Burning disks is slow and annoying, and often they are single use. (Once you've used the disk to move data from point A to point B, you no longer need the disk). I'd love to have a small box of 10 gig USB 2 plugs I could hand back and forth between people as though they were sticks of gum and not worry if you never see them again.
Heck, in the world of Netbooks, (with no CD drives), this becomes even more useful.
--Or, of course, we could always do as the Japanese have done; build an internet infrastructure which moves data around at the speed we need it moved. But in the mean time, having a handful of two-dollar USB 2 plugs around will do quite nicely.
I love it when technology slips off the cutting edge!
I've seen sites where the attacks are so outrageous and crazy that it moves from the internet out into the real world of harassment, abusive litigation and physical assault. Driven by fears of this kind of attack, I've seen site owners become VERY controlling and hyper-aware of the people looking at their material. I can see their point, but I still half-think that the fear isn't fully necessary and that free-range policies can still serve very well if you embrace them intelligently.
The Slashcode system is brilliant. I don't think people realize just how remarkable an accomplishment Slashdot is. It has been running with no holds barred on the managerial side wrt public comments, and the world hasn't ended. It's still here and healthy.
The trick is to allow full anonymity, allow user moderation, and to provide content which will attract sane people and keep them informed of sane things. --So long a population sane people of good-will are in the majority, (and social engineering aside, it generally is), then the site doesn't require massive, fear-driven control measures.
Look at YouTube; asinine comments are often "thumbed" down or overwhelmed by more reasonable responses. The world certainly has a lot of crazy assholes in it, but there are a lot more regular people. And while regular people are easy to turn into monsters if you feed them false data, you are not without power here; controlling the site content is the best way to socially engineer the minds of the regular populace. --I don't promote the removing of choice from people or manipulating people. No way. But if you give lies what they call for, (The Truth), then you are giving people the material they need to behave rationally, which generally they want to do.
This Google Wiki thing simply needs a public moderation system and good "Feng Shui" in order to regulate the natural growth and behavior patterns of the communities which flow through it. --I tend to believe in high control in the environment design and construction phase, and then 90% hands off when you set it loose. --The remaining 10% being occasional tune-ups and maintenance.
You're so silly. Nobody really is shocked to discover the women on the cover of Cosmopolitan was airbrushed. Get a grip....Growing spiritually? What kind of transcendental moonbat are you?
The kind who knows the difference between, "Censorship" and "Warning Labels". As you seemed to have such difficulty wrapping your noodle around that, it is hardly any wonder that you find the idea of spiritual growth confusing. But hey, if you laugh at it hard enough you can certainly pretend that it isn't there either.
News flash: People are not being mind controlled by, gasp, "THE CORPORATIONS." I'm sure you think that you're so smart and wise and above everyone else and need to protect them but most people can kind of figure out that enhancements have been made on an image.
Uh huh. Because social engineering stops at facial make-up and you're smarter than the teams of dedicated behavioral researchers who have been hacking the human mind since well before your parents were toddlers. The simple fact that you don't know what spiritual awareness is says to me that the mind-job performed on you has been rather effective.
LOL at you thinking people are being mindcontrolled by zits being removed from women on billboard images:D:D:D
"Laughter" of that kind is an automatic response. Why do you do it? How did you learn it, and who taught it to you? If you can even start to answer those questions in a realistic manner, then you're not entirely a wind-up toy.
So instead of laughing, try setting aside bias and doing some reading into how the human mind works. Start with a quick review of the basics; Marshall McLuhan, Noam Chomsky/Edward Herman, Joseph Goebbels. Martha Stout is also pretty amazing, though less well-known. From there you can work your way up to more complex works by others. This stuff isn't hidden; it's right out there in the open for anybody who wants to know. Once you have collected enough data, you can start thinking and forming valid opinions. Until then, you are making ignorant assumptions of no consequence.
The subject of human awareness is an amazing one. Until you devote some effort into studying how it works, you really will remain running on automatic, mechanical thinking for your whole life without ever realizing it. The recognition of one's own mechanical nature is one of the most difficult hurdles to get over because the very nature of the mind in that state is such that it doesn't facilitate awareness of that state.
More transcendental moonbat shit, that is. Go back to sleep now.
I LIKE complexity and the power provided by many options. It's why my computer has over a hundred buttons on it. If I wanted a gameboy or an iPhone, I'd have a gameboy or an iPhone. But I don't. I have a computer with a mouse and the ability to navigate with precision through a complex GUI.
Photoshop is a great example of uncompromisingly complex software not written for idiots; it's a brute to learn, but once you've surmounted the bell curve, you can solve any problem about six different ways at high speed.
Driver software also suffers from "Stupid Creep". --Early versions of device drivers are generally so full of options that you can fine-tune your machine to do exactly what you want it to do. Then, almost invariably, the designers read, "How Steve Jobs Made A Billion Dollars" and start deciding on your behalf which functions you don't need and remove them, plugging in half-baked AI's to think for you, or simply dumping you in the middle of whatever average behavior is expected and leave no option of escape. --Snatching away functions and choices and all the things I like so that the average drooling user can operate their scanner or whatever without the need for higher brain functions. Like those computer consoles in "Idiocracy".
Lame.
Fortunately, old versions of software are available on the web and PC's are still highly configurable. --I can understand the desire of the Mozilla folks to want to stay current, but they're on their own with this one.
I'd add, "Get off my lawn!" except I enjoy the sound of kids playing outside. Just so long as it's not with hand-held video games.
Wow. And here I thought my parents had more to do with my gene pool than my time of birth. Nevermind my disposition.
Nothing is ever so simple. There's a lot more to a person than their genes. --Even identical twins born within moments of each other will express their individuality in unique ways. Astrology and genetics provide influences and boundaries, etc., but they do not prevent the soul from choosing and then expressing those choices via an application of Will.
Computers offer a useful analogy; Two computers can be built using the same hardware, (genetics), can run the same software (astrology), but what the user does within that environment is governed by the Soul.
Blah blah blah. I hear this crap all the time, it happens just as much with boys. You supposed to be tanned and toned, look like a linebacker, have just the right hair, jaw needs to be this shape, etc.
