Do you really think people want to destroy the world in Moores Watchmen universe?
No. I guess I didn't make myself clear enough. --I was saying that Moore was saying the exact opposite; you describe his position accurately. What I was saying was that his position was uninformed and that the real situation in the world is vastly more complex and indeed does contain people who are eager to see the world burn.
The "sexy actors in spandex" look like the characters in the comic. Why would you expect them to not look like that?
We must be looking at different images. The comics were drawn in a style which made a clear attempt to make even beautiful people look very human, awkward and un-glamorized. I'm simply basing my views based what I've seen. In the comics, the second Silk Specter, for example, was just a confused woman in a dippy miniskirt who didn't look particularly super, which I thought carried Moore's message very well. Compare that to the scary and ultra-hot Batman-ized kung-fu version of her in the promotional clips. Dan in the comics had a middle-aged overweight thing going rather than the dapper and agile leap-to-the-ground with cool-capes ablaze image portrayed in the clips. Rorschach is supposed to look creepy in the film because he's the obvious target for even simple-minded casting, since his character is not meant to be a sympathetic hero.
My one hesitation is that these are promotional clips, so perhaps the producers are trying to hit the sexy angle in order to make money on opening day. Maybe the film will carry a very different message from the one broadcast by the advertising, but I my, um, spider-sense is ringing off the hook on this.
We'll have to wait and see, and I suspect we WILL see. I strongly doubt this film will be held up for long with so much money at stake.
Maybe I'm naive but I don't seriously believe that many people in power WANT to destroy the world. [...] Who do you think wants to destroy the world?
Just posting like that (saying where your current thinking is and asking questions) suggests strongly that you're anything but naive but simply haven't connected to the relevant information yet.
There are a number in the scientific community who promote the idea of a sudden 90% population reduction. This guy and others like him who are a little less exhibitionist carry a surprising amount of support in the academic and political communities. Where wealth and the fear of losing that wealth go hand in hand.
There are secret societies which are big into such plans. This video touches on a couple of the more outward notions held by some people with influence, (though this video has it's own stupidities built-in, but it seems impossible to do any research without having to scrape off the personal bias of any given researcher. Endless amounts of reductionist comparison need to be done when looking at this stuff.)
There's tons and tons of information out there. Dig in! Looking into the whole Denver Airport thing is fascinating. Weighing in on both sides of that argument lead to some interesting results.
Good luck and don't worry; fear is normal but if you keep your wits about you, the world gets a LOT brighter afterwards, more so than it even seems now. Knowledge protects in ways we can't even imagine.
And there it is; that Christian Love, in all-caps too. --I'm never sure when I predict a mental melt-down and subsequent explosion if it will actually happen. Sometimes just having the prediction stuck under their noses is enough to shut these weird little fish down.
Though, I'm not convinced that this isn't just a clever Leftist troll trying to get me to point out the deficiencies in lower-functioning thinking.
Still. . . Assuming that this guy is for real, you can read a ton into the fact that he uses "Your" instead of "You're". If he can't even absorb and fix such a basic fundamental of written communication which when dropped conjures the image of actual drool spilling from his lower-lip, then how can he be expected to see and absorb any of the more complex aspects of reality?
These guys are both un-fixable and quite hilarious. I wonder if I can make him spin in rage so fast that he actually bleeds from his ears? Let's try! --I'm laughing at YOU because you're clearly damaged goods and you can't contain your rage when somebody pokes a hole or two in your barely held-together web of faulty reason. Spin, baby, spin! Maybe punch a wall or two. That will be ever SO impressive! Ha ha ha!
Hot young actors with all the right moves playing characters in the Watchmen film? Come ON people!
I think everybody salivating for this film has seriously missed the point of the story.
Go back and re-read the comics. The WHOLE point of the comics was that the dream of superheros was juvenile and false, a band-aid solution which simply could not address the real problems of general self-destructive tendencies in people, and that it was the realization of this which drove Viedt to enact his 'master plan'. Casting sexy actors to look awesome in spandex is a dead giveaway that this film is the Watchmen antichrist. But of course, the antichrist is supposed to be popular. . .
I hope this film dies in the can.
For what it's worth, I think Alan Moore wasn't casting a wide enough net. In the 80's and 90's, his view of corruption was, while earnest, simple and naive; blaming the threat of nuclear holocaust simply on good humans going astray while they tried to do the right thing. He didn't see the psychopath, or the threat of world-spanning cults, or loonie social darwinists arguing in favor of deliberate population-thinning by massive orders of magnitude. --To name but a few forces in play. Many people in power WANT to destroy the world; it's not a mistake, it's a deliberate goal. Still, for a comic from two decades ago, The Watchmen was well-done even if it was the product of a clever man with the same mentality of a highschool kid suddenly and passionately aware that the rain forests are being cut down.
I'd be curious to see how Moore might have written that same story today, assuming he hasn't stopped absorbing knowledge.
The optical readers can be easily hacked as has been definitively demonstrated to anybody with eyes. Go to the big Free Documentary Website, and watch "Hacking Democracy" again if you missed it the first time on HBO.
There is simply a situation of rampant criminal negligence being perpetrated all across the states. The Right Wing way of doing things is to chin-jut at and ignore the law when it doesn't suit them and then lie about it afterwards. They do it again and again and again, and being caught once or made to feel shame for being a shit doesn't work; they're like the little bully/problem kid in kindergarten. You have to MAKE them follow the rules because they're petulant kids with no sense of responsibility. And I'm not talking about Republicans. (Though, I would imagine these days that there are few real people left in the Republican party.) I'm talking about the brain-damage victims; you know the type I mean.
There is broad proof of discarded paper records of votes which the documentarians dug out of trash bins and manually counted to discover that, 'Yes' election fraud is entirely real. But so what? With responsible people, being caught is enough to fix the problem. With problem kids, they shrug at you and say, "Yeah, SO?" And since these twerps are in offices both high and low, nothing has been done.
The skinny: The data cards which plug into the optical readers are brought to and from the voting site by corporate monkeys for the voting machine companies, and it was