, WaggEd went beyond simply monitoring tweets: It introduced a beta version of a software tool for monitoring and analyzing them.
Do they sound stupid now?
My guess is that they're doing three things with this ad. . .
1. They're trying to tap into a universal feeling of awkwardness that everybody feels when recalling a "PCP" party. (Parents, Chips and Pop). They're doing this because awkward, painful feelings open up memory centers. Information given during a period of high anxiety gets locked into place in the human mind. This is a well-known and often-used ploy in mind control. The information being served up in these ads is NOT how to run your software or all the features offered by their OS, but that "WINDOWS 7 EXISTS AND IT IS UBIQUITOUS AND YOU, AS A PACK ANIMAL HAD BETTER GET WITH THE PROGRAM OR RISK EXPULSION FROM THE HERD!!!!"
2. Trying to tap into the feeling of safety and love which people also feel when they think of their parents and the silly birthday parties thrown for them when they were little. Why? Because an OS is the bedrock upon which you ground your entire computer existence, --the same way your parents provided the bedrock for your adult behavior sets. You might think your parents were stupid and annoying, and you probably want to deny it, but the truth of the matter is that most people grow up to become their parents.
3. Go viral. --Using such deliberate tactics designed to rope in the lower echelon of geeks, such as stove clocks which are obviously bouncing around 'wrong' in exactly the kind of way geeks like to point out and be "Right" about. Fuck, fuck, FUCK! There's a whole sick cultural system through which people who like computer technology were warped into that "Look! I'm RIGHT!" head-space, and you had better believe that clock "error" was on purpose so as to lock them in. Low-hanging fruit.
So, please, for goodness sake, try to think outside of the bloody box when approaching the toxic waste which is advertising! If you fall for this kind of stupid shit, then you're nothing but slaves who deserve to be used and abused, and you WILL be.
Sorry for the harsh language, but this is important.
Whenever somebody claims that a purely subjective thing, like a book, actor, car, computer, or in this case, a whole nation is the "Best" in the world, I sigh deeply and reach for my WTF? filters. --Your point of view and (faulty) sense of reality aren't universal conditions, nor should they be.
Until people realize who is really controlling who, then all of their pontification isn't meaningful in the slightest.
The world banking elite are the managers of the world and all of this artificially constructed strife we're seeing.
This of course justifies the protesters to help themselves to TV's and burn cars and buildings and whatnot.
Protesters are protesters. Criminals are criminals. Please try to stay focused. Or perhaps get out once in a while to visit the real world away from your TV set. You'll find it's a good deal different and, oh, the wonders you will see!
I can't wait to see what happens when they take over healthcare
They are ALREADY in control of health care. That's why healthcare sucks. Big business and government, (and certainly the medical industry), are all heads of the same beast, employ the same people and worship the same masters. They just wear different labels to confuse the ever-ignorant population.
Now, the ideal is that the people should be in control of their health care through a government they put together and control.
But the U.S., before it can take on such a task, needs to completely gut its government and build something which isn't going to put personal greed ahead of the public interest. That's not going to happen because the U.S. population is far too drugged, weakened and brainwashed. They haven't got a chance. They are free-range serfs.
There are a few destructive nuts out there among the protest groups, and there are also black-hats pretending to be protesters who are hired to start trouble and thus give the authorities the excuse to hammer down control measures, as well as allow the media to spin anti-establishment people as fringe-dangerous. All you have to do is drug and wind-up one borderline loon to make an entire legion of well-meaning and responsible people look bad. It's an old, easy and as it happens, well-documented system. Do a Google around for it. The term "COINTELPRO" will come up. There is a lot of fascinating reading you can do on the subject.
The objective is to keep the little people from forming groups of any power and to keep people like you misinformed and afraid of, (and in love with) the wrong parties.
Remember; it wasn't protesters who trashed the economy and made off with billions of YOUR tax dollars with no repercussions. It was the people being protested against.
No, that's just a narrative device. Time travel stories are old as the hills. I'm talking about something else entirely. . .
The guys making Acron were tuned into the same idea at the same point. Their product is on about the same release schedule as I would have been had I been a game designer, (which thankfully I'm not! Obeying your muse is hard work.)
Creative types tend to be connected to some kind of "thought-wave" generator which spits out whole-cloth ideas at the same time and broadcasts them to the world. If the "thought-wave" is strong enough and enough people are affected by it, they squirrel away and work on some version of the idea and then birth it into the public a couple of years after the wave front hit. Then the whole planet is affected. High-level culture engineering.
