I didn't think a significant number of Americans would be stupid enough to fall for the whole 'Terrorists' thing, but holy smokes, I guess all the Fluoride and Big Macs played a number on their brains.
I guess the question is whether or not the world is stupid enough to fall for an extended Bing marketing campaign, because Americans certainly are.
--Granted, I do feel uneasy deep down inside when I think "Google", but when I think, "Bing", I feel a burning horror very close to the surface.
I have no doubt that a significant number of retarded apes will do whatever the hell Microsoft tells them to do, and I betcha anything there have been tense talks over in Redmond about whether or not to release Windows 7 with an integrated Bing search bar built into the final version. You KNOW that if they thought they could rape you and take your wallet and get away with it, they would. MS is like the Blob from 50's sci-fi. Hungry, smart and without ethics, only a half-assed legal system keeps those fuckers in check. I would much rather have a company which at least attempts to make ethical behavior part of its mission statement.
But in the end, it doesn't matter to me; I know for a fact that I will NEVER knowingly give Microsoft an inch where I don't absolutely have to.
Speaking of which. . . I wonder if the new game system MS is developing where it watches your body language is at all creepy?
Gee, that kid sure is good at pulling hoaxes. He even changed his name from Nico Marquardt to Garrit Blank, presumably so nobody would recognize him this time around!
The article was not written by a science writer, obviously, but he was clearly smarter than you.
As a form of basic theft, that has got to be one of the all-time dumbest, most inefficient ways to steal money. --Giving a massive percentage to Amazon and to the manufacture of CDs. It's also one of those schemes which isn't even a scheme; you'd think that an important part of any basic plan to commit a crime would be to get away with it afterwards. It seems that they left the whole, "Don't Get Caught" portion off the menu, because really, how the heck did they expect to NOT get caught when leaving such an idiotically obvious number of money trails all pointing directly at them?
What this smacks of is more simply a group of guys who don't want to be thieves so much as famous musicians. Because now they have press and street cred, (for being stupid?), and if the songs are any good, they might just end up with music careers. After they get out of prison.
Oh, whatever. They were probably just stoned and not thinking clearly.
Of course, whether it deserves that celebration can be questioned.
Indeed. I paused and used up quite a number of processor cycles before finally settling on the word, "Celebrated".
Some of the most dubious works created by humanity remain some of the most useful precisely because they are dubious. The brain needs something to chew through. OSC just happens to make it fun at the same time.
Some things are found to be explosively offensive exactly because they are true.
Put another way. . .
"The enormity of the reaction often indicates the power of the truth being commented upon." --When one points out the elephant in the living room, those who are struggling most stridently to ignore that ugly, stinking beast which has such a terrible hold on their souls, will rather than do something useful about the problem, instead tackle the offending commenter to ground and stuff a sock in his mouth. Before returning to their FPS game of choice to breathe the addict's sigh of relief.
You know who you are, and despite all your rationalizations, you also know I'm right. You don't even have to look so very deep down inside, and that's exactly the problem, isn't it?
"Ender's Game" filled with tedious self-reflection?
Sounds very much to me as though you read one of the later books in the series thinking that it was the first when really it was not. The series quickly became progressively less note-worthy with each subsequent publication. --Which is lucky for you; it means you have still to read one of the most celebrated sci-fi books ever written.
Cheers and have fun!
-FL
Cognitive snag. . .
on
Wired for War
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Iraq: draw. We destroyed the army, and then sat on our hands as the country fell apart, causing great immiseration of the citizenry. We handed over the meatiest stuff to political cronies. After several years of clear failure, Iraq is now a marginal state whose future is up for grabs.
A draw? I think when viewed from the top of the pyramid, the state of Iraq as we see it today was always the desired result. --Actually, I'd say that every one of the wars you outline was a roaring success from the organizer's standpoint. Tons of money shifted from the public purse into private holdings, and lots of fear and chaos resulted; the perfect environment for the psychopath to expand and entrench its world view within the popular collective mental environment we all have to live in.
Politicians and industrialists like war, but regular people only pick up arms after significant mind conditioning has taken place. --After all, regular Joes are the ones getting their limbs shot off for their trouble. All the little Bushies and Daddy Warbucks' don't risk a damned thing.
As such, I think you might be making the common mistake of believing that the stated objectives as they appear in the propaganda are in fact the REAL objectives. --But once that little cognitive snag gets straightened out, the world suddenly makes a lot more sense to the observer.
-FL
FPS culture
on
Wired for War
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· Score: -1, Flamebait
I don't know. . .
Have you ever walked through a convention center filled with FPS gamers? I wouldn't trust a single one of those hooting retards with real firepower. Not with the kind of neural patterning they spend thousands of hours cementing into place, these days, pretty much from childhood.
It's not just the time spent in front of the screen. . , it's the time NOT spent engaged in real, face to face human dynamics.
