Are you being intentionally obtuse? The prosecution is for an offence such as assault, vandalism or robbery. The gubmint don't just say to someone who#s done nothing "agree to the surveillance or we'll prosecute you for refusing".
Are you being intentionally obtuse?
My points, and there were two of them, were these:
1. The poster said that invasive surveillance was "non-compulsory" and that this made everything okay. This is false. When the only other option available is prison, then one is under the compulsion to comply. --Whether or not the punishment is deserving, (which appears to be the meat of your argument), is entirely irrelevant to this point.
2. My second point is that the behavior being punished is a direct result of class warfare, which is very deliberately waged upon the populace by the state. You seem to have missed this all-important item. Slaves who become angered for being slaves can be vilified by the state laws as much as you like, but it doesn't make the natural reaction of rage incorrect. The tragedy is that they have been so retarded by the system that they don't know how to best direct their rage. They're not attacking the right people. --Which is also a deliberate outcome of the control system.
Are you so naïve about economics that you think there's plenty for all and governments keep it from the people just to be mean?
Actually yes, I believe exactly that, but it doesn't stem from naivete. Economics is a bloody twisted shell game based on false credit creation. Though, I must also say that I am very impressed with your use of the double-dotted 'i'.
It's not nearly so straight forward as you make it out to be. And you know it. Where is your bias really coming from?
Notice that nothing in this is compulsory. It is an option presented to families as an alternative to being prosecuted.
Not compulsory? Please re-read your own sentence. Anybody who would willingly agree to this 'non-compulsory' treatment is somebody under serious compulsion. Like the fear of prosecution.
Poor education and class warfare is why this situation exists at all. And it's deliberate.
Slave nation. We're not much better in the West. We have more television channels, so it's easier to keep people from open rebellion. In the UK, you need more truncheons.
I think of the UK rather as being the control sample in a large experiment.
This is your basic statecraft Judo; Tension is created to excuse the use of Gestapo muscle. In this case the tension is created through a mult-generational application of terrible education and terrible living standards so that people become frustrated fit to bursting. The youthful rage you're talking about is an honest and healthy reaction to slavery. The solution isn't MORE pressure.
But people have been successfully dumbed down to the point where this is no longer as obvious as daylight, and so they welcome the Empire.
-FL
"So This Is How Liberty Dies. . . With Thunderous Applause"
A general strike across all industries means that the slaves are no longer feeding their masters. The slave masters are frickin' terrified of this, which is why they work so hard to control people, to dumb them down and turn them against each other. The French have this worked out. Those giant cross-country strikes? Notice how the French have a better standard of living than virtually anybody else on the planet? This is why they were vilified by Bush-co. Fuck the slave masters and all their endless lies. Politicians are leaches. End of story.
If everybody puts a bit of canned food aside and commits to taking care of each other during the stoppage, then they can happily starve out the government and make it bend to their will.
That's all it takes. --That and a few hard-headed strike leaders willing to brave MI5's assassins. But that's not impossible, and they know it.
We just have the comfort of knowing that we live on the edges of ridiculously huge tracts of unpopulated, un-cleared wilderness bigger than most European countries into which we can run off and live, (and conduct guerrilla warfare from), should things get really sticky. Our brand of political asshole remains vaguely aware of this fact. I think that's partly why there seems to be a campaign afoot to ensure that everybody turns into a fat, lazy, ignorant, TV-watching, video-gaming idiot. They run slower, have fewer hours in the day to think, and in the end, simply put up with a lot more bullshit.
A hunter isn't scared of the same things everybody else is, because s/he knows that should society crumble, survival isn't a matter of how many digits are recorded after one's name in the local bank machine.
With 50,000 apps (and counting) floating around, how DOES one get seen? How DOES one achieve that holy grail of marketing coups, the "monetiezed viral phenomenon"?
Well, creating a shitstorm of controversy and then pulling the wool over the eyes of a hundred thousand Slashdotter game junkies would be a good start. Ka-Ching.
You have no idea what resources a probe built by a civilization 100,000 years ahead of us requires.
Heck, even the assumption that "Probes" as we understand them are needed for data collection is enormously conceited on the part of humanity.
Humans today are as thick as bricks.
Do we try to communicate with the cows and pigs? Heck, we walk among them, breed them, cage them, kill them and EAT them. But they just graze and stand around in a daze as though it were all the most normal thing in the world. We simply use the means of containment which are necessary to counteract their ability to overcome that containment and escape our food system.