This one I felt strongly a few years ago. I suddenly woke up one morning with the overwhelming desire to make an RTS game with a time element. But I'm not a programmer, so it sat idle. But others have been better placed to act on this sort of thing. I wonder what the end purpose is to introducing humanity to the idea that time is not solid or linear?
This just keeps getting better and better! I understand every word in this analogy, but the the whole thing just refuses to makes sense! Are you on the talk show circuit or something?
Nope. Just a guy who happens to know what he is talking about.
This study, like astrology and whatever the hell the parent poster was raving on about, share one similarity. They are results and methods promoted by and for people who seek mental shortcuts to understanding the world. It's a tempting strategy certainly, but in the long term, you're better off trusting in getting it done right.
I agree. Now how about you go and do some of that rather than just talk about it.
I'm betting you've done zero research beyond turning your nose up at the odd newspaper astrology section and Chinese place mat, --all in accordance with the opinions of the authority figures in your life, (like any good pack animal). --It's true that newspaper astrology is silly, but my opinion for why this is so also happens to be valid because I've taken the time to actually research the subject. It's annoying, yes, but knowing what you are talking about DOES require that you actually study the subject in question rather than simply seek those mental shortcuts, as you aptly put it.
Astrology is valid. But you wouldn't know that unless you leave your comfort zones and do some digging into taboo areas of knowledge and risk being ridiculed by other cowards. Most people are not capable of this, and so they remain happy in their ignorance while pretending to be rational thinkers. People frightened of laughter are tiny beings of little power or consequence.
Slashdot Mirror
Care to volunteer for open brain surgery instead?
It's all about intent. Researchers who study living systems by killing and mutilating other creatures without awareness and compassion do so at their own expense. I've met researchers who kill animals without having adequately made peace with themselves or the creatures involved. Instead, what often occurs is that they shut parts of themselves off and try to believe that "it's all for the greater good", (usually a lie). Some are better at convincing themselves of this than others. The ones who break down after ten minutes of discussing the problem have souls which are either budding or which have not yet been killed off. Those who do not are very often living in a self-delusion which carries a price.
All costs are tallied and will be paid back regardless of what people believe in the present moment. What comes around goes around.
Behaving with stupidity and barbarism is like buying on credit.
-FL
How do i disable that fucking live twitter feed on the right? I clicked on the link to read a Wired article, not listen to random dumbasses whining!
Actually, on any given screen other than your own, you appear as a random dumb-ass. And gee, you are also whining. --About a non-issue as it happens. If you want to insulate your precious self from the outside world, then it's entirely possible to do this by configuring your browser accordingly.
Just a few thoughts for you to consider. --If indeed you have the brain tissue required for such a feat. Which is very doubtful.
-FL
When your website is just a few font sizes shy of TimeCube, you've lost even me.
Insanity has a specific smell and that guy's site reeks of it. It's different from manic-depressive, from which real and useful innovations can arise. This guy just seems nuts.
But that's just the smell test. If somebody can reproduce his findings in a meaningful way, I'd be the first in line to shake his hand. Until then, I trust my nose.
-FL
No kidding!
I've seen several D&D groups destroyed by the single asshole who a friend brought along because they felt sorry and figured, "All s/he needs is a supportive group of other geeks where s/he can gain a little self-esteem."
And then the needy little vampire proceeds to piss everybody off, make the evening painful and totally un-fun, and one by one, the real people you wanted to play with get fed up and move on. The worst is when more assholes show up and infest your group, and the next thing you know, your light and energizing game night has become a dark drain upon your life.
Basic rule of gaming: Never, NEVER play with people who you don't like and wouldn't choose to spend time with normally. Seems straight forward enough, but the problem is very common. --People forget that it's a D&D game, not a therapy session for creeps. If you are foolish enough to get sucked into vampiric relationships with monster people, my heart goes out to you; we've all been there, but it's your job to figure it out and leave the leach at the door and not inflict your monster on everybody else.
The difficult part is that while many people are geeks by choice, others are geeks by default. There are a lot of cool people to be found at sci-fi conventions, but then there are the troll people who don't bathe, talk too loud, have no social graces and who hide from life in D&D land. No thank-you. If they are genuinely troubled souls trying their best to improve, well that's great, but they can do it elsewhere. One of the most memorable rock-bottom moments before I finally cashed in my chips and abandoned a D&D group, (I was the last of the real people to go), was when the creep in question began getting off on torturing NPC's in prolonged sessions, Reservoir Dogs style.