Your points, while logical in isolation, don't take video game culture into account. I would guess that many of the troops who would be remotely directing the future combat robot would be drawn from the above mentioned demographic. And that's one huge bunch of socially disconnected apes.
Have you tried calling Europe lately? No delay. When information is moving at the speed of light, the only delay we're going to experience is due to switching speeds, which are pretty darned zippy these days.
While the military is dealing with un-tethered aircraft, I suspect nonetheless that they've managed to work something out.
And that would be an apt example of what is known as the, "Reiki Flakey" in common parlance.
But as one great logician pointed out, "Just because all cows are animals, it is fucking retarded to assume that all animals are cows."
--Please pardon my paraphrasing for the benefit of the logically inept, which around Slashdot is apparently an embarrassing commonality. But as somebody wiser than me once said, "Just because all logicians are nerds, it should not be assumed that all nerds are logicians. Hell, many of them needed their mittens tied to the ends of their sleeves for a few years longer than the other kids, so really, you're asking quite a lot here."
Ad Hom? --Sure, though I prefer to call it, "Kicking one's energy in the arse".
Let me put it directly. There is no such thing as psy power, we've been looking for years and while aliens may have abilities we have not considered, they will not have abilities that contradict physics; nor will they be able to feed on non-existant energy fields.
That is very direct indeed, and it is certainly the official popular position which has been promoted with a particularly strong level of hysteria lately, --being the last seventy years or so, when it matters most. And while strident denial and passionately reinforced disbelief does certainly play a role in how perceptions work in small, enclosed systems, it does not alter the actual workings of the universe as a whole. This, according to my own labor-intensive findings.
I should say, your opinion is not reinforced by my explorations into the matter at all. --Which I suspect includes many of the same sources you have absorbed on the argument, as well as, naturally, a balancing of material from the other side of the same argument. It's quite impossible to form any sort of rational notions by exploring only one side of the story. Fair and Balanced, right?
I've observed that with disheartening regularity those who are most firm in their positions against the notion of energy are typically also those who have done the least amount of honest research. The typical example is the so-called "sceptic" who has has little-to-no experience with such matters beyond having sniffed at the daily newspaper astrology section and place mats in the local Chinese restaurant. Armchair philosophy, no matter how refined, doesn't count for much when it doesn't look at anything beyond its own thinking and the cherry-picked examples which support its cause. Causes are dangerous, emotionally charged things which get in the way of real science. This is why I find it wonderfully appropriate that there happen to be two accepted spellings of the word, "Skeptic" and "Sceptic". --One of which is a noble and sensible (and rare) type of individual, while the other bears a strong relation to the idea of "sewage" and "toxic buildup in the system."
--Particularly given that those students of philosophy who open themselves up to the barest bit of actual, earnest research promptly fall out of their arm chairs and hit the floor in shock. You don't hear much from those people, as they tend to be too ashamed to speak, though they needn't be. It's just that their social programming was never successfully purged from their very deliberately installed guilt-circuits. Pathetic, really, but somewhat forgivable given the forces stacked against them. They are right about one thing after all; the mind is easily manipulated.
Installed at birth and through the formative years, when one is most vulnerable, most never manage to break away from the programming. --Or they do with altogether too much force, as is evidenced by the disgust some feel from discovering that they have been born into religious families, which if one is fortunate enough to escape, as from a quicksand, tends to result in an elastic sort of hurling onto one's back --from which one's view of the world is then quite skewed until they regain their feet. For some reason, however, few bother ever standing up again, preferring to remain stubbornly flat on their backs where things feel safe and solid, and where the patch of sky above is, like the world behind their television screens, comfortably far away.
Actually it's probably worse (or better, depending on your perspective) than that. Aliens wouldn't consider us food for the simple reason that we almost certainly wouldn't agree with them. Life that has evolved in different biospheres very likely evolved using very different chemicals, and so an alien would obtain no more nutrition by eating a human than he would by eating the human's car.
That's more kit from the same box of linear assumptions, I'm afraid.
Put it this way; that feeling of power one gets when bullying (or torturing) a person is not just an imaginary rush of adrenaline or somesuch.
Our cities are huge negative energy batteries. Come rent and bill payment day, the power level spikes. Spikes even higher during tax time. Or economic downturn. Or with the sounding of war drums and airport sirens. . , altogether it produces a bonanza of life-energy transferred. Of all the cultivated bits of capital proffered up by the planet, Human Misery, Human Longing, Human Hate, Human Fear, Pain and Anxiety are collectively the most efficiently produced and reliable bumper crop.
As one fellow who laughing commented up upon reading one of my missives on the subject, "Ah. So aliens are Emotivores, are they?" He summed it up rather neatly, while seeming to think I was being terribly inventive.
It's a huge assumption that they are looking for others like them.
This touches on a good point.
I've always thought some of the very basic assumptions made by the "Seeking Intelligent Life" community are rather presumptuous.
The assumptions are so basic as to be almost invisible to those who make them, which appears to be nearly everybody. The primary one being that Intelligent Life will be as excited about finding Intelligent Life as we are. --The only considered variables being Intelligent Life's level of technology and level of benevolence.