As above, so below.
We're smarter than cows and we have opposable thumbs, so the systems necessary to contain and manage us as a food supply are naturally going to be more complex. But those systems work well enough, and they're barely hidden if we bother to stop and notice them. But we don't. Instead we dream our lives away and discuss Fermi as though he were full of insight and wisdom. As though aliens would naturally want to shake our hands and talk with us. That burning bush spoke, did it? And did the things it told us make the world less like a meat rendering plant or more like a meat rendering plant?
There are thousands of documented crop circles with just some of the strangest features which cannot be replicated by even the most clever human engineers we ask. And there are countless millions of children who go missing every year all over the world. For some reason, those figures are largely NOT documented. How curious.
But we don't like to think about things like that. They are creepy and weird and our knees are designed to jerk instantly upon the mention of such things. We've been well programmed. Anybody who thinks we have not need only read the five hundred posts on this very subject. The amount of raw sewage which passes for reasoned thinking is depressing.
You had me right up until you mentioned "DMT". --Unless, of course you meant "Database Management Technology", which I agree is an excellent way of learning about the universe. Learning takes work.
"Insight in a bottle" drugs damage you in some interesting ways which can prevent real growth. Even Castaneda, the king of the spiritual drug trip, explained that DJ only drugged him with such dangerous chemicals because he was so very stupid. They needed to blast him repeatedly before he would accept that "Things aren't really as they seem"; then he was quite sober for the bulk of his weird journeys through the latter years.
Please listen to this poster. Or perhaps read the article yourself.
There is NO vaccine which is delivered via mosquitoes. The researchers were testing the effectiveness of chloroquine in conjunction with moderate exposure to the malaria parasite in an attempt to boost immunity in the host.
The bottom line is that you still need to take a drug on a regular basis, and that drug isn't perfect.
Little has changed since the days of tonic water. Sorry.
I don't think that Fermi's Paradox is all that paradoxical either. I just think he was closed-minded, unimaginative and perhaps a tad (or a whole lot) conceited. (Sorry, Fermi.) --But I still think you're making a rather large assumption.
We crossed oceans without first getting comfortable in our dangerous, leaky, rat-infested sail boats. Planets have wonderful, big, open spaces, wind and rain and snow, natural sunlight, natural fauna and geographic features which appear according to chaotic systems we don't have to think about or organize; they just happen! How awesome is that? I think living on a space platform, even a really nice one, would be a rather horrible way to exist by comparison.
I also happen to think that contact was made a long time ago, we are the cattle raised by those who plan to colonize and that all our major religions are direct works of population manipulation.
But then, I'm about as far from Fermi as Fermi is from me. Exactly that far, actually.
Basic human mechanics explain the success and failure of these films.
1. "Alien". --The alien was a grand mystery, a freaky horror show. It was scary and 'alien' and that was what drew us in and thrilled audiences. We are frightened of things we cannot understand and at the same time drawn toward those things in order to understand them. Basic human survival circuitry in action translated into a box-office success.
2. "Aliens". --Okay. Now we get it. We understand the basic biology of the "monster" and we're not scared anymore. Well, we're a little scared, but actually, we're also sort of pissed off that we got our asses handed to us the first time and that we screamed like little girls. Fuckin' aliens. I'd like to see how those ugly bastards would stand up against us in a REAL fight, like with grenades and machine guns. (Classic, "Who would win? Spider Man or the Hulk?") Yet again, basic human wiring turned into box-office dollars. (The answer, it turns out is, "We'd stand up remarkably well." --That's why Cameron had to handicap the marines so severely. It really was just a bug hunt gone wrong.)
3. "Who Cares?" It's just pest control at this point. Not that interesting. Might as well be, "Snakes on a Plane."
4. "Who Cares Part II". See above.
5. Bleh. Society has moved on. You're going to have to come up with a new kind of monster if you want to scare/impress audiences today. Nobody has the guts or the brains to do that apparently. --Though that Torchwood production, "Children of Earth", was surprisingly solid. Made me feel kind of sick, but then so did "Alien".
I currently live in a community with many farmers, and most of them are smarter than me, university educated and generally very well informed. They know their plant and soil ecology/biology backwards and forwards, and have the years of experience and product to show for their efforts. Several of your points make it clear that you have NO idea what you are talking about.