I felt sick for a whole day afterward and I was furious that a weakling little turd like him had single-handedly managed over the course of several months to destroy something which had been awesome, bright and powerful. I'm still angry with myself for not cutting him off in the beginning when it would have been easy and my gut had been telling me to do so. Never again.
-FL
I completely disagree.
Slashdot is a news re-server, and its power exists in the Slashcode comment system. It's like a stomach for news, where all the users are bacteria and enzymes breaking down the content tossed down its gullet.
Your current post is an apt example of this principal at work.
Collective editorial oversight in the wild. --It's great, because we are encouraged by the very ecosystem of Slashdot to question and hash out EVERYTHING. More often than not, when perusing the comments one will see the truth (or at least more of it than was previously available with just the official media), will bubble to the surface. And it's not authoritarian "truth"; rather, it's the kind which requires that the reader think and research and discern. Many people will not come away with full information because they choose not to; Lazy people want to be told how reality is. And that's great! It allows freedom. The freedom to be an idiot means that there also exists the freedom to be enlightened. Slashdot at its best encourages people to WORK to find out what reality is, which it does daily.
Some of the most powerful learning I've done has come through people telling me why I'm wrong about something and backing it up with solid details. Also, watching others go through the same process is a great way to learn.
I love this site!
-FL
...on this issue, he is a nutbar. How can he decry people who ignore all the scientific evidence of evolution or global warming, yet do the same thing himself on this issue?
Because the scientific evidence is far from unanimous and a good portion of it is coming from biased parties who stand to gain billions of dollars if their version of reality is accepted?
I agree that it would be nice to live in "Future-world" where mature minds and real science rule the day (and there's a trustworthy Starfleet officer on every deck), but we don't live in that world. We live in a world of war, slavery, treachery and psychopaths and corrupt agendas. So when somebody comes at you with a needle, if you persist in pretending that your dream world is the real world, you're probably going to get used and abused in order to feed somebody further up the pyramid.
Far too many people struggle to live in false realities which suit their sensibilities and egos, etc.; what they wish the world was rather than what it is. These people are food.
-FL
Yeah. That could work.
--Face recognition software ought to be able to replace actors heads with yours in all the appropriate places, and get the lighting correct, etc. As well as being able to re-map whole environments according to taste.
With formula writing being what it is, you could probably even set up algorithms capable of recognizing romantic scenes versus actions sequences. Humans are quite predictable as to what they respond to. It sounds like you could just punch in, "Romantic comedy, straight couple, includes car chase, musical number, and a bitter-sweet ending."
How interesting. Artificial Intelligence might display its initial strengths through pop-art, the one place where we thought we were truly unique and strong.
-FL
I mean, come on. The man must have known that he would get caught, which leads me to wonder if in fact he really did anything wrong.
Anybody here who wrote a program for a prison system would consider it irresponsible to NOT set passwords. But before you are given a chance to explain the very good reasons for what you've done, the big men with truncheons who are already watching you like a hawk assume the worst and start running around like Chicken Little with the sky falling.
That's my guess.
And chickens just LOVE it when the sky falls; it gives them a sense of purpose and an excuse to play 'hero'. Heck, I know a couple of cops, and they are good people, but their world view is very slanted due to regular exposure to the criminal element. Without a healthy means of grounding to the real world, their sense of reality can become wildly inaccurate. Add to that some over-enlarged ego, lots of fear, pack-mentality and a bit of down-home stupid, and you're looking at a system where innocence is not assumed and some really terrible things can -and do- happen.
I'm not saying the guy was mister pure-heart, but I bet the whole story isn't being represented here. --What with the hysteria that both police and the media typically spin themselves into over anything to do with computer 'hackers', I think this is entirely likely.
But it appears that many posters here aren't capable of remembering the patterns they see in the news wrt this kind of story. Hackers!
-FL
Game designers build realities in which the narrative action takes place. The rules of that reality have to come from somewhere. Those rules are based on personal beliefs and dogma.