You're right when you note highschool populations today.
It's become more intense over the years for men. How old are you? I was born in the very early Seventies, and I remember being blithely unaware of body image demands until I was in my mid teens. And even then, it didn't penetrate very deeply and I was happy enough to simply go through life without worrying too much about the shape of my body. This seemed to be the case with all virtually the guys I knew, whereas many of the girls I grew up with were obsessing about body image, were on 'diets', trying to stuff themselves into tight jeens, etc. Fat girls were made fun of while fat guys were big-boned. That's how I remember it.
But that was quite some years ago now. The body image messages seem to have been ramped up all over the media spectrum, and it seems very likely that body-image messages are more equally aimed at both sexes today.
Rambo and Ahhnold became media icons in the mid-80's, while we had Steve McQueen in the 60's and Harrison Fords and other guys in the 70's who were masculine but who were not PuMpEd up. Whereas for women, big boobs, long legs and thin waists have been in vogue for that whole period, and expressed in media loudly.
I'm not interested in working out who the bigger victims are. Victim culture is bullshit. --I don't have any patience for women who direct anger at me because of social injustices I had nothing to do with. But that doesn't prevent me from recognizing facts.
I very much doubt that it was "only a century or two ago." I don't think many women removed their body hair in 1800, or 1850, or even 1900. More likely, it was a marketing gimmick in the post-war years, when Edward Bernais got up to his clever tricks.
I didn't bother to do the research again to figure out the exact date. Which just goes to show how effective advertising has been on me, and I'm trying to stay aware!
The same logic IS applicable and can be easily used to defend censorship;
Ugh. Wiggle, wiggle, bullshit, wiggle. Just say, "Yeah, good point," and move on like a self-respecting person with an ounce of integrity and quit trying to WIN. Trying to WIN means you're not interested in truth; you're interested in polishing up lies and thus fucking with your sense of reality so that your ego can feel good. This is both self-destructive and lame.
NOBODY was suggesting censorship, but since you're on the topic, let's look at it because it's not always the big bad thing it's been MARKETED as being. . .
Corporations and individuals are NOT the same. Corporations should NOT be allowed to lie, because when they do, they tear down rain forests, poison entire populations, use cost/benefit analysis to allow dangerously faulty designs to be used in public, they crash economies and they derail elected governments, etc. Your examples are all about human individuals. Humans are small and they NEED to be allowed the space to lie and make mistakes because that is how they grow spiritually; A girl with a boob job is not going to have the same effect on society as a corporate ad campaign designed to implant thoughts into the minds of millions of people. Also, the corporation CANNOT grow spiritually, and thus will only learn how to lie better. This is why we need to be able to control corporations. They are not people; they are huge and they are dangerous. Our ability to anthropomorphize a giant non-human entity is a natural and well-exploited tendency in humans. We need to stop thinking that telling a corporation not to lie is the same as telling a person she can't wear make-up.
The fact that so many people are willing, to their own detriment, to defend abusive corporate bodies is proof-positive of just how effective ad campaigns are.
So, as a non-shitty person, you're the type who wants to use the force and violence of government to make ugly that which some people consider beautiful. Wouldn't a better method be to just boycott any publication which had pictures of beautiful people in it? What would Ghandi do?
A few things. . .
It's not publications with pictures of beautiful people; it's publications of pictures of people which have been digitally altered. A label at the bottom of a poster saying, "The people in the above image have been digitally altered," doesn't change the image in the poster. It just informs people that they're being lied to.
From the Wiki on Gandhi,"As a practitioner of ahimsa, he swore to speak the truth and advocated that others do the same."
Also. . , while Gandhi was a genius, his philosophy contains one flaw; it works wonderfully if you happen to live in a world without psychopaths, but we don't. This is the problem with living in wishful thinking; in only wanting to see 'beautiful' things rather than what is actually there. Wishful thinking is very destructive.
For goodness sake, the same banking families financed both sides of the cold war, were using the same debt strategies (or variations on the theme) to control both governments and populations on either side of the Iron Curtain. (Oooh, what a dramatic term! The curtain is IRON! Makes for great copy.)
--This means that the people in charge were not Russians and they were not Americans. It was somebody else at the top of the pyramid, and that person or group had no real interest in nuking everything in existence. Why? Because slaves can't clean your toilets if they have been reduced to ash.
However, controlling the slaves is another story altogether, thus we get the stupid drama which loud alpha males with salt & pepper hair sitting in their cigar-smelling easy-chairs barking endlessly with great authority about. . . Some of those strutting imbeciles are blathering away right now in this very forum. --Filled to the brim with important-sounding History Channel crappola. --All of it one giant, ridiculous, idiotic charade. You were never in any true danger of nuclear annihilation. No. You weren't.
And you can add the economic theorists to the idiot pile; those who argue over whether it was the Capitalists or the Communists who won or lost are just as deluded. When all the details are boiled down, this simple fact remains: All money in the East and West is borrowed from private banks, and all of it is borrowed at interest. The world is owned by the banks because it's impossible to pay back 10% on the principal when the principal is all there is.
Funny how they never mentioned any of that in school.
Now the question is this: Who controls the private banks? What do they fear? Who issues commands to them?
Whatever the answer to that is, one thing is certain: This Dead Hand nonsense is just a left-over piece of sensationalist crap designed to keep you in line. Same as the whole terrorist thing; a controlled bit of stage production using real, live idiots who really did think they were super-spies or Allah's children or whatever horseshit they're selling the testosterone junkie plebes these days. All crap. All controlled. All to make sure the vast majority of humans keep their heads down and their hands dirty and their mouths shut.
Great! Let's also censor all media that stigmatizes nerds! Cancel "Ugly Betty!" Require TV shows to have people with imperfect teeth! All soap operas must have at least one male with acne. And next time I clone out a zit on my face for my facebook picture, I'll be able to sleep warmly at night knowing there's I also had to put a disclaimer on it saying so.
Who said anything about censoring?
Putting a label on something simply adds another signal to the message. It points out the lie, it does not suppress it.