Because I didn't want to be like you, I took the time to ask questions. In fact, just last week, I attended a workshop for a local community farm with featured experts who came to advise on soil health, and I can tell you that the science of organic farming is lightyears beyond what most people think. For instance, in the last ten years alone, there have been amazing discoveries made about the life cycles and inter-relationships at work in the garden. --One of the more startling I learned about was the symbiotic relationship between certain common fungus strains and the plants they inhabit. Kill the fungus, decrease crop yields by as much as 30%. --And we, the human race, are actively exploring the science behind why this is so. Or at least those of us who are paying attention. Those eating ho-hos and living in ad-based states of denial don't know much of anything.
Essentially it comes down to this: the systems which naturally evolved over millions of years are incredibly efficient and smart, and when you learn how to tweak those systems using the lego bricks which naturally exist within their ecologic spheres, without introducing foreign agents, you can raise clean, healthy crops which don't come laced with poisons and dangerous genetic uncertainty factors. There's a reason Australia has too many rabbits; it's called, "Irresponsible scientific conceit". --The belief that humans are not connected to and stand apart from the rest of the biosphere; that we are smart enough to be able to whack Life with chemical and genetic mallets without taking the time to learn about the subtleties of biological relationships and that we will not be affected in our ego-centric bubble reality.
It takes the WORK of study to be a successful organic farmer, whereas it only takes money and intellectual laziness to spread a bag of the latest corporate powder on your land. I've met both types. It's like the difference between a hard-core television viewer and a mountain climber. One has a brain made of goop, the other has eyes filled with sparks.
And I hate to break it to you, but you atheists are exactly like theists, but you don't believe in any gods..
Agreed.
I'd call dogmatic thinking of any sort to be a kind of worship.
Dogmatics are all spooky.
The kind of brainwashing used on regular church goers seems innocent enough from a certain angle, but it is quite plain to me that should the church decide so, they could within short order turn a significant portion of the god-fearing masses into an army of zombie killers who will burn my house down because they have unquestioning faith that doing so is God's will.
Atheist dogmatics spook me for the same reasons, though their commands issue from the 'Discovery Channel' rather than the pulpit. For instance, one day, a platoon of idiots with machine guns could easily arrive under orders to jab everybody in my town with a mystery fluid for the good of society because 'Science' told them to. Marvelous.
Of course, my personal belief system states that anybody who acts selfishly and destructively and whose brain isn't wired for human emotions should be tattooed with a big "Beware" symbol or simply locked up. --Except we'd have to rebuild the most of the government from the ground up. (Plan 'B' simply consists of learning how to recognize and avoid giving power to assholes.)
There don't need to be any specific rational reasons behind this. It's simply a matter of species recognition.
Giant corporate behemoths are into slave labor. Their bodies are larger than any group of moral people within it, and so the cost/benefit analysis cancer is much more able to grow in yucky ways. (Is it cheaper to do something awful and pay the occasional price of a lost law suit than it is to not do it?)
Indy companies are much more likely to exist for the express purpose of serving its human masters and not the other way around. So when a large, psychotic company detects another similar species out there in the shared environment doing things differently, it sees it as a criticism of, and indeed. a threat to it's own chosen mode of behavior. Therefore, this Other is labeled "Enemy".
It's kind of like how two geeks of differing opinions will attempt to annihilate one another on instinct. Which version of "True" will become dominant in the world? Blood will flow over this.
I don't actually have a problem with bio-fuels if they are used correctly. --Oil is a bio-fuel which just happens to have been stored for millions of years. Basically, plants convert and store sunlight energy, and so it's essentially using Life to harvest solar power. It's the way in which food crops are being used to fuel cars which causes trouble.
I'd love to see a smart solution like the one you suggest. But after all the arguing is over and the dust has settled, it really comes down to this one fact: Big industry doesn't like smart solutions. --Not when "Smart" means, "Cheap and Efficient", which invariably means selling fewer units less frequently, and that's bad for business.
It's not cynicism. It's just math. Only when we become a lot wiser as a species will the larger equations of general happiness for all overtake low-level greed-based business math. We're not there yet.
If we want "Cheap and Efficient", we have to make it ourselves or work in community-based co-operatives.
*My* kids are learning critical thinking skills. We've talked about the likelihood of ET life, the energy required to travel interstellar distances and the absurdity of alien invasion stories. It's right up there with werewolves.
You do realize that through your actions, your kids are now pretty much guaranteed to join a christian cult and worship elves while drinking colloidal silver to cure their ills, right?