I remember back around the time when I realized I couldn't play video games anymore, I was playing this game involving soldiers and medieval towns and castles and such. If you performed certain actions, then the local economy responded in very specific ways which reflected a strong belief in the All American, "Let the Market Decide" form of Free Market monetary/social Darwinism which so many geeks are mesmerized by. --It was quite annoying to see unrealistic behavior in the game mechanic when I performed actions which should, in my mind, have resulted in different effects. It was like the game designers and I were in an argument, and they won because they'd set the parameters of the argument and none of it was taking place in the real world.
Dogma verses Dogma.
Games provide a soap box where geeks get to work out their frustrations by building a reality where they are always RIGHT! Very closely linked to this is the same geek desire to have a data jack implanted into the rear of one's skull so that this difficult reality we all live in can be escaped into the VR 'verse where nobody can hurt you or make fun of you.
Add to this that synaptic connections build up based on experience; Playing games for hundreds and hundreds of hours re-wires the brain so that it starts to solve problems based on what it perceived to be the reality in which its stress reactions are played out. So I'd say that video games are not just an effective way to express one's beliefs, but an excellent way to force adoption of those beliefs in others.
That this isn't immediately obvious is rather alarming.
-FL
The problem is that the media is begging the question, framing the data, and making stuff up so that reasonable people will say, "It sure seems that way!" --and then go along with the next incredibly stupid war on the agenda. Remember; the people driving this shit are the same ones who bankrupted the country and lied about WMD's in order to control oil and people and everything else.
No thank-you. I just don't believe the bullshit anymore. Iran may not be perfect, but frankly, I'm more concerned with religious fanatics of the Republican/Palin variety (Apocalypse NOW) at home with access to the button than I am about the weapons held by nations half a planet away. And who the hell cares about Israel anyway? The loony Zionists have been burning their bridges like crazy these past few years. The world is going to let out a collective grunt of righteousness when they finally get themselves nuked. And now organ harvesting? Ugh. Why doesn't the big media focus appropriate attention on THAT for a while?
-FL
But, personally, I never liked it. My recollection is that none of the stories ever resolved. That always seemed sloppy and lazy to me. The basic Twilight Zone plot always seemed to be: a) Creepy, weird, moderately intriguing things start to happen for no reason. b) Things continue to happen. c) Finally, things stop happening, for no reason. I always felt cheated.
It sounds like Scooby Doo was using the story-telling pattern which you click with best. Mysterious force appears, wrangling with said force, and then, "It was the theme-park operator the whole time! He just wanted the oil drilling rights! (--And he'd have gotten them too, if it weren't for those meddling kids!)
Twilight Zone (which I loved), was weirdness as it often unfolds for real; people are overwhelmed and incapable of pulling together the smarts, strength and social-support/networking required to unravel baffling and upsetting events. My only disappointment with Scooby Doo is that they never actually ran into something which didn't have a mundane explanation. I would have liked to have seen the Scooby Gang deal with the real supernatural while keeping their wits about them. Even super-weird stuff has its roots and reasons and can be worked out and understood.
-FL
I knew a guy who went off and fought in Iraq because of Starship Troopers. He came back reporting that he'd been a fool. I was tired at the time and gave a half-assed attempt to console him by saying, "Well, you gained a great deal of experience and insight into how the real world works. You got conned." He shot back, "Yeah, they say the military builds character, but it's the wrong kind of character. --It builds unquestioning idiots and killers and those who survive come back fucked up. I'm fucked up."
As for the right to vote; I have to agree, most people shouldn't be allowed to vote. They're too stupid and too easily fooled by propaganda into supporting idiotic things. --But to give the vote to that specific subsection of people who were fooled into becoming military killers. . ? That's insane. The world would need to be at war all the time to provide the initiatory test bed necessary to make the voting system possible. (And preparation for war always means war.) --Not only that, but those voting under such a scheme would have all gone through military training. --Which everybody knows is a punishing kind of brainwashing served up by the very Government they'd be voting for. A vote from somebody who has been brainwashed is the same as a confession beaten from a torture victim. Not worth a damn. --This would negate the whole idea of freedom of thought and democracy in general.
Basically, you're talking complete idiocy.