Being a curious person, I decided to react to the various bits of incongruous signal peeping out from all the noise. Crop circles were one such bit of signal. There are many others. For some reason, (which is not actually, "Some Reason" but rather, like every other bit of signal, upon exploring it, a very clearly understandable reason, and not a very flattering one at that), people block out the threads, try to rationalize them away, and generally force reality through the warped lens of the current popular human belief structures. But if people manage to undo this bit of social programming and honestly look at the information available without bias or a desire to destroy it in favor of the calming, socially acceptable version, then life can be clearly seen for what it really is; The jungle on the other side of the barbed electric enclosure.
The available indicators today, (and there are many, many of them), tell us several things. . .
1. Alien Life doesn't exist within, and more importantly, doesn't perceive physical space/time the same way we do. They're better at it. More evolved. Time is a spatial vector for them along which they can move back and forth at will.
2. They don't consider us equals. Far from it; they consider us food. In much the same way we don't negotiate with cattle or share in cultural exchanges with stands of corn, we are naive to expect to be treated as anything other than a retarded ape species bearing a (significant) industrial resource value. There's a reason there are so many of us at the moment and that world politics are as they are.
3. They've been here "forever" and have been manipulating us for the same length of time.
SETI, while it is rather sweet in its child-like naivete, remains an indicator of just how fsked we really are as a race.
Bearing all of this in mind, it is hardly any surprise that people would rather block it out and live comfortably in some pretend reality. I'm sure cows do the equivalent thing on their level. --Imagine if all the cows at once decided to use all that enormous muscle power to overwhelm the gates and trample their keepers? They could do this at any moment, but they never will.
Yep. The eeePc 1000 series with the Atom chip is very nice. I didn't wait for the prices to drop, and I got one shortly after the container ship from Asia disgorged. It's isn't perfect, though. The battery life, while pretty good, is nowhere near the 7.5 hours promised by ASUS. After seven months of regular use, (and I don't use any power-saving features because I find them annoying), battery life has leveled out to about three and a half hours of useful time, plus another twenty minutes of panicked warnings (in XP), that your system is about to lose power, --which makes that last twenty minutes kind of useless imo, because you're stressing over the battery and not concentrating on your work.
Still, it is by FAR the best netbook I've seen; durable and well-designed, and the hibernation system is flawless, as close to instant-on as I've needed, and I've enjoyed instant-on writing devices before. But the keyboard is what makes it truly practical. --Even after the honeymoon period wore off, I still use the eee regularly. It has become what I'd hoped; a good, solid tool.
These new machines, if they can do what they promise with battery power on the ARM chip, will be quite impressive. If they build something you can actually type on comfortably and which offers a decent screen size, (I refuse to work on anything with less than 10" of screen real estate; I find small screens make me feel claustrophobic and this affects my writing, making me think smaller and more breathlessly). . , if such problems can be overcome, then such a device would definitely be worth a look.
However, it sounds to me as though they're trying to sell Nintendo controllers with screens where you can use your thumbs to enter text. --Rather than sell devices designed for getting actual work done. I suspect this is because they simply did the market research and realized that while the common user SAYS s/he wants to work on a mobile computer, what they really want is to goof off on Facebook.
It'll be interesting to see how they manage to sell these things past people's false notions about themselves.
This is an instance where my half-second misinterpretation of the title of this story was more interesting than the real title.
"You've dropped your Land Mine. --Now what?"
Admit it. Assuming it's self-arming upon impact with the surface of your front yard, (you were loading it into the back of your mini-van for some reason.) --Before you sleep tonight, you'll have spent time trying to solve for this scenario.
I know I did.
Why were you loading military ordinance into your mini-van for anyway?
Square really needs to back off trying to make movies.
It's far too easy for the Japanese to create superheros who seem over-pretty and lacking in charisma. The old, "You Lack Honor! Your Brother hates you because he is too proud to accept your love. My Fight-Magic is Stronger! Huraugh!" characteristic is so bloody boring and predictable and, frankly, lower-functioning that I have a hard time taking Japan seriously half the time.
Still, I get it. Any society is going to have a hefty dose of Retarded Ape dominating its pop culture. In the West, we are simply so surrounded by our own brand of Retarded Ape that it has blended into the background.
But honestly, if you threw into any Square story an average American individualist, it would pretty much only be the language barrier preventing him from becoming their leader within about half a day. --All based on the sheer inability to embarrass him into servitude. And on his ability to embarrass into servitude any dope so emotionally stunted that he hates his brother because he is too proud to accept his love. --That and sustain eye-contact with somebody who can see instantly the tangle of social awkwardness and fear of embarrassment scarcely hidden a half millimeter beneath the surface of your studiously maintained socially sanctioned "cool" fashion sense.
But don't worry. Having a big robot or super-power will make your friends stop beating you up and taking your lunch money. When they see that you have a super-power, then they will like you!