None of your examples are appropriate or parallel to the subject being discussed.
OMG you are such a tard -- Did you vote for Obama?
There will be NO SHORTAGE of beautiful women in the world to "influence anorexia". A label is not going to change a mentally disturbed person's mind. PERIOD
OMG, I don't know if you are aware, and please do correct me if I am wrong, but based on your silly post, you currently typify the thundering retard who doesn't grasp the concept of evidence, reason or rationality. --Who honestly cannot understand the difference between reasoning and simply repeating dogma loudly in the brain-damaged belief that doing so will make the things s/he wants to be true become actually true.
If this is you, then please do evolve or stop typing because at the moment you barely sound human. Go swing in the tire.
The anger cycle, your attitudes, beliefs and all the other crap in your mental machine will put you squarely in the middle of exactly the kind of people which best match that head-space. If you are a shitty person, you'll be surrounded by the same. If you believe that the world is full of shitty people, you'll prove that to yourself every day.
Water rises, (or sinks) to its own level.
Learn that, and you're basically a Jedi. Until then, you're a chump.
Good luck finding your way out of that maze. It's one of the tougher ones, but absolutely required if you want to advance beyond "Proto-Human".
I don't know if such a law can even work, but just the fact that this kind of thing is even being considered is really cool.
My fellow male geeks don't truly get what girls go through and what a mind-job it does on them. But there IS one example which might resonate. . .
Remember when all those new Star Wars toys came out, and all the characters you once identified with were now PuMpEd up? I know it affected me in a negative way, and I thought I was fairly impervious to such things. I found it surprising and illuminating.
Advertising and media stereotypes fuck you in the head. Remember: Body hair was at one time not considered ugly on a woman. It wasn't until quite recently that this changed when a razor-blade company decided to start equating dirtiness with body-hair on women. Doubled the number of customers for its product. This was only a century or two ago.
Fuck advertising. Rock-on France! If it wasn't for Sarkozy and the creep of evil, France would be the true hero of the world.
That shark jumping thing has just happened. DMCA, please go home now. You're drunk and you're scaring the remaining guest, the family dog and our kids are shuddering in their bedrooms in fear.
Also. . , you want a calculator hack? I'll give you a calculator hack!
Type the following number. . . "07734" on your calculator and then invert the screen for a pleasant surprise!!!!!
--My 'favorite' instances are when an article is loaded up with acronyms with no explanation. It happens everywhere, not just Slashdot, that I find myself scanning an article in reverse looking for a bloody definition --and about as often as not, never finding one. Something about that just makes me steam.
Of course I can always wiki a definition myself, but the nice thing about having one linked directly from an article description is that I can be reasonably assured that the author is using the SAME definition as the one linked.
Ask ten people to define a relatively simple noun and you'll get ten totally different definitions, half of which are so incompatible that ridiculous flame wars can erupt over different readings of the exact same sentence.
I think of the human brain in two respects. Software and hardware.
IQ tests are like hardware benchmarks. And sure, I've known my own share of not-kidding-around-smarts kind of people. (Who practically need cooling fans on their heads.) --But the software many of them were running was basically, "Donkey Kong". Which is to say, I've known more clued-out 'smart' people than I'd be comfortable shaking a stick at.
Sounds like your brother was one of the very few who had, "Wisdom 1.0" installed.
It's an unfortunate indicator that he decided to leave the banking industry, allowing those running Donkey Kong to continue managing our economy.
--And on the person the 'secret' is being kept from.
It's more accurate to think of information as a form of power. Manipulative women are very good at doling out and/or withholding power accordingly among allies and enemies. This is why astrology is so powerful. If you know any Snake women, (Asian astrology, based on Jupiter), then laugh all you want, but keep an eye out because that girl has it built into her genes to destroy and manipulate people out of fear and/or wicked amusement.
Thanks for offering your thought process, though. It seems well-formed. I just find myself struggling against the evils of greed in a world where self-service is required for survival. I think fighting through this infernal crucible is how we turn from lumbering proto-humans into more fully-formed souls.
Speaking of aguring from ignorance. Or at least illiteracy. I didn't say non-ionizing radiation was harmless. I said it was different from ionizing radiation. Which it is.
Very good then. I stand corrected. And I assume then that you also recognize that non-ionizing radiation presents a legitimate concern? Though, it seems odd that you should bring up the difference at all if you believe such a thing. Are you absolutely certain you're not now just splitting hairs because you are too enslaved by your ego to be able to admit error?
And I also said, which you completely ignored, that this guy has household appliacnes that put out more of it than his precious garlic will be exposed to from a cell tower, or whatever the hell it is he's opposed to.
I read that, thought it was an erroneous comment, and then moved on. But you bring it up once more, so I've read it again. Several times. --Now that I've looked at it, it seems rather silly or at the very least full of assumptions. Are you suggesting that this farmer's washing machine and television, (I doubt somehow that he has a wifi setup given his alarm over microwave towers), are projecting stronger signals from his house and onto his garlic fields than a microwave transmission tower would do? If so, it really depends on what is meant by "A few hundred meters" (as described in the article), and how much power would be used to drive the tower, --both valid points to be considered. When I last ran the numbers for a cell tower of moderate strength in my neighborhood, I think 900 meters worked out to be the distance where cell tissue no longer would react to signal. (Human and animal cell tissue anyway. I don't know about garlic and other plant life). In any case, it's been a few years and the details are a bit faded now.
Fact is, anybody who lives in a modern, technological society is constantly exposed to EM radiation across all the spectra, all the time, every day. And has been for decades. The more you pretend that has not been pointed out, the more I will laugh at your claims.
I've never pretended that we are not bombarded by EM constantly, so I'm not entirely clear what you are getting at here. Are you suggesting that no ill effects have been observed? That would be a false statement.
Here's the skinny: specific frequencies of the right power at the right range can affect how your brain functions. However, because it's your brain, it's hard to tell when you are affected. When you feel sleepy and dazed and forgetful, is that just how you would naturally be under any circumstances, or would you feel differently if the artificial EM environment was switched off? From the subjective perspective, it's very hard to tell. This is why we have science. The book I mentioned earlier is filled with a wide selection of studies all illustrating the ways in which living tissue is indeed affected.