"The method using surface plasmon represents a new technology to enhance the emission efficiency of OLED. It is expected to greatly contribute to the development of new technologies in OLED and flexible display, as well as securing original technology," --Prof. Choi
Doesn't that just sound like something out of the Alpha Centauri tech tree?
Light emitting diodes tech is one of my favorite. It and all the inventions which derive from it, makes life look and feel as though we're truly in, "The Future" as I imagined it while watching Buck Rogers back in my childhood.
I can't believe that I of all people have to be the one to point this out. (Please bear in mind when I say that, that I am one of those Free Energy dudes who thinks Pons & Fleishmann were on to something and that it was suppressed).
--I mean, I'd be as happy as anybody for a smart solution to the fuel problem to be embraced by industry. While wind and solar farming seem to be catching on, hydrogen and electric vehicles seem to be anathema. But anyway, the point of this post. . .
Bacteria need more than sunlight and CO2 to produce an energy-rich byproduct like alcohol.
They need biomass of some sort. The petri dishes we used in my highschool biology lab didn't come with nutrient agar spread across the bottom for no reason, now did they?
The last time I read up on one of these fuel-from-algae efforts, they involved feeding a rather large quantity of SUGAR CANE and WOOD CHIPS to the cultures. Scaled up to industrial quantities, this method of fuel production works out to be about the same as Corn Ethanol. Growing gasoline. Anybody who needs to be informed as to why this is an incredibly stupid idea should go and inform themselves at once.
This story looks like very carefully worded P.R. spin. "They produce their own sugars"? Ugh. Human cells can do that too. It's called, "Burning Fat". That energy has to come from somewhere, and it doesn't come from Salt Water and Carbon Dioxide.
Come on Slashdot. Wake up. Conservation of Energy doesn't go away just because it spends a bit of time being green and gooey.
LoTR was a great work by someone who really spent time and effort writing the book. Does he (or even his family) not deserve to reap the rewards of his efforts that we are all enjoying? Why does everyone think that just because you like it that somehow it's now no longer HIS but OURS. Communism?
I can understand what you are saying, and I agree with it to a point, and that point is called, "Culture".
The stories and ideas which bind us together as a culture also form the words of our language, the content of our dreams. Creating a system in which only those who have enough wealth are legally allowed to experience certain thoughts is pretty tyrannical.
So you have a spectrum; at one end, you have honest rewards earned from honest labor, and on the other end you have tyranny. Anybody who tries to say that only one end of that spectrum exists. . , well that person is wrong. (And there are a lot of wrong people out there.)
The problem is that the gray area between the ends on this spectrum is where most of us live, and the problem cannot be solved by putting every situation through a simple mathematical formula to receive a Yes/No answer. It just doesn't work that way, as we've found through the application of endless arguments of limited perspective which only give us another push on the logical merry-go-round.
We should try rather to gauge these situations based on how fair they seem. LoTR has passed into common culture at this point, that much is clear, however, I also think it would be fair to give a tip of the hat to the Tolkien estate. It doesn't have to be a billion dollars, but for goodness sake, a couple million wouldn't bloody hurt when studio executive coke-heads are raking it in. --Speaking of whom, I'd love to see that crowd allow some of their works to pass into public domain. Sheesh.
Having ALL the adult authority figures in your 7 year-old life convince you that the world is ending. . ? If you honestly think that wouldn't mess you up, then you're kidding yourself. You're not Captain Kirk. If they pulled it off, you'd be shell-shocked like anybody else.
Of course. . , if the teaching and police staff did a half-assed job and made themselves look like idiots while wrecking their air of authority, then the smart kids would be disturbed for entirely different reasons. "Oh my god. The adults in our lives are all complete morons. We're doomed."
The fiance of friend of mine is a total hottie and she owns and runs a whole development shop. She can move aside a programmer when the job isn't being done up to her alarmingly high specs and get it done herself in half the time. Think, "Geek Bond Girl". Then get out more before assuming you know what reality looks like. With a bit of exploring, one learns that most fictional accounts of the world aren't half as astonishing as the real thing.
Slashdot Mirror
Are you being intentionally obtuse? The prosecution is for an offence such as assault, vandalism or robbery. The gubmint don't just say to someone who#s done nothing "agree to the surveillance or we'll prosecute you for refusing".
Are you being intentionally obtuse?
My points, and there were two of them, were these:
1. The poster said that invasive surveillance was "non-compulsory" and that this made everything okay. This is false. When the only other option available is prison, then one is under the compulsion to comply. --Whether or not the punishment is deserving, (which appears to be the meat of your argument), is entirely irrelevant to this point.