Newsflash: Stop Daydreaming, Fuck the System and Get Real Friends.
Sure, one can always reduce the complexity of a written piece so that it feels more homey and accessible for the uninitiated audience, but I'm not sure that was called for in this case. It wasn't really THAT difficult to understand. I found his style quite enjoyable, actually. It's refreshing, sometimes, to not be treated like the lowest common denominator FOX viewer.
And given that his whole argument was based around the problems with sound-bite journalism and dogmatic arguments designed to be quickly digested and not deeply considered, I think that it would have been painfully ironic if he HAD dumbed his article down to the point where it could be instantly absorbed without any effort needed on the part of the reader for real comprehension.
But hot damn it made him feel great when he used all those sophysticated words!
I doubt it. To write with that level of ease and complexity, one needs to occupy the required head-space in earnest. Probably doesn't even notice he's doing it except on those rare occasions when he pulls back from the keyboard to pause for a breather and watch himself. And people, even the smart ones, rarely manage to do that more than a handful of times in any given life.
That, and the fact, (in my opinion anyway), he also happens to be right.
Not that it matters. For some reason everybody who thinks and writes seems to be perpetually concerned about what humanity ought to do about the state of humanity. The longer I live, the more I realize that the quest for societal justice is a fool's errand. Nobody can change anything no matter how hard they try, and the most amazing thing is that nobody realizes this astonishing truth. Change requires awareness, and machines are not aware. Almost all humans are machines. Even as I write this, I can hear the gears clicking in my skull, still on auto-pilot. And I've been working on this stuff.
It is a law of the universe; there is no free lunch, and in one way or another, you pay for everything.
Funny. I thought that paying Microsoft a lot of money for their product was the cost of the "lunch". Just because they can screw people doesn't mean that they are on any sort of moral high ground when they do. Not everybody is adept at reading and understanding the fine print like some of us happen to be. I can't stand the argument that we have nobody to blame but ourselves in a society where it is impossible for any one person to learn all the trades and skills necessary to function today. I don't know how to fix a car engine or perform surgeries, so I have to rely on others to do their jobs responsibly, and I'll be damned if I'm going to be made to feel guilty for not being a mechanic or a surgeon. Nor will I ever say that being raped is your own fault if you can't be bothered to learn martial arts or carry a gun. There is a reasonable expectation of decency from others in our society, and when that expectation is violated, there should be penalties.
I'm not seeing nearly enough penalties dished out these days. I almost wish I'd taken up law enforcement so I could prosecute top-flight political assholes. Because we certainly don't have a V or a Batman looking out for us.
I found in Balder's Gate, (one of the last games I seriously tried to play), that I enjoyed trying to build a strong and efficient character with effective tools/weapons, but that after a while I saw the pattern of more difficult challenges increasing the demand for more powerful weapons/tools. When the pattern became obvious to my base, automatic nature; (intellectually I knew from the outset how such games were designed), I lost all interest in the game because it felt repetitive and the story was uninteresting. I quit about a quarter of the way through.
My base, automatic nature, I think, has figured out that the more effective survival technique is to learn the over-arching pattern behind a challenge and then find a way to hack the system rather than to defeat the challenge head-on directly. --Once a pattern is understood, the need to engage in more base magpie-like behavior becomes pointless, and thus my "reward center" stops pumping happy juice into the rest of my brain.
Games which DO manage to engage me forever and ever are more akin to territory-winning combat scenarios where the 'enemy' is constantly advancing. My survival instincts, even if they recognize the old patterns, will nonetheless be stirred to action when they can predict the loss of territory and life if I take no action whatsoever. And so my 'happy juice' center starts pumping like mad when it sees the possibility of annihilation creeping towards me across the game board. In Balder's Gate, after a while, all I wanted to do was hang up the sword and find a nice little cottage by the sea to settle down in where I didn't have to work so hard at such a menial labor.
They don't call it "Hand to Hand" combat for nothing.
Heck, neither can I, but the little red underline which appears beneath incorrectly spelled words in every text window on my computer seems to be able to handle most of the load. --That tech is the one which amazes/creeps me out more than any other. Because I don't remember ever installing it, or specifically looking for it as an application, or even thinking, "Hey, you know what would be a good idea for a ubiquitous bit of programming technology to make my life easier?"
Slashdot Mirror
I didn't think a significant number of Americans would be stupid enough to fall for the whole 'Terrorists' thing, but holy smokes, I guess all the Fluoride and Big Macs played a number on their brains.
I guess the question is whether or not the world is stupid enough to fall for an extended Bing marketing campaign, because Americans certainly are.
--Granted, I do feel uneasy deep down inside when I think "Google", but when I think, "Bing", I feel a burning horror very close to the surface.