Find one study of the radar operators that show a statistically significant aberrant rate of any thing or STFU.
I think you have seriously mis-interpreted my comments. Please re-read them and try again. Or perhaps ask questions before leaping to conclusions. --Cuz you just blasted the stuffing out of a straw man three farms away. (And I don't think there was even any garlic growing over there!)
Here's a clue: While cancer growth rates can certainly be sped up or slowed down depending what you expose cancer cells to EMR-wise, I consider cancer entirely incidental and insignificant given the larger issue. --And I was certainly not attempting to suggest legitimacy in the released USAF studies, (not that those can be taken at face value in any event). I simply brought them up because I felt that they played a part in the origination of the, "If it don't burn it ain't bad," meme.
What you should be asking is this, "If EMR doesn't cause cancer, then what about it might be bad enough that I would bother posting at all?"
Yeah, the difference is between ionizing and non-ionizing radiation. And most people can't grasp there is a difference, much less what it is, even when you explain it to them. [. ..] We need to figure out how to run cars on stupidity, because it really is an infinite resource.
The ironic part is that with all of that bluster, you are speaking from ignorance yourself. Even when I explain how non-ionizing EM radiation can indeed affect cells, people still just can't seem to grasp what I'm talking about. When I offer graphs and references, etc., and they begin to see that they have been trumpeting ignorance, they often get pissy and refuse to read any of the references, (as if hiding from information will make it go away so that they don't have to be wrong. As if the Ego's sense of self-importance actually matters.)
Do some research before calling others stupid, please. Look up, "Cyclotron resonance" --wherein various ions in conjunction with the Earth's magnetic field, (at 60 Hz, for instance, it happens to be the lithium ion), are excited and move on a vector resulting on much more frequent penetration of cell walls, in particular, the blood/brain barrier in the human nervous system, than would happen normally in nature. The result is that if any lithium is present in the subject, that the medicinal effect is many times greater when in proximity to a 60 Hz electrical signal. How many people are on lithium drugs these days?
That's just one example.
Another aspect is that nerve cells in humans respond in a variety of peculiar ways to stimulation from 10 Hz to 500 Hz EM wave forms, (in the non-ionizing power range). This is very low, well below the microwave frequencies used by modern communication equipment. However, and this is the vital point, it has been established that much higher frequencies modulated down to low frequencies carry the same effects as those native low frequencies. That should be of interest to everybody because that's exactly how information is moved through high-frequency equipment. And all of it in the non-ionizing range.
The "It doesn't burn so it can't hurt me" meme, as far as I've been able to determine, originated with US Air Force and then later on, Motorola public relations efforts to quell fears about radar and cell phone equipment. In the USAF, a number of law suits had been filed by radar operators who had contracted cancers. They reported that in the arctic environments, they would stand in front of the radar emitters to warm themselves and that this had harmed them. The findings were inconclusive, but among the studies which Motorola ran with in their media efforts were the assumptions that heating was the only way damage could occur, allowing public perception to fill in the blanks despite the fact that the complexity of the human nervous system and the interplay of EM energy in cell tissue was far, far more complex a subject than could be reduced to a simple black & white, "does it or does it not burn?" question. The sad/funny part is that those who fall for that binary question think they are being scientific when really they are being chumped by a very simple cognitive trap designed for very simple thinkers. Most people who think they are skeptics and scientists don't really understand and certainly don't live by the principals they most admire.
There is a lot of information available on the subject of EM radiation and how it affects the human nervous system. I would recommend Robert O. Becker's book, "Cross Currents" as an excellent beginner source on the subject. Look it up on Amazon. Oddly enough, many of the people I talk to on this subject choose to invent all manner of silly/pathetic excuses to avoid performing actual research in lieu being told what is real by pop culture, ("I don't have time to read" and "Yes, his credentials ARE impressive, but after shipping, the book comes to more than the $5 you said it was, so I'm not going to read it.")
my wisdom teeth were good to me you insensitive clod!
Oh, that just means you're further along the evolutionary path than I am, and your large-jawed seed will prosper while my kind vanishes down some dead end branch of Darwin's tree.
Big-mouths inherit the world. Ain't that always the way?
Wow! --After looking at the difficulties lined up in the marketing of this new architecture, it seems to me that if it isn't backwards compatible with Windows software, then it's going to have to offer some kind of serious advantage in order to win in the game of software evolution. There's a very good chance this won't happen because the dominant approach to OS's remains full-steam ahead.
Example from biology: Humans have dozens of idiotic design parameters, features and various do-dads which despite their idiocy remain embedded in the primary design simply because the over-all template was good enough to win at the evolution game. Thus we have appendixes, wisdom teeth, crappy eyes, redundant body hair, and inefficient muscle levers, (to name a few).
We might be stuck with silly chip designs on the Enterprise.
Second thought. . .
Maybe not! --Remember the Y2K bug? How the estimates of how long it would take to re-code all the software so that it could manage an extra two digits? Disaster-scenario lovers predicted that it would take twenty years of sustained, super-expensive effort to fix the thing. As it happened, we got it done with time to spare. So maybe porting all our beloved software so that it runs on this more efficient architecture would be similarly within our grasp.
While I and every other geek in the world would love portable computers to run many times longer on a single charge, I'm not sure that this force is quite the same as, "Planes will fall out of the sky and all the escalators will fail on the eve of 2000!" We'll have to wait and see.
But good luck to ARM; I always like to see clever innovation, and my wisdom teeth were horrible.
Slashdot Mirror
Burning disks is slow and annoying, and often they are single use. (Once you've used the disk to move data from point A to point B, you no longer need the disk). I'd love to have a small box of 10 gig USB 2 plugs I could hand back and forth between people as though they were sticks of gum and not worry if you never see them again.
Heck, in the world of Netbooks, (with no CD drives), this becomes even more useful.