2. My second point is that the behavior being punished is a direct result of class warfare, which is very deliberately waged upon the populace by the state. You seem to have missed this all-important item. Slaves who become angered for being slaves can be vilified by the state laws as much as you like, but it doesn't make the natural reaction of rage incorrect. The tragedy is that they have been so retarded by the system that they don't know how to best direct their rage. They're not attacking the right people. --Which is also a deliberate outcome of the control system.
-FL
Are you so naïve about economics that you think there's plenty for all and governments keep it from the people just to be mean?
Actually yes, I believe exactly that, but it doesn't stem from naivete. Economics is a bloody twisted shell game based on false credit creation. Though, I must also say that I am very impressed with your use of the double-dotted 'i'.
It's not nearly so straight forward as you make it out to be. And you know it. Where is your bias really coming from?
-FL
Notice that nothing in this is compulsory. It is an option presented to families as an alternative to being prosecuted.
Not compulsory? Please re-read your own sentence. Anybody who would willingly agree to this 'non-compulsory' treatment is somebody under serious compulsion. Like the fear of prosecution.
Poor education and class warfare is why this situation exists at all. And it's deliberate.
Slave nation. We're not much better in the West. We have more television channels, so it's easier to keep people from open rebellion. In the UK, you need more truncheons.
I think of the UK rather as being the control sample in a large experiment.
-FL
You're only looking at the symptoms.
This is your basic statecraft Judo; Tension is created to excuse the use of Gestapo muscle. In this case the tension is created through a mult-generational application of terrible education and terrible living standards so that people become frustrated fit to bursting. The youthful rage you're talking about is an honest and healthy reaction to slavery. The solution isn't MORE pressure.
But people have been successfully dumbed down to the point where this is no longer as obvious as daylight, and so they welcome the Empire.
-FL
"So This Is How Liberty Dies. . . With Thunderous Applause"
No need to fight back.
Just stop.
A general strike across all industries means that the slaves are no longer feeding their masters. The slave masters are frickin' terrified of this, which is why they work so hard to control people, to dumb them down and turn them against each other. The French have this worked out. Those giant cross-country strikes? Notice how the French have a better standard of living than virtually anybody else on the planet? This is why they were vilified by Bush-co. Fuck the slave masters and all their endless lies. Politicians are leaches. End of story.
If everybody puts a bit of canned food aside and commits to taking care of each other during the stoppage, then they can happily starve out the government and make it bend to their will.
That's all it takes. --That and a few hard-headed strike leaders willing to brave MI5's assassins. But that's not impossible, and they know it.
-FL
We have our problems, too.
We just have the comfort of knowing that we live on the edges of ridiculously huge tracts of unpopulated, un-cleared wilderness bigger than most European countries into which we can run off and live, (and conduct guerrilla warfare from), should things get really sticky. Our brand of political asshole remains vaguely aware of this fact. I think that's partly why there seems to be a campaign afoot to ensure that everybody turns into a fat, lazy, ignorant, TV-watching, video-gaming idiot. They run slower, have fewer hours in the day to think, and in the end, simply put up with a lot more bullshit.
A hunter isn't scared of the same things everybody else is, because s/he knows that should society crumble, survival isn't a matter of how many digits are recorded after one's name in the local bank machine.
-FL
Few out-prick my business cynicism.
But there's a bright, trusting part deep inside which is willing to give the benefit of the doubt. Sometimes.
-FL
In a world. . .
With 50,000 apps (and counting) floating around, how DOES one get seen? How DOES one achieve that holy grail of marketing coups, the "monetiezed viral phenomenon"?
Well, creating a shitstorm of controversy and then pulling the wool over the eyes of a hundred thousand Slashdotter game junkies would be a good start. Ka-Ching.
Busted.
-FL
You have no idea what resources a probe built by a civilization 100,000 years ahead of us requires.
Heck, even the assumption that "Probes" as we understand them are needed for data collection is enormously conceited on the part of humanity.
Humans today are as thick as bricks.
Do we try to communicate with the cows and pigs? Heck, we walk among them, breed them, cage them, kill them and EAT them. But they just graze and stand around in a daze as though it were all the most normal thing in the world. We simply use the means of containment which are necessary to counteract their ability to overcome that containment and escape our food system.
As above, so below.