Here's a gem for you: In a world where all money printed by governments is borrowed from a small banking cartel at interest, how is it possible for governments to pay back the principal plus interest? --Well, they borrow more money, also at interest. This is exactly how it works. Thus one small collective of banks established god-knows how long ago when personal fortunes were first amassed by men, those shadowy creeps with their own secret services and their fingers in every important pot, own everything. Kennedy was killed in a large part because he tried to take them on by trying, (horrors) to introduce an actual American dollar, printed by the actual American government and not borrowed at interest from anybody. This could have changed everything. It could have broken the chains of world slavery to the banking cartels. So for this and other similar reasons, he had to go. Today's politicians know this and they play right along because they're cowards and they know that the only way to survive is to climb to the top of the power structure. Obama and Bush are cut from the same cloth. --You and I and your father and everybody else are slaves to this economic system burdened under ever-increasing world debt. Voting is a giant and meaningless scam. This is entirely by design and the military is just a means of generating big gobs of debt very quickly while conveniently providing a means to kill and brain-wash those men and women in the population who might actually be strong enough and righteous enough to do something about it. But they won't because the perfect method for systematically processing such people has obviously been found. Just distribute copies of fucking Heinlein to all the 18 year-olds and sit back.
Heinlein was either evil or he was a damned tool presenting a one-sided argument in such a charismatic and inspiring manner that young people reading it were blinded by its alpha-male logic and its glorious trumpet call to arms and general testosterone laden horseshit. --Drunk on this crap, readers missed the flaws in the argument. Try reading slower and thinking faster next time you pick it up. You'll be amazed.
-FL
You cannot dismiss the stars as unimportant and just say that it is the planet's position that matters. Why? Because the only way we can measure a planet's position is by comparing it with the location of stars.
I was tempted to leave this here because shortly after I hit the, "Submit" button I realized I was in rather gross error regarding the nature of how stars are used in Astrology. The planets are read against a backdrop of stars which determine which areas of the 'chart' they are in and what influences they correlate to. With regard to the Eastern model, however, my comments remain valid. The horoscopes are based on calendar readings so the shifting stars are not relevant. In any case, I thought, "Doh! I hate it when I state something firmly only to realize I was wrong.!" But so what? That's no excuse to run away. I'm also in love with science and learning.
The problem is that based on my observations, Astrology simply works. I went in very skeptical as well, and I've certainly studied the ways in which people can be fooled. I went in with that knowledge, and guys like Randi were heroic in my eyes. But the signal to noise ratio I saw in Astrology was ridiculously strong and was not adequately explained by the predictions made by science. The experiment in the school room video is a good example. That particular aspect of human nature would have been in evidence regardless of whether the reading was accurate or not for some people. It only shows that people can fool themselves, and we know this to be true. But it doesn't say that the reading might not have fit very well for 1/12 of the people in the room and have required much more self-delusion for the rest. --I've seen accurate readings which would not have functioned well in that test because they were far too specific to certain personality types and would simply have made Randi's demonstration seem less convincing. It must never be forgotten that the man is a seasoned stage magician. He knows all about fooling an audience to achieve a certain effect. It would be very foolish to assume that he didn't hand-pick the astrological reading for that event to be well-suited to the performance he intended to put on. It cuts both ways.
The point is this; I've seen and done a lot of 'impossible' things which are not adequately explained by main-stream skepticism. At some point, one has to decide whether or not to trust one's senses, to live by what is seen, felt, heard, etc., Science is a very useful tool, but I don't trust all of its practitioners, (Randi and his huge ego least of all!), and I don't trust all of its processes. Even among researchers who have their egos in check, the lure of corruption in its many forms is often too much to resist. Science is valuable, but like astrology, it must not be taken whole-cloth without vetting.
Why does a clump of stars that looks to be close together from eath have any significance, when we now know that some of them might be 1000s of light years further away than others. Take Orion's belt for example, most cultures on earth have grouped this striking three star constellation together(including western and chinese). The furthest star is 600 light years further away than the nearest.
Well, a couple of things here. . . The first is that, as I presently think about things, the distant stars do not have the direct influences which are discussed in astrology. It's the planets, which still very far away are certainly not as far off as the stars. The stars provide a constant board against which the planetary positions can be accurately measured. As that board has moved a bit over the last few thousand years, the measurements of the planets ought, as you note, to no longer hold with the established rules of what each planet means when it is in such and such a 'house'. That I can't explain and it does indeed seem to be a fundamental flaw in the whole system. And yet the system keeps right on working, so I'm forced to conclude that something else is at work whi
Yes, James Randi is good at pointing out how humans can be easily fooled. The video you linked to is an apt example of why common newspaper astrology is pretty useless. It's also a good example of how a flakey astrologer with a turban and a crystal ball can con people. This is all very true, and I've seen countless versions of this argument, and the example Randi offers in that classroom video was an excellent presentation of that feature of the human psyche.