--Or, of course, we could always do as the Japanese have done; build an internet infrastructure which moves data around at the speed we need it moved. But in the mean time, having a handful of two-dollar USB 2 plugs around will do quite nicely.
I love it when technology slips off the cutting edge!
-FL
It's an interesting problem with no clear answer.
I've seen sites where the attacks are so outrageous and crazy that it moves from the internet out into the real world of harassment, abusive litigation and physical assault. Driven by fears of this kind of attack, I've seen site owners become VERY controlling and hyper-aware of the people looking at their material. I can see their point, but I still half-think that the fear isn't fully necessary and that free-range policies can still serve very well if you embrace them intelligently.
The Slashcode system is brilliant. I don't think people realize just how remarkable an accomplishment Slashdot is. It has been running with no holds barred on the managerial side wrt public comments, and the world hasn't ended. It's still here and healthy.
The trick is to allow full anonymity, allow user moderation, and to provide content which will attract sane people and keep them informed of sane things. --So long a population sane people of good-will are in the majority, (and social engineering aside, it generally is), then the site doesn't require massive, fear-driven control measures.
Look at YouTube; asinine comments are often "thumbed" down or overwhelmed by more reasonable responses. The world certainly has a lot of crazy assholes in it, but there are a lot more regular people. And while regular people are easy to turn into monsters if you feed them false data, you are not without power here; controlling the site content is the best way to socially engineer the minds of the regular populace. --I don't promote the removing of choice from people or manipulating people. No way. But if you give lies what they call for, (The Truth), then you are giving people the material they need to behave rationally, which generally they want to do.
This Google Wiki thing simply needs a public moderation system and good "Feng Shui" in order to regulate the natural growth and behavior patterns of the communities which flow through it. --I tend to believe in high control in the environment design and construction phase, and then 90% hands off when you set it loose. --The remaining 10% being occasional tune-ups and maintenance.
-FL
You're so silly. Nobody really is shocked to discover the women on the cover of Cosmopolitan was airbrushed. Get a grip. ...Growing spiritually? What kind of transcendental moonbat are you?
The kind who knows the difference between, "Censorship" and "Warning Labels". As you seemed to have such difficulty wrapping your noodle around that, it is hardly any wonder that you find the idea of spiritual growth confusing. But hey, if you laugh at it hard enough you can certainly pretend that it isn't there either.
News flash: People are not being mind controlled by, gasp, "THE CORPORATIONS." I'm sure you think that you're so smart and wise and above everyone else and need to protect them but most people can kind of figure out that enhancements have been made on an image.
Uh huh. Because social engineering stops at facial make-up and you're smarter than the teams of dedicated behavioral researchers who have been hacking the human mind since well before your parents were toddlers. The simple fact that you don't know what spiritual awareness is says to me that the mind-job performed on you has been rather effective.
LOL at you thinking people are being mindcontrolled by zits being removed from women on billboard images :D :D :D
"Laughter" of that kind is an automatic response. Why do you do it? How did you learn it, and who taught it to you? If you can even start to answer those questions in a realistic manner, then you're not entirely a wind-up toy.
So instead of laughing, try setting aside bias and doing some reading into how the human mind works. Start with a quick review of the basics; Marshall McLuhan, Noam Chomsky/Edward Herman, Joseph Goebbels. Martha Stout is also pretty amazing, though less well-known. From there you can work your way up to more complex works by others. This stuff isn't hidden; it's right out there in the open for anybody who wants to know. Once you have collected enough data, you can start thinking and forming valid opinions. Until then, you are making ignorant assumptions of no consequence.
The subject of human awareness is an amazing one. Until you devote some effort into studying how it works, you really will remain running on automatic, mechanical thinking for your whole life without ever realizing it. The recognition of one's own mechanical nature is one of the most difficult hurdles to get over because the very nature of the mind in that state is such that it doesn't facilitate awareness of that state.
More transcendental moonbat shit, that is. Go back to sleep now.
-FL
I LIKE complexity and the power provided by many options. It's why my computer has over a hundred buttons on it. If I wanted a gameboy or an iPhone, I'd have a gameboy or an iPhone. But I don't. I have a computer with a mouse and the ability to navigate with precision through a complex GUI.
Photoshop is a great example of uncompromisingly complex software not written for idiots; it's a brute to learn, but once you've surmounted the bell curve, you can solve any problem about six different ways at high speed.
Driver software also suffers from "Stupid Creep". --Early versions of device drivers are generally so full of options that you can fine-tune your machine to do exactly what you want it to do. Then, almost invariably, the designers read, "How Steve Jobs Made A Billion Dollars" and start deciding on your behalf which functions you don't need and remove them, plugging in half-baked AI's to think for you, or simply dumping you in the middle of whatever average behavior is expected and leave no option of escape. --Snatching away functions and choices and all the things I like so that the average drooling user can operate their scanner or whatever without the need for higher brain functions. Like those computer consoles in "Idiocracy".
Lame.
Fortunately, old versions of software are available on the web and PC's are still highly configurable. --I can understand the desire of the Mozilla folks to want to stay current, but they're on their own with this one.
I'd add, "Get off my lawn!" except I enjoy the sound of kids playing outside. Just so long as it's not with hand-held video games.
-FL
Wow. And here I thought my parents had more to do with my gene pool than my time of birth. Nevermind my disposition.
Nothing is ever so simple. There's a lot more to a person than their genes. --Even identical twins born within moments of each other will express their individuality in unique ways. Astrology and genetics provide influences and boundaries, etc., but they do not prevent the soul from choosing and then expressing those choices via an application of Will.
Computers offer a useful analogy; Two computers can be built using the same hardware, (genetics), can run the same software (astrology), but what the user does within that environment is governed by the Soul.
-FL
Blah blah blah. I hear this crap all the time, it happens just as much with boys. You supposed to be tanned and toned, look like a linebacker, have just the right hair, jaw needs to be this shape, etc.
You're right when you note highschool populations today.