I have no doubt that a significant number of retarded apes will do whatever the hell Microsoft tells them to do, and I betcha anything there have been tense talks over in Redmond about whether or not to release Windows 7 with an integrated Bing search bar built into the final version. You KNOW that if they thought they could rape you and take your wallet and get away with it, they would. MS is like the Blob from 50's sci-fi. Hungry, smart and without ethics, only a half-assed legal system keeps those fuckers in check. I would much rather have a company which at least attempts to make ethical behavior part of its mission statement.
But in the end, it doesn't matter to me; I know for a fact that I will NEVER knowingly give Microsoft an inch where I don't absolutely have to.
Speaking of which. . . I wonder if the new game system MS is developing where it watches your body language is at all creepy?
-FL
Floating Wind Turbine?
It's probably that I just woke up and am dizzy enough for the fantastic to make sense, but. . .
I pictured a giant blimp with a windmill on it, tethered to Norway. And my only thought was, "Gosh, is that safe?"
My second thought when I realized I was mistaken was, "Aw, what a shame. That would have been cool."
-FL
How does buying digital music give a massive percentage to CD manufacturers?
Well, the first step is to live in my head, where fact and fancy come and go some days like marigolds on a lazy Sunday.
After that, it's pretty easy. Thank goodness for Slashdot to set me right. And I'm not saying that facetiously.
Cheers!
-FL
Gee, that kid sure is good at pulling hoaxes. He even changed his name from Nico Marquardt to Garrit Blank, presumably so nobody would recognize him this time around!
The article was not written by a science writer, obviously, but he was clearly smarter than you.
-FL
As a form of basic theft, that has got to be one of the all-time dumbest, most inefficient ways to steal money. --Giving a massive percentage to Amazon and to the manufacture of CDs. It's also one of those schemes which isn't even a scheme; you'd think that an important part of any basic plan to commit a crime would be to get away with it afterwards. It seems that they left the whole, "Don't Get Caught" portion off the menu, because really, how the heck did they expect to NOT get caught when leaving such an idiotically obvious number of money trails all pointing directly at them?
What this smacks of is more simply a group of guys who don't want to be thieves so much as famous musicians. Because now they have press and street cred, (for being stupid?), and if the songs are any good, they might just end up with music careers. After they get out of prison.
Oh, whatever. They were probably just stoned and not thinking clearly.
And they probably need haircuts. Off my lawn.
-FL
Of course, whether it deserves that celebration can be questioned.
Indeed. I paused and used up quite a number of processor cycles before finally settling on the word, "Celebrated".
Some of the most dubious works created by humanity remain some of the most useful precisely because they are dubious. The brain needs something to chew through. OSC just happens to make it fun at the same time.
Cheers
-FL
Some things are found to be explosively offensive exactly because they are true.
Put another way. . .
"The enormity of the reaction often indicates the power of the truth being commented upon." --When one points out the elephant in the living room, those who are struggling most stridently to ignore that ugly, stinking beast which has such a terrible hold on their souls, will rather than do something useful about the problem, instead tackle the offending commenter to ground and stuff a sock in his mouth. Before returning to their FPS game of choice to breathe the addict's sigh of relief.
You know who you are, and despite all your rationalizations, you also know I'm right. You don't even have to look so very deep down inside, and that's exactly the problem, isn't it?
-FL
"Ender's Game" filled with tedious self-reflection?
Sounds very much to me as though you read one of the later books in the series thinking that it was the first when really it was not. The series quickly became progressively less note-worthy with each subsequent publication. --Which is lucky for you; it means you have still to read one of the most celebrated sci-fi books ever written.
Cheers and have fun!
-FL
Iraq: draw. We destroyed the army, and then sat on our hands as the country fell apart, causing great immiseration of the citizenry. We handed over the meatiest stuff to political cronies. After several years of clear failure, Iraq is now a marginal state whose future is up for grabs.
A draw? I think when viewed from the top of the pyramid, the state of Iraq as we see it today was always the desired result. --Actually, I'd say that every one of the wars you outline was a roaring success from the organizer's standpoint. Tons of money shifted from the public purse into private holdings, and lots of fear and chaos resulted; the perfect environment for the psychopath to expand and entrench its world view within the popular collective mental environment we all have to live in.
Politicians and industrialists like war, but regular people only pick up arms after significant mind conditioning has taken place. --After all, regular Joes are the ones getting their limbs shot off for their trouble. All the little Bushies and Daddy Warbucks' don't risk a damned thing.
As such, I think you might be making the common mistake of believing that the stated objectives as they appear in the propaganda are in fact the REAL objectives. --But once that little cognitive snag gets straightened out, the world suddenly makes a lot more sense to the observer.
-FL
I don't know. . .
Have you ever walked through a convention center filled with FPS gamers? I wouldn't trust a single one of those hooting retards with real firepower. Not with the kind of neural patterning they spend thousands of hours cementing into place, these days, pretty much from childhood.
It's not just the time spent in front of the screen. . , it's the time NOT spent engaged in real, face to face human dynamics.