We're smarter than cows and we have opposable thumbs, so the systems necessary to contain and manage us as a food supply are naturally going to be more complex. But those systems work well enough, and they're barely hidden if we bother to stop and notice them. But we don't. Instead we dream our lives away and discuss Fermi as though he were full of insight and wisdom. As though aliens would naturally want to shake our hands and talk with us. That burning bush spoke, did it? And did the things it told us make the world less like a meat rendering plant or more like a meat rendering plant?
There are thousands of documented crop circles with just some of the strangest features which cannot be replicated by even the most clever human engineers we ask. And there are countless millions of children who go missing every year all over the world. For some reason, those figures are largely NOT documented. How curious.
But we don't like to think about things like that. They are creepy and weird and our knees are designed to jerk instantly upon the mention of such things. We've been well programmed. Anybody who thinks we have not need only read the five hundred posts on this very subject. The amount of raw sewage which passes for reasoned thinking is depressing.
It's the rare cow which escapes the food chain.
-FL
You had me right up until you mentioned "DMT". --Unless, of course you meant "Database Management Technology", which I agree is an excellent way of learning about the universe. Learning takes work.
"Insight in a bottle" drugs damage you in some interesting ways which can prevent real growth. Even Castaneda, the king of the spiritual drug trip, explained that DJ only drugged him with such dangerous chemicals because he was so very stupid. They needed to blast him repeatedly before he would accept that "Things aren't really as they seem"; then he was quite sober for the bulk of his weird journeys through the latter years.
-FL
That's a very elegant model of reality you have there. I like it!
But it's still based on some rather enormous assumptions and a lot of human conceit wrt the nature of the universe.
And those annoying crop circles just aren't going away no matter how hard we try to ignore them. . .
Why do people do that, I wonder?
-FL
Both quantum mechanics and General Relativity teach us that if an event is not observed, than (relative to the observer) the event never took place.
You can 'un-observe' your text books all you want; you'll still be incorrect. Too bad, though; it's a fun theory ;-)
-FL
Please listen to this poster. Or perhaps read the article yourself.
There is NO vaccine which is delivered via mosquitoes. The researchers were testing the effectiveness of chloroquine in conjunction with moderate exposure to the malaria parasite in an attempt to boost immunity in the host.
The bottom line is that you still need to take a drug on a regular basis, and that drug isn't perfect.
Little has changed since the days of tonic water. Sorry.
-FL
I don't think that Fermi's Paradox is all that paradoxical either. I just think he was closed-minded, unimaginative and perhaps a tad (or a whole lot) conceited. (Sorry, Fermi.) --But I still think you're making a rather large assumption.
We crossed oceans without first getting comfortable in our dangerous, leaky, rat-infested sail boats. Planets have wonderful, big, open spaces, wind and rain and snow, natural sunlight, natural fauna and geographic features which appear according to chaotic systems we don't have to think about or organize; they just happen! How awesome is that? I think living on a space platform, even a really nice one, would be a rather horrible way to exist by comparison.
I also happen to think that contact was made a long time ago, we are the cattle raised by those who plan to colonize and that all our major religions are direct works of population manipulation.
But then, I'm about as far from Fermi as Fermi is from me. Exactly that far, actually.
I just don't see any paradox.
-FL
Basic human mechanics explain the success and failure of these films.
1. "Alien". --The alien was a grand mystery, a freaky horror show. It was scary and 'alien' and that was what drew us in and thrilled audiences. We are frightened of things we cannot understand and at the same time drawn toward those things in order to understand them. Basic human survival circuitry in action translated into a box-office success.
2. "Aliens". --Okay. Now we get it. We understand the basic biology of the "monster" and we're not scared anymore. Well, we're a little scared, but actually, we're also sort of pissed off that we got our asses handed to us the first time and that we screamed like little girls. Fuckin' aliens. I'd like to see how those ugly bastards would stand up against us in a REAL fight, like with grenades and machine guns. (Classic, "Who would win? Spider Man or the Hulk?") Yet again, basic human wiring turned into box-office dollars. (The answer, it turns out is, "We'd stand up remarkably well." --That's why Cameron had to handicap the marines so severely. It really was just a bug hunt gone wrong.)
3. "Who Cares?" It's just pest control at this point. Not that interesting. Might as well be, "Snakes on a Plane."
4. "Who Cares Part II". See above.
5. Bleh. Society has moved on. You're going to have to come up with a new kind of monster if you want to scare/impress audiences today. Nobody has the guts or the brains to do that apparently. --Though that Torchwood production, "Children of Earth", was surprisingly solid. Made me feel kind of sick, but then so did "Alien".