It's become more intense over the years for men. How old are you? I was born in the very early Seventies, and I remember being blithely unaware of body image demands until I was in my mid teens. And even then, it didn't penetrate very deeply and I was happy enough to simply go through life without worrying too much about the shape of my body. This seemed to be the case with all virtually the guys I knew, whereas many of the girls I grew up with were obsessing about body image, were on 'diets', trying to stuff themselves into tight jeens, etc. Fat girls were made fun of while fat guys were big-boned. That's how I remember it.
But that was quite some years ago now. The body image messages seem to have been ramped up all over the media spectrum, and it seems very likely that body-image messages are more equally aimed at both sexes today.
Rambo and Ahhnold became media icons in the mid-80's, while we had Steve McQueen in the 60's and Harrison Fords and other guys in the 70's who were masculine but who were not PuMpEd up. Whereas for women, big boobs, long legs and thin waists have been in vogue for that whole period, and expressed in media loudly.
I'm not interested in working out who the bigger victims are. Victim culture is bullshit. --I don't have any patience for women who direct anger at me because of social injustices I had nothing to do with. But that doesn't prevent me from recognizing facts.
-FL
I very much doubt that it was "only a century or two ago." I don't think many women removed their body hair in 1800, or 1850, or even 1900. More likely, it was a marketing gimmick in the post-war years, when Edward Bernais got up to his clever tricks.
I didn't bother to do the research again to figure out the exact date. Which just goes to show how effective advertising has been on me, and I'm trying to stay aware!
-FL
The same logic IS applicable and can be easily used to defend censorship;
Ugh. Wiggle, wiggle, bullshit, wiggle. Just say, "Yeah, good point," and move on like a self-respecting person with an ounce of integrity and quit trying to WIN. Trying to WIN means you're not interested in truth; you're interested in polishing up lies and thus fucking with your sense of reality so that your ego can feel good. This is both self-destructive and lame.
NOBODY was suggesting censorship, but since you're on the topic, let's look at it because it's not always the big bad thing it's been MARKETED as being. . .
Corporations and individuals are NOT the same. Corporations should NOT be allowed to lie, because when they do, they tear down rain forests, poison entire populations, use cost/benefit analysis to allow dangerously faulty designs to be used in public, they crash economies and they derail elected governments, etc. Your examples are all about human individuals. Humans are small and they NEED to be allowed the space to lie and make mistakes because that is how they grow spiritually; A girl with a boob job is not going to have the same effect on society as a corporate ad campaign designed to implant thoughts into the minds of millions of people. Also, the corporation CANNOT grow spiritually, and thus will only learn how to lie better. This is why we need to be able to control corporations. They are not people; they are huge and they are dangerous. Our ability to anthropomorphize a giant non-human entity is a natural and well-exploited tendency in humans. We need to stop thinking that telling a corporation not to lie is the same as telling a person she can't wear make-up.
The fact that so many people are willing, to their own detriment, to defend abusive corporate bodies is proof-positive of just how effective ad campaigns are.
-FL
So, as a non-shitty person, you're the type who wants to use the force and violence of government to make ugly that which some people consider beautiful. Wouldn't a better method be to just boycott any publication which had pictures of beautiful people in it? What would Ghandi do?
A few things. . .
It's not publications with pictures of beautiful people; it's publications of pictures of people which have been digitally altered. A label at the bottom of a poster saying, "The people in the above image have been digitally altered," doesn't change the image in the poster. It just informs people that they're being lied to.
From the Wiki on Gandhi, "As a practitioner of ahimsa, he swore to speak the truth and advocated that others do the same."
Also. . , while Gandhi was a genius, his philosophy contains one flaw; it works wonderfully if you happen to live in a world without psychopaths, but we don't. This is the problem with living in wishful thinking; in only wanting to see 'beautiful' things rather than what is actually there. Wishful thinking is very destructive.
-FL
Nonsense. Utter, complete, absolute nonsense.
For goodness sake, the same banking families financed both sides of the cold war, were using the same debt strategies (or variations on the theme) to control both governments and populations on either side of the Iron Curtain. (Oooh, what a dramatic term! The curtain is IRON! Makes for great copy.)
--This means that the people in charge were not Russians and they were not Americans. It was somebody else at the top of the pyramid, and that person or group had no real interest in nuking everything in existence. Why? Because slaves can't clean your toilets if they have been reduced to ash.
However, controlling the slaves is another story altogether, thus we get the stupid drama which loud alpha males with salt & pepper hair sitting in their cigar-smelling easy-chairs barking endlessly with great authority about. . . Some of those strutting imbeciles are blathering away right now in this very forum. --Filled to the brim with important-sounding History Channel crappola. --All of it one giant, ridiculous, idiotic charade. You were never in any true danger of nuclear annihilation. No. You weren't.
And you can add the economic theorists to the idiot pile; those who argue over whether it was the Capitalists or the Communists who won or lost are just as deluded. When all the details are boiled down, this simple fact remains: All money in the East and West is borrowed from private banks, and all of it is borrowed at interest. The world is owned by the banks because it's impossible to pay back 10% on the principal when the principal is all there is.
Funny how they never mentioned any of that in school.
Now the question is this: Who controls the private banks? What do they fear? Who issues commands to them?
Whatever the answer to that is, one thing is certain: This Dead Hand nonsense is just a left-over piece of sensationalist crap designed to keep you in line. Same as the whole terrorist thing; a controlled bit of stage production using real, live idiots who really did think they were super-spies or Allah's children or whatever horseshit they're selling the testosterone junkie plebes these days. All crap. All controlled. All to make sure the vast majority of humans keep their heads down and their hands dirty and their mouths shut.
-FL
Great! Let's also censor all media that stigmatizes nerds! Cancel "Ugly Betty!" Require TV shows to have people with imperfect teeth! All soap operas must have at least one male with acne. And next time I clone out a zit on my face for my facebook picture, I'll be able to sleep warmly at night knowing there's I also had to put a disclaimer on it saying so.
Who said anything about censoring?
Putting a label on something simply adds another signal to the message. It points out the lie, it does not suppress it.
None of your examples are appropriate or parallel to the subject being discussed.
-FL
OMG you are such a tard -- Did you vote for Obama?