Your points, while logical in isolation, don't take video game culture into account. I would guess that many of the troops who would be remotely directing the future combat robot would be drawn from the above mentioned demographic. And that's one huge bunch of socially disconnected apes.
-FL
Latency is SO last century.
Have you tried calling Europe lately? No delay. When information is moving at the speed of light, the only delay we're going to experience is due to switching speeds, which are pretty darned zippy these days.
While the military is dealing with un-tethered aircraft, I suspect nonetheless that they've managed to work something out.
-FL
And that would be an apt example of what is known as the, "Reiki Flakey" in common parlance.
But as one great logician pointed out, "Just because all cows are animals, it is fucking retarded to assume that all animals are cows."
--Please pardon my paraphrasing for the benefit of the logically inept, which around Slashdot is apparently an embarrassing commonality. But as somebody wiser than me once said, "Just because all logicians are nerds, it should not be assumed that all nerds are logicians. Hell, many of them needed their mittens tied to the ends of their sleeves for a few years longer than the other kids, so really, you're asking quite a lot here."
Ad Hom? --Sure, though I prefer to call it, "Kicking one's energy in the arse".
-FL
Let me put it directly. There is no such thing as psy power, we've been looking for years and while aliens may have abilities we have not considered, they will not have abilities that contradict physics; nor will they be able to feed on non-existant energy fields.
That is very direct indeed, and it is certainly the official popular position which has been promoted with a particularly strong level of hysteria lately, --being the last seventy years or so, when it matters most. And while strident denial and passionately reinforced disbelief does certainly play a role in how perceptions work in small, enclosed systems, it does not alter the actual workings of the universe as a whole. This, according to my own labor-intensive findings.
I should say, your opinion is not reinforced by my explorations into the matter at all. --Which I suspect includes many of the same sources you have absorbed on the argument, as well as, naturally, a balancing of material from the other side of the same argument. It's quite impossible to form any sort of rational notions by exploring only one side of the story. Fair and Balanced, right?
I've observed that with disheartening regularity those who are most firm in their positions against the notion of energy are typically also those who have done the least amount of honest research. The typical example is the so-called "sceptic" who has has little-to-no experience with such matters beyond having sniffed at the daily newspaper astrology section and place mats in the local Chinese restaurant. Armchair philosophy, no matter how refined, doesn't count for much when it doesn't look at anything beyond its own thinking and the cherry-picked examples which support its cause. Causes are dangerous, emotionally charged things which get in the way of real science. This is why I find it wonderfully appropriate that there happen to be two accepted spellings of the word, "Skeptic" and "Sceptic". --One of which is a noble and sensible (and rare) type of individual, while the other bears a strong relation to the idea of "sewage" and "toxic buildup in the system."
--Particularly given that those students of philosophy who open themselves up to the barest bit of actual, earnest research promptly fall out of their arm chairs and hit the floor in shock. You don't hear much from those people, as they tend to be too ashamed to speak, though they needn't be. It's just that their social programming was never successfully purged from their very deliberately installed guilt-circuits. Pathetic, really, but somewhat forgivable given the forces stacked against them. They are right about one thing after all; the mind is easily manipulated.
Installed at birth and through the formative years, when one is most vulnerable, most never manage to break away from the programming. --Or they do with altogether too much force, as is evidenced by the disgust some feel from discovering that they have been born into religious families, which if one is fortunate enough to escape, as from a quicksand, tends to result in an elastic sort of hurling onto one's back --from which one's view of the world is then quite skewed until they regain their feet. For some reason, however, few bother ever standing up again, preferring to remain stubbornly flat on their backs where things feel safe and solid, and where the patch of sky above is, like the world behind their television screens, comfortably far away.
Real men walk.
-FL
Actually it's probably worse (or better, depending on your perspective) than that. Aliens wouldn't consider us food for the simple reason that we almost certainly wouldn't agree with them. Life that has evolved in different biospheres very likely evolved using very different chemicals, and so an alien would obtain no more nutrition by eating a human than he would by eating the human's car.
That's more kit from the same box of linear assumptions, I'm afraid.
Put it this way; that feeling of power one gets when bullying (or torturing) a person is not just an imaginary rush of adrenaline or somesuch.
Our cities are huge negative energy batteries. Come rent and bill payment day, the power level spikes. Spikes even higher during tax time. Or economic downturn. Or with the sounding of war drums and airport sirens. . , altogether it produces a bonanza of life-energy transferred. Of all the cultivated bits of capital proffered up by the planet, Human Misery, Human Longing, Human Hate, Human Fear, Pain and Anxiety are collectively the most efficiently produced and reliable bumper crop.
As one fellow who laughing commented up upon reading one of my missives on the subject, "Ah. So aliens are Emotivores, are they?" He summed it up rather neatly, while seeming to think I was being terribly inventive.
Wish I was.
-FL
It's a huge assumption that they are looking for others like them.
This touches on a good point.
I've always thought some of the very basic assumptions made by the "Seeking Intelligent Life" community are rather presumptuous.