-FL
You do not know what you are talking about.
I currently live in a community with many farmers, and most of them are smarter than me, university educated and generally very well informed. They know their plant and soil ecology/biology backwards and forwards, and have the years of experience and product to show for their efforts. Several of your points make it clear that you have NO idea what you are talking about.
Because I didn't want to be like you, I took the time to ask questions. In fact, just last week, I attended a workshop for a local community farm with featured experts who came to advise on soil health, and I can tell you that the science of organic farming is lightyears beyond what most people think. For instance, in the last ten years alone, there have been amazing discoveries made about the life cycles and inter-relationships at work in the garden. --One of the more startling I learned about was the symbiotic relationship between certain common fungus strains and the plants they inhabit. Kill the fungus, decrease crop yields by as much as 30%. --And we, the human race, are actively exploring the science behind why this is so. Or at least those of us who are paying attention. Those eating ho-hos and living in ad-based states of denial don't know much of anything.
Essentially it comes down to this: the systems which naturally evolved over millions of years are incredibly efficient and smart, and when you learn how to tweak those systems using the lego bricks which naturally exist within their ecologic spheres, without introducing foreign agents, you can raise clean, healthy crops which don't come laced with poisons and dangerous genetic uncertainty factors. There's a reason Australia has too many rabbits; it's called, "Irresponsible scientific conceit". --The belief that humans are not connected to and stand apart from the rest of the biosphere; that we are smart enough to be able to whack Life with chemical and genetic mallets without taking the time to learn about the subtleties of biological relationships and that we will not be affected in our ego-centric bubble reality.
It takes the WORK of study to be a successful organic farmer, whereas it only takes money and intellectual laziness to spread a bag of the latest corporate powder on your land. I've met both types. It's like the difference between a hard-core television viewer and a mountain climber. One has a brain made of goop, the other has eyes filled with sparks.
Which are you?
-FL
And I hate to break it to you, but you atheists are exactly like theists, but you don't believe in any gods..
Agreed.
I'd call dogmatic thinking of any sort to be a kind of worship.
Dogmatics are all spooky.
The kind of brainwashing used on regular church goers seems innocent enough from a certain angle, but it is quite plain to me that should the church decide so, they could within short order turn a significant portion of the god-fearing masses into an army of zombie killers who will burn my house down because they have unquestioning faith that doing so is God's will.
Atheist dogmatics spook me for the same reasons, though their commands issue from the 'Discovery Channel' rather than the pulpit. For instance, one day, a platoon of idiots with machine guns could easily arrive under orders to jab everybody in my town with a mystery fluid for the good of society because 'Science' told them to. Marvelous.
Of course, my personal belief system states that anybody who acts selfishly and destructively and whose brain isn't wired for human emotions should be tattooed with a big "Beware" symbol or simply locked up. --Except we'd have to rebuild the most of the government from the ground up. (Plan 'B' simply consists of learning how to recognize and avoid giving power to assholes.)
-FL
There don't need to be any specific rational reasons behind this. It's simply a matter of species recognition.
Giant corporate behemoths are into slave labor. Their bodies are larger than any group of moral people within it, and so the cost/benefit analysis cancer is much more able to grow in yucky ways. (Is it cheaper to do something awful and pay the occasional price of a lost law suit than it is to not do it?)
Indy companies are much more likely to exist for the express purpose of serving its human masters and not the other way around. So when a large, psychotic company detects another similar species out there in the shared environment doing things differently, it sees it as a criticism of, and indeed. a threat to it's own chosen mode of behavior. Therefore, this Other is labeled "Enemy".
It's kind of like how two geeks of differing opinions will attempt to annihilate one another on instinct. Which version of "True" will become dominant in the world? Blood will flow over this.
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Neat!
I don't actually have a problem with bio-fuels if they are used correctly. --Oil is a bio-fuel which just happens to have been stored for millions of years. Basically, plants convert and store sunlight energy, and so it's essentially using Life to harvest solar power. It's the way in which food crops are being used to fuel cars which causes trouble.
I'd love to see a smart solution like the one you suggest. But after all the arguing is over and the dust has settled, it really comes down to this one fact: Big industry doesn't like smart solutions. --Not when "Smart" means, "Cheap and Efficient", which invariably means selling fewer units less frequently, and that's bad for business.