There will be NO SHORTAGE of beautiful women in the world to "influence anorexia". A label is not going to change a mentally disturbed person's mind. PERIOD
OMG, I don't know if you are aware, and please do correct me if I am wrong, but based on your silly post, you currently typify the thundering retard who doesn't grasp the concept of evidence, reason or rationality. --Who honestly cannot understand the difference between reasoning and simply repeating dogma loudly in the brain-damaged belief that doing so will make the things s/he wants to be true become actually true.
If this is you, then please do evolve or stop typing because at the moment you barely sound human. Go swing in the tire.
-FL
Awwww. Pooooooooooor you.
The anger cycle, your attitudes, beliefs and all the other crap in your mental machine will put you squarely in the middle of exactly the kind of people which best match that head-space. If you are a shitty person, you'll be surrounded by the same. If you believe that the world is full of shitty people, you'll prove that to yourself every day.
Water rises, (or sinks) to its own level.
Learn that, and you're basically a Jedi. Until then, you're a chump.
Good luck finding your way out of that maze. It's one of the tougher ones, but absolutely required if you want to advance beyond "Proto-Human".
-FL
Right-on, France!
I don't know if such a law can even work, but just the fact that this kind of thing is even being considered is really cool.
My fellow male geeks don't truly get what girls go through and what a mind-job it does on them. But there IS one example which might resonate. . .
Remember when all those new Star Wars toys came out, and all the characters you once identified with were now PuMpEd up? I know it affected me in a negative way, and I thought I was fairly impervious to such things. I found it surprising and illuminating.
Advertising and media stereotypes fuck you in the head. Remember: Body hair was at one time not considered ugly on a woman. It wasn't until quite recently that this changed when a razor-blade company decided to start equating dirtiness with body-hair on women. Doubled the number of customers for its product. This was only a century or two ago.
Fuck advertising. Rock-on France! If it wasn't for Sarkozy and the creep of evil, France would be the true hero of the world.
-FL
This is about calculator keys, right?
That shark jumping thing has just happened. DMCA, please go home now. You're drunk and you're scaring the remaining guest, the family dog and our kids are shuddering in their bedrooms in fear.
Also. . , you want a calculator hack? I'll give you a calculator hack!
Type the following number. . . "07734" on your calculator and then invert the screen for a pleasant surprise!!!!!
(Ooooh, it's so exciting and. . , welcoming!)
-FL
Well put.
--My 'favorite' instances are when an article is loaded up with acronyms with no explanation. It happens everywhere, not just Slashdot, that I find myself scanning an article in reverse looking for a bloody definition --and about as often as not, never finding one. Something about that just makes me steam.
Of course I can always wiki a definition myself, but the nice thing about having one linked directly from an article description is that I can be reasonably assured that the author is using the SAME definition as the one linked.
Ask ten people to define a relatively simple noun and you'll get ten totally different definitions, half of which are so incompatible that ridiculous flame wars can erupt over different readings of the exact same sentence.
Cheers!
-FL
I think of the human brain in two respects. Software and hardware.
IQ tests are like hardware benchmarks. And sure, I've known my own share of not-kidding-around-smarts kind of people. (Who practically need cooling fans on their heads.) --But the software many of them were running was basically, "Donkey Kong". Which is to say, I've known more clued-out 'smart' people than I'd be comfortable shaking a stick at.
Sounds like your brother was one of the very few who had, "Wisdom 1.0" installed.
It's an unfortunate indicator that he decided to leave the banking industry, allowing those running Donkey Kong to continue managing our economy.
-FL
--And on the person the 'secret' is being kept from.
It's more accurate to think of information as a form of power. Manipulative women are very good at doling out and/or withholding power accordingly among allies and enemies. This is why astrology is so powerful. If you know any Snake women, (Asian astrology, based on Jupiter), then laugh all you want, but keep an eye out because that girl has it built into her genes to destroy and manipulate people out of fear and/or wicked amusement.
-FL
First, I was mostly just going for laughs.
Me too.
Thanks for offering your thought process, though. It seems well-formed. I just find myself struggling against the evils of greed in a world where self-service is required for survival. I think fighting through this infernal crucible is how we turn from lumbering proto-humans into more fully-formed souls.
-FL
In Gene's world, you wouldn't want to own it. You'd simply don your metallic jammies and go visit the thing in a museum, where it belongs.
I love those lines in Indy films, "It belongs in a museum!" The dude was willing to die for that ideal. Does that make Indy a communist?
-FL
Speaking of aguring from ignorance. Or at least illiteracy. I didn't say non-ionizing radiation was harmless. I said it was different from ionizing radiation. Which it is.
Very good then. I stand corrected. And I assume then that you also recognize that non-ionizing radiation presents a legitimate concern? Though, it seems odd that you should bring up the difference at all if you believe such a thing. Are you absolutely certain you're not now just splitting hairs because you are too enslaved by your ego to be able to admit error?
And I also said, which you completely ignored, that this guy has household appliacnes that put out more of it than his precious garlic will be exposed to from a cell tower, or whatever the hell it is he's opposed to.
I read that, thought it was an erroneous comment, and then moved on. But you bring it up once more, so I've read it again. Several times. --Now that I've looked at it, it seems rather silly or at the very least full of assumptions. Are you suggesting that this farmer's washing machine and television, (I doubt somehow that he has a wifi setup given his alarm over microwave towers), are projecting stronger signals from his house and onto his garlic fields than a microwave transmission tower would do? If so, it really depends on what is meant by "A few hundred meters" (as described in the article), and how much power would be used to drive the tower, --both valid points to be considered. When I last ran the numbers for a cell tower of moderate strength in my neighborhood, I think 900 meters worked out to be the distance where cell tissue no longer would react to signal. (Human and animal cell tissue anyway. I don't know about garlic and other plant life). In any case, it's been a few years and the details are a bit faded now.
Fact is, anybody who lives in a modern, technological society is constantly exposed to EM radiation across all the spectra, all the time, every day. And has been for decades. The more you pretend that has not been pointed out, the more I will laugh at your claims.
I've never pretended that we are not bombarded by EM constantly, so I'm not entirely clear what you are getting at here. Are you suggesting that no ill effects have been observed? That would be a false statement.