The assumptions are so basic as to be almost invisible to those who make them, which appears to be nearly everybody. The primary one being that Intelligent Life will be as excited about finding Intelligent Life as we are. --The only considered variables being Intelligent Life's level of technology and level of benevolence.
Being a curious person, I decided to react to the various bits of incongruous signal peeping out from all the noise. Crop circles were one such bit of signal. There are many others. For some reason, (which is not actually, "Some Reason" but rather, like every other bit of signal, upon exploring it, a very clearly understandable reason, and not a very flattering one at that), people block out the threads, try to rationalize them away, and generally force reality through the warped lens of the current popular human belief structures. But if people manage to undo this bit of social programming and honestly look at the information available without bias or a desire to destroy it in favor of the calming, socially acceptable version, then life can be clearly seen for what it really is; The jungle on the other side of the barbed electric enclosure.
The available indicators today, (and there are many, many of them), tell us several things. . .
1. Alien Life doesn't exist within, and more importantly, doesn't perceive physical space/time the same way we do. They're better at it. More evolved. Time is a spatial vector for them along which they can move back and forth at will.
2. They don't consider us equals. Far from it; they consider us food. In much the same way we don't negotiate with cattle or share in cultural exchanges with stands of corn, we are naive to expect to be treated as anything other than a retarded ape species bearing a (significant) industrial resource value. There's a reason there are so many of us at the moment and that world politics are as they are.
3. They've been here "forever" and have been manipulating us for the same length of time.
SETI, while it is rather sweet in its child-like naivete, remains an indicator of just how fsked we really are as a race.
Bearing all of this in mind, it is hardly any surprise that people would rather block it out and live comfortably in some pretend reality. I'm sure cows do the equivalent thing on their level. --Imagine if all the cows at once decided to use all that enormous muscle power to overwhelm the gates and trample their keepers? They could do this at any moment, but they never will.
-FL
Yep. The eeePc 1000 series with the Atom chip is very nice. I didn't wait for the prices to drop, and I got one shortly after the container ship from Asia disgorged. It's isn't perfect, though. The battery life, while pretty good, is nowhere near the 7.5 hours promised by ASUS. After seven months of regular use, (and I don't use any power-saving features because I find them annoying), battery life has leveled out to about three and a half hours of useful time, plus another twenty minutes of panicked warnings (in XP), that your system is about to lose power, --which makes that last twenty minutes kind of useless imo, because you're stressing over the battery and not concentrating on your work.
Still, it is by FAR the best netbook I've seen; durable and well-designed, and the hibernation system is flawless, as close to instant-on as I've needed, and I've enjoyed instant-on writing devices before. But the keyboard is what makes it truly practical. --Even after the honeymoon period wore off, I still use the eee regularly. It has become what I'd hoped; a good, solid tool.
These new machines, if they can do what they promise with battery power on the ARM chip, will be quite impressive. If they build something you can actually type on comfortably and which offers a decent screen size, (I refuse to work on anything with less than 10" of screen real estate; I find small screens make me feel claustrophobic and this affects my writing, making me think smaller and more breathlessly). . , if such problems can be overcome, then such a device would definitely be worth a look.
However, it sounds to me as though they're trying to sell Nintendo controllers with screens where you can use your thumbs to enter text. --Rather than sell devices designed for getting actual work done. I suspect this is because they simply did the market research and realized that while the common user SAYS s/he wants to work on a mobile computer, what they really want is to goof off on Facebook.
It'll be interesting to see how they manage to sell these things past people's false notions about themselves.
-FL
Oh boy.
So was this is how Open Mind and Mindpixel ended up being implemented? What a shame that neither creator lived to see it.
-FL
You guys should check this out, it is so true.
Yes. And that is the case ALL the time. We need special hats or something to protect us.
-FL
This is an instance where my half-second misinterpretation of the title of this story was more interesting than the real title.
"You've dropped your Land Mine. --Now what?"
Admit it. Assuming it's self-arming upon impact with the surface of your front yard, (you were loading it into the back of your mini-van for some reason.) --Before you sleep tonight, you'll have spent time trying to solve for this scenario.
I know I did.
Why were you loading military ordinance into your mini-van for anyway?
-FL
Holy shit! Enough cheese with your trailer?
Square really needs to back off trying to make movies.
It's far too easy for the Japanese to create superheros who seem over-pretty and lacking in charisma. The old, "You Lack Honor! Your Brother hates you because he is too proud to accept your love. My Fight-Magic is Stronger! Huraugh!" characteristic is so bloody boring and predictable and, frankly, lower-functioning that I have a hard time taking Japan seriously half the time.
Still, I get it. Any society is going to have a hefty dose of Retarded Ape dominating its pop culture. In the West, we are simply so surrounded by our own brand of Retarded Ape that it has blended into the background.