But it brings to mind the logical fallacy, "All cows are animals, therefore all animals are cows."
Randi is missing one key detail, as is everybody else who thinks that the above example is all there is to astrology. --And that detail is this: When you remove the con artists and the vague newspaper horoscope section, astrology actually works.
When you read a real astrology book, it is actually not so vague as one is led to believe all horoscope material is. A good book is filled with very specific descriptions which cannot apply to everybody, filled with key details which match up with the individual being described and which totally fail to describe those it does not apply to. I've never seen Randi look at that kind of astrology, and because he's such a giant ego himself who has based his entire reputation and self-worth on being right about his many assertions about reality, he will probably continue to avoid such sources. Some of his arguments when has been cornered have been childish and ridiculous and petty in the extreme. That's what happens when somebody cannot let go of their sacred cows.
If you want to test this out for yourself, (if you aren't scared of letting go of your own sacred cows), then I would recommend this book. Amazon appears to have used copies available for less than a dollar plus postage. You can probably own your very own for less than the price of a food court lunch. Most people will not do this, precisely because they assume they know everything already, or worse, they don't want to risk being wrong, but this is the kind of research I am talking about and which needs to be done before a valid opinion can been obtained. --It's easy to read all manner of studies and watch James Randi videos, but the research which skeptics never seem to do is to actually find a competent source and read a few horoscopes and gauge for themselves the accuracy. There's a very big difference between vague bullshit descriptions about what geminis and cancers might be like, -and having very specific details about your life described to you in a single paragraph.
In the book linked above, every eastern sign with its specific element is given a two paragraph specific treatment which is quite upsetting for the hardened skeptic because it blows them out of the water by describing them down to their shoelaces with stark accuracy in terms which cannot be handed back over their shoulders to accurately describe the student sitting behind them. It just doesn't work. --And it's a little humbling to discover that there are only 60 basic human templates walking around. Of course, there are infinite variations on each theme, but the hard specifics are frighteningly nailed down. This is something people find very upsetting, as it should. Everybody, with very, very few exceptions, is a slave to their robotic, automatic nature and astrology makes this plain. People hate that truth and so they fight it at every turn, but the only way to truly fight it is to look it straight in the face and learn how it works. Only then can one attempt to stop being a robot. But that's the advanced stuff. We're still on basic astrology at the moment. . .)
Now, you bring up a fascinating point. . . The fact that the stars have moved over the last thousand years or so.
However, in Western astrology this simple doesn't represent any difficulties. Western astrology is based not on stars but planets, and the planets
Pardon me while I repost those links. . .
Theodora Lau's Handbook of Chinese Horoscopes. (A good book for Eastern Astrology).
Susan Miller's website is a fairly robust example of the Western model.
-FL
Pls site your sources Mr.
Theodora Lau's Handbook of Chinese Horoscopes. (A good book for Eastern Astrology).
Susan Miller's website is a fairly robust example of the Western model.
Those two sources offer clean(ish) versions of the basic starter material. But the most effective research is done using such sources in conjunction with long personal observations.
I have researched this and know what I am talking about!
Okay!
And am I correct in assuming from your poster, (mister), that you hold Astrology in a dim view? I just want to know what kind of person I'm talking with so as to avoid making any false assumptions at the outset.
-FL
Just a little remark: there's no company called the "Fox Channels". The Fox brand is spread over dozens of semi-independent companies of News Corp., which have little relation to each other in terms of their management and PR. Saying "Fox Something" when you deal with huge corporations is simply useless. Waggener Edstrom has been doing some work for "Fox International Channels" in particular, which are doing work broadcasting and producing shows for public outside USA. [. . .] What is the company Microsoft previously worked with? Crispin Porter + Boguski, also considered one of the "smartest marketing firms on the planet", who have done work for Burger King, Coca Cola, American Express, Domino's and more. And now they have Microsoft on their portfolio thanks to their work few months back, which was poorly received, and mostly forgotten by now, with frequent strategy shifts, awkward moments and prematurely ending projects and relationships. This is how these "big smart marketing companies" build portfolio and you better get used to being tricked by their statements when "googling a little" as you say you do.