Here's the skinny: specific frequencies of the right power at the right range can affect how your brain functions. However, because it's your brain, it's hard to tell when you are affected. When you feel sleepy and dazed and forgetful, is that just how you would naturally be under any circumstances, or would you feel differently if the artificial EM environment was switched off? From the subjective perspective, it's very hard to tell. This is why we have science. The book I mentioned earlier is filled with a wide selection of studies all illustrating the ways in which living tissue is indeed affected.
-FL
Find one study of the radar operators that show a statistically significant aberrant rate of any thing or STFU.
I think you have seriously mis-interpreted my comments. Please re-read them and try again. Or perhaps ask questions before leaping to conclusions. --Cuz you just blasted the stuffing out of a straw man three farms away. (And I don't think there was even any garlic growing over there!)
Here's a clue: While cancer growth rates can certainly be sped up or slowed down depending what you expose cancer cells to EMR-wise, I consider cancer entirely incidental and insignificant given the larger issue. --And I was certainly not attempting to suggest legitimacy in the released USAF studies, (not that those can be taken at face value in any event). I simply brought them up because I felt that they played a part in the origination of the, "If it don't burn it ain't bad," meme.
What you should be asking is this, "If EMR doesn't cause cancer, then what about it might be bad enough that I would bother posting at all?"
-FL
Yeah, the difference is between ionizing and non-ionizing radiation. And most people can't grasp there is a difference, much less what it is, even when you explain it to them. [. . .] We need to figure out how to run cars on stupidity, because it really is an infinite resource.
The ironic part is that with all of that bluster, you are speaking from ignorance yourself. Even when I explain how non-ionizing EM radiation can indeed affect cells, people still just can't seem to grasp what I'm talking about. When I offer graphs and references, etc., and they begin to see that they have been trumpeting ignorance, they often get pissy and refuse to read any of the references, (as if hiding from information will make it go away so that they don't have to be wrong. As if the Ego's sense of self-importance actually matters.)
Do some research before calling others stupid, please. Look up, "Cyclotron resonance" --wherein various ions in conjunction with the Earth's magnetic field, (at 60 Hz, for instance, it happens to be the lithium ion), are excited and move on a vector resulting on much more frequent penetration of cell walls, in particular, the blood/brain barrier in the human nervous system, than would happen normally in nature. The result is that if any lithium is present in the subject, that the medicinal effect is many times greater when in proximity to a 60 Hz electrical signal. How many people are on lithium drugs these days?
That's just one example.
Another aspect is that nerve cells in humans respond in a variety of peculiar ways to stimulation from 10 Hz to 500 Hz EM wave forms, (in the non-ionizing power range). This is very low, well below the microwave frequencies used by modern communication equipment. However, and this is the vital point, it has been established that much higher frequencies modulated down to low frequencies carry the same effects as those native low frequencies. That should be of interest to everybody because that's exactly how information is moved through high-frequency equipment. And all of it in the non-ionizing range.
The "It doesn't burn so it can't hurt me" meme, as far as I've been able to determine, originated with US Air Force and then later on, Motorola public relations efforts to quell fears about radar and cell phone equipment. In the USAF, a number of law suits had been filed by radar operators who had contracted cancers. They reported that in the arctic environments, they would stand in front of the radar emitters to warm themselves and that this had harmed them. The findings were inconclusive, but among the studies which Motorola ran with in their media efforts were the assumptions that heating was the only way damage could occur, allowing public perception to fill in the blanks despite the fact that the complexity of the human nervous system and the interplay of EM energy in cell tissue was far, far more complex a subject than could be reduced to a simple black & white, "does it or does it not burn?" question. The sad/funny part is that those who fall for that binary question think they are being scientific when really they are being chumped by a very simple cognitive trap designed for very simple thinkers. Most people who think they are skeptics and scientists don't really understand and certainly don't live by the principals they most admire.
There is a lot of information available on the subject of EM radiation and how it affects the human nervous system. I would recommend Robert O. Becker's book, "Cross Currents" as an excellent beginner source on the subject. Look it up on Amazon. Oddly enough, many of the people I talk to on this subject choose to invent all manner of silly/pathetic excuses to avoid performing actual research in lieu being told what is real by pop culture, ("I don't have time to read" and "Yes, his credentials ARE impressive, but after shipping, the book comes to more than the $5 you said it was, so I'm not going to read it.")
Now THAT's stupid!
-FL
my wisdom teeth were good to me you insensitive clod!
Oh, that just means you're further along the evolutionary path than I am, and your large-jawed seed will prosper while my kind vanishes down some dead end branch of Darwin's tree.
Big-mouths inherit the world. Ain't that always the way?
-FL
The first is. . .
Wow! --After looking at the difficulties lined up in the marketing of this new architecture, it seems to me that if it isn't backwards compatible with Windows software, then it's going to have to offer some kind of serious advantage in order to win in the game of software evolution. There's a very good chance this won't happen because the dominant approach to OS's remains full-steam ahead.
Example from biology: Humans have dozens of idiotic design parameters, features and various do-dads which despite their idiocy remain embedded in the primary design simply because the over-all template was good enough to win at the evolution game. Thus we have appendixes, wisdom teeth, crappy eyes, redundant body hair, and inefficient muscle levers, (to name a few).
We might be stuck with silly chip designs on the Enterprise.
Second thought. . .
Maybe not! --Remember the Y2K bug? How the estimates of how long it would take to re-code all the software so that it could manage an extra two digits? Disaster-scenario lovers predicted that it would take twenty years of sustained, super-expensive effort to fix the thing. As it happened, we got it done with time to spare. So maybe porting all our beloved software so that it runs on this more efficient architecture would be similarly within our grasp.
While I and every other geek in the world would love portable computers to run many times longer on a single charge, I'm not sure that this force is quite the same as, "Planes will fall out of the sky and all the escalators will fail on the eve of 2000!" We'll have to wait and see.
But good luck to ARM; I always like to see clever innovation, and my wisdom teeth were horrible.
-FL