But honestly, if you threw into any Square story an average American individualist, it would pretty much only be the language barrier preventing him from becoming their leader within about half a day. --All based on the sheer inability to embarrass him into servitude. And on his ability to embarrass into servitude any dope so emotionally stunted that he hates his brother because he is too proud to accept his love. --That and sustain eye-contact with somebody who can see instantly the tangle of social awkwardness and fear of embarrassment scarcely hidden a half millimeter beneath the surface of your studiously maintained socially sanctioned "cool" fashion sense.
But don't worry. Having a big robot or super-power will make your friends stop beating you up and taking your lunch money. When they see that you have a super-power, then they will like you!
Newsflash: Stop Daydreaming, Fuck the System and Get Real Friends.
Nice graphics though.
-FL
Sure, one can always reduce the complexity of a written piece so that it feels more homey and accessible for the uninitiated audience, but I'm not sure that was called for in this case. It wasn't really THAT difficult to understand. I found his style quite enjoyable, actually. It's refreshing, sometimes, to not be treated like the lowest common denominator FOX viewer.
And given that his whole argument was based around the problems with sound-bite journalism and dogmatic arguments designed to be quickly digested and not deeply considered, I think that it would have been painfully ironic if he HAD dumbed his article down to the point where it could be instantly absorbed without any effort needed on the part of the reader for real comprehension.
-FL
But hot damn it made him feel great when he used all those sophysticated words!
I doubt it. To write with that level of ease and complexity, one needs to occupy the required head-space in earnest. Probably doesn't even notice he's doing it except on those rare occasions when he pulls back from the keyboard to pause for a breather and watch himself. And people, even the smart ones, rarely manage to do that more than a handful of times in any given life.
That, and the fact, (in my opinion anyway), he also happens to be right.
Not that it matters. For some reason everybody who thinks and writes seems to be perpetually concerned about what humanity ought to do about the state of humanity. The longer I live, the more I realize that the quest for societal justice is a fool's errand. Nobody can change anything no matter how hard they try, and the most amazing thing is that nobody realizes this astonishing truth. Change requires awareness, and machines are not aware. Almost all humans are machines. Even as I write this, I can hear the gears clicking in my skull, still on auto-pilot. And I've been working on this stuff.
-FL
It is a law of the universe; there is no free lunch, and in one way or another, you pay for everything.
Funny. I thought that paying Microsoft a lot of money for their product was the cost of the "lunch". Just because they can screw people doesn't mean that they are on any sort of moral high ground when they do. Not everybody is adept at reading and understanding the fine print like some of us happen to be. I can't stand the argument that we have nobody to blame but ourselves in a society where it is impossible for any one person to learn all the trades and skills necessary to function today. I don't know how to fix a car engine or perform surgeries, so I have to rely on others to do their jobs responsibly, and I'll be damned if I'm going to be made to feel guilty for not being a mechanic or a surgeon. Nor will I ever say that being raped is your own fault if you can't be bothered to learn martial arts or carry a gun. There is a reasonable expectation of decency from others in our society, and when that expectation is violated, there should be penalties.
I'm not seeing nearly enough penalties dished out these days. I almost wish I'd taken up law enforcement so I could prosecute top-flight political assholes. Because we certainly don't have a V or a Batman looking out for us.
-FL
I found in Balder's Gate, (one of the last games I seriously tried to play), that I enjoyed trying to build a strong and efficient character with effective tools/weapons, but that after a while I saw the pattern of more difficult challenges increasing the demand for more powerful weapons/tools. When the pattern became obvious to my base, automatic nature; (intellectually I knew from the outset how such games were designed), I lost all interest in the game because it felt repetitive and the story was uninteresting. I quit about a quarter of the way through.
My base, automatic nature, I think, has figured out that the more effective survival technique is to learn the over-arching pattern behind a challenge and then find a way to hack the system rather than to defeat the challenge head-on directly. --Once a pattern is understood, the need to engage in more base magpie-like behavior becomes pointless, and thus my "reward center" stops pumping happy juice into the rest of my brain.
Games which DO manage to engage me forever and ever are more akin to territory-winning combat scenarios where the 'enemy' is constantly advancing. My survival instincts, even if they recognize the old patterns, will nonetheless be stirred to action when they can predict the loss of territory and life if I take no action whatsoever. And so my 'happy juice' center starts pumping like mad when it sees the possibility of annihilation creeping towards me across the game board. In Balder's Gate, after a while, all I wanted to do was hang up the sword and find a nice little cottage by the sea to settle down in where I didn't have to work so hard at such a menial labor.
They don't call it "Hand to Hand" combat for nothing.
-FL
Sadly, I still can't spell.
Heck, neither can I, but the little red underline which appears beneath incorrectly spelled words in every text window on my computer seems to be able to handle most of the load. --That tech is the one which amazes/creeps me out more than any other. Because I don't remember ever installing it, or specifically looking for it as an application, or even thinking, "Hey, you know what would be a good idea for a ubiquitous bit of programming technology to make my life easier?"
And yet, there it is.
Skynet beta. Grew like fungus.
-FL