Fair enough, re the Fox Channels remark. It was ten seconds of Googling after all. My point, and I should think this would be clear to you, is that large and successful PR companies have studied psychology extensively and they don't look stupid unless they want to look stupid. You bring up the hopelessly mis-used Occam without understanding, it seems, the principal behind Occam. Let me put it this way. . .
Is it more reasonable that a group well versed in psychology put out a series of ads, (keeping in mind that this is their primary focus of trade upon which their livelihoods depend) for a huge and important client like Microsoft desperate at this point to make sure that their new OS doesn't fail in the market place, but that through simple negligence they just happened to make the ad series pathetic. . ? -OR- is it more likely that they used the skills and knowledge they are trained in to deliberately make the ad series APPEAR pathetic because they understand how humans in large groups tend to react to stimuli?
You seem to be suggesting that, all things being equal, it is more likely that they are just a bunch of bumbling fools who don't care if they shoot videos which look like bad student films even when their reputations with a large client at a crucial marketing period -during a recession- are on the line. And you have the audacity to bring up Occam?
Also. . .
Crispin Porter & Boruski were responsible for the Seinfeld-Bill Gates team up. That move, (despite their almost certainly self-edited entry in Wikipedia which declares it to be a giant and embarrassing flop), was largely responsible for the positive reaction Windows 7 has been receiving. Here's the message which hit home in that 'Flop': "Gates is a socially awkward dork who went walkabout, leaving MS in the hands of Ballmer who screwed up the farm with Vista. BUT Gates is back now! And THAT's what you want as an investor in MS. You don't want Bill to be cool and savvy. You want him to be a social-retard who happens to be a brilliant computer/business genius who will make you lots of money when he gets back to work. Vista wasn't his fault, and now that he's back at the helm, the next Windows product is going to kick ass, and you the audience, are going to WANT it to kick ass because it's so painful to see Bill look like an idiot that you want him to have a success."
And that's not a retroactive excuse. That's exactly how it read at the time, and that's exactly what went on to happen. And THAT is public relations magic at its most effective.
I'm missing your point. Even I have written a tool for analyzing tweets, as I bet anyone who toyed with Twitter's API. Can I get lots of money now? All I get out of the above is that you're easily impressed by buzz-words. The amount of Second Life, Twitter and Facebook apps a marketing company has may have sur
People are asking, "How could Microsoft, with all its wealth and power, produce such a stupid series of ads?"
Because they're smarter than you?
--Because they have enough wealth and power to hire one of the smartest public relations firms on the planet. Waggener Edstrom is the same firm in charge of the Fox Channels. If there's any one thing they know how to do, it's identify a market and then lock down that market forever and ever and sell them whatever the hell 'truth' they feel like selling.
Here's a small clip from a page I found after about 10 seconds of Google searching. . .
Do they sound stupid now?
My guess is that they're doing three things with this ad. . .
1. They're trying to tap into a universal feeling of awkwardness that everybody feels when recalling a "PCP" party. (Parents, Chips and Pop). They're doing this because awkward, painful feelings open up memory centers. Information given during a period of high anxiety gets locked into place in the human mind. This is a well-known and often-used ploy in mind control. The information being served up in these ads is NOT how to run your software or all the features offered by their OS, but that "WINDOWS 7 EXISTS AND IT IS UBIQUITOUS AND YOU, AS A PACK ANIMAL HAD BETTER GET WITH THE PROGRAM OR RISK EXPULSION FROM THE HERD!!!!"
2. Trying to tap into the feeling of safety and love which people also feel when they think of their parents and the silly birthday parties thrown for them when they were little. Why? Because an OS is the bedrock upon which you ground your entire computer existence, --the same way your parents provided the bedrock for your adult behavior sets. You might think your parents were stupid and annoying, and you probably want to deny it, but the truth of the matter is that most people grow up to become their parents.
3. Go viral. --Using such deliberate tactics designed to rope in the lower echelon of geeks, such as stove clocks which are obviously bouncing around 'wrong' in exactly the kind of way geeks like to point out and be "Right" about. Fuck, fuck, FUCK! There's a whole sick cultural system through which people who like computer technology were warped into that "Look! I'm RIGHT!" head-space, and you had better believe that clock "error" was on purpose so as to lock them in. Low-hanging fruit.
So, please, for goodness sake, try to think outside of the bloody box when approaching the toxic waste which is advertising! If you fall for this kind of stupid shit, then you're nothing but slaves who deserve to be used and abused, and you WILL be.