It's not cynicism. It's just math. Only when we become a lot wiser as a species will the larger equations of general happiness for all overtake low-level greed-based business math. We're not there yet.
If we want "Cheap and Efficient", we have to make it ourselves or work in community-based co-operatives.
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*My* kids are learning critical thinking skills. We've talked about the likelihood of ET life, the energy required to travel interstellar distances and the absurdity of alien invasion stories. It's right up there with werewolves.
You do realize that through your actions, your kids are now pretty much guaranteed to join a christian cult and worship elves while drinking colloidal silver to cure their ills, right?
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Doesn't that just sound like something out of the Alpha Centauri tech tree?
Light emitting diodes tech is one of my favorite. It and all the inventions which derive from it, makes life look and feel as though we're truly in, "The Future" as I imagined it while watching Buck Rogers back in my childhood.
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I can't believe that I of all people have to be the one to point this out. (Please bear in mind when I say that, that I am one of those Free Energy dudes who thinks Pons & Fleishmann were on to something and that it was suppressed).
--I mean, I'd be as happy as anybody for a smart solution to the fuel problem to be embraced by industry. While wind and solar farming seem to be catching on, hydrogen and electric vehicles seem to be anathema. But anyway, the point of this post. . .
Bacteria need more than sunlight and CO2 to produce an energy-rich byproduct like alcohol.
They need biomass of some sort. The petri dishes we used in my highschool biology lab didn't come with nutrient agar spread across the bottom for no reason, now did they?
The last time I read up on one of these fuel-from-algae efforts, they involved feeding a rather large quantity of SUGAR CANE and WOOD CHIPS to the cultures. Scaled up to industrial quantities, this method of fuel production works out to be about the same as Corn Ethanol. Growing gasoline. Anybody who needs to be informed as to why this is an incredibly stupid idea should go and inform themselves at once.
This story looks like very carefully worded P.R. spin. "They produce their own sugars"? Ugh. Human cells can do that too. It's called, "Burning Fat". That energy has to come from somewhere, and it doesn't come from Salt Water and Carbon Dioxide.
Come on Slashdot. Wake up. Conservation of Energy doesn't go away just because it spends a bit of time being green and gooey.
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LoTR was a great work by someone who really spent time and effort writing the book. Does he (or even his family) not deserve to reap the rewards of his efforts that we are all enjoying? Why does everyone think that just because you like it that somehow it's now no longer HIS but OURS. Communism?
I can understand what you are saying, and I agree with it to a point, and that point is called, "Culture".
The stories and ideas which bind us together as a culture also form the words of our language, the content of our dreams. Creating a system in which only those who have enough wealth are legally allowed to experience certain thoughts is pretty tyrannical.
So you have a spectrum; at one end, you have honest rewards earned from honest labor, and on the other end you have tyranny. Anybody who tries to say that only one end of that spectrum exists. . , well that person is wrong. (And there are a lot of wrong people out there.)
The problem is that the gray area between the ends on this spectrum is where most of us live, and the problem cannot be solved by putting every situation through a simple mathematical formula to receive a Yes/No answer. It just doesn't work that way, as we've found through the application of endless arguments of limited perspective which only give us another push on the logical merry-go-round.
We should try rather to gauge these situations based on how fair they seem. LoTR has passed into common culture at this point, that much is clear, however, I also think it would be fair to give a tip of the hat to the Tolkien estate. It doesn't have to be a billion dollars, but for goodness sake, a couple million wouldn't bloody hurt when studio executive coke-heads are raking it in. --Speaking of whom, I'd love to see that crowd allow some of their works to pass into public domain. Sheesh.
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Having ALL the adult authority figures in your 7 year-old life convince you that the world is ending. . ? If you honestly think that wouldn't mess you up, then you're kidding yourself. You're not Captain Kirk. If they pulled it off, you'd be shell-shocked like anybody else.
Of course. . , if the teaching and police staff did a half-assed job and made themselves look like idiots while wrecking their air of authority, then the smart kids would be disturbed for entirely different reasons. "Oh my god. The adults in our lives are all complete morons. We're doomed."
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Never seen a female developer.
The fiance of friend of mine is a total hottie and she owns and runs a whole development shop. She can move aside a programmer when the job isn't being done up to her alarmingly high specs and get it done herself in half the time. Think, "Geek Bond Girl". Then get out more before assuming you know what reality looks like. With a bit of exploring, one learns that most fictional accounts of the world aren't half as astonishing as the real thing.
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