Sorry for the harsh language, but this is important.
-FL
Whenever somebody claims that a purely subjective thing, like a book, actor, car, computer, or in this case, a whole nation is the "Best" in the world, I sigh deeply and reach for my WTF? filters. --Your point of view and (faulty) sense of reality aren't universal conditions, nor should they be.
Until people realize who is really controlling who, then all of their pontification isn't meaningful in the slightest.
The world banking elite are the managers of the world and all of this artificially constructed strife we're seeing.
-FL
This of course justifies the protesters to help themselves to TV's and burn cars and buildings and whatnot.
Protesters are protesters. Criminals are criminals. Please try to stay focused. Or perhaps get out once in a while to visit the real world away from your TV set. You'll find it's a good deal different and, oh, the wonders you will see!
-FL
I can't wait to see what happens when they take over healthcare
They are ALREADY in control of health care. That's why healthcare sucks. Big business and government, (and certainly the medical industry), are all heads of the same beast, employ the same people and worship the same masters. They just wear different labels to confuse the ever-ignorant population.
Now, the ideal is that the people should be in control of their health care through a government they put together and control.
But the U.S., before it can take on such a task, needs to completely gut its government and build something which isn't going to put personal greed ahead of the public interest. That's not going to happen because the U.S. population is far too drugged, weakened and brainwashed. They haven't got a chance. They are free-range serfs.
-FL
There are a few destructive nuts out there among the protest groups, and there are also black-hats pretending to be protesters who are hired to start trouble and thus give the authorities the excuse to hammer down control measures, as well as allow the media to spin anti-establishment people as fringe-dangerous. All you have to do is drug and wind-up one borderline loon to make an entire legion of well-meaning and responsible people look bad. It's an old, easy and as it happens, well-documented system. Do a Google around for it. The term "COINTELPRO" will come up. There is a lot of fascinating reading you can do on the subject.
The objective is to keep the little people from forming groups of any power and to keep people like you misinformed and afraid of, (and in love with) the wrong parties.
Remember; it wasn't protesters who trashed the economy and made off with billions of YOUR tax dollars with no repercussions. It was the people being protested against.
-FL
No, that's just a narrative device. Time travel stories are old as the hills. I'm talking about something else entirely. . .
The guys making Acron were tuned into the same idea at the same point. Their product is on about the same release schedule as I would have been had I been a game designer, (which thankfully I'm not! Obeying your muse is hard work.)
-FL
Creative types tend to be connected to some kind of "thought-wave" generator which spits out whole-cloth ideas at the same time and broadcasts them to the world. If the "thought-wave" is strong enough and enough people are affected by it, they squirrel away and work on some version of the idea and then birth it into the public a couple of years after the wave front hit. Then the whole planet is affected. High-level culture engineering.
This one I felt strongly a few years ago. I suddenly woke up one morning with the overwhelming desire to make an RTS game with a time element. But I'm not a programmer, so it sat idle. But others have been better placed to act on this sort of thing. I wonder what the end purpose is to introducing humanity to the idea that time is not solid or linear?
Curious.
-FL
This just keeps getting better and better! I understand every word in this analogy, but the the whole thing just refuses to makes sense! Are you on the talk show circuit or something?
Nope. Just a guy who happens to know what he is talking about.
This study, like astrology and whatever the hell the parent poster was raving on about, share one similarity. They are results and methods promoted by and for people who seek mental shortcuts to understanding the world. It's a tempting strategy certainly, but in the long term, you're better off trusting in getting it done right.
I agree. Now how about you go and do some of that rather than just talk about it.
I'm betting you've done zero research beyond turning your nose up at the odd newspaper astrology section and Chinese place mat, --all in accordance with the opinions of the authority figures in your life, (like any good pack animal). --It's true that newspaper astrology is silly, but my opinion for why this is so also happens to be valid because I've taken the time to actually research the subject. It's annoying, yes, but knowing what you are talking about DOES require that you actually study the subject in question rather than simply seek those mental shortcuts, as you aptly put it.
Astrology is valid. But you wouldn't know that unless you leave your comfort zones and do some digging into taboo areas of knowledge and risk being ridiculed by other cowards. Most people are not capable of this, and so they remain happy in their ignorance while pretending to be rational thinkers. People frightened of laughter are tiny beings of little power or consequence.
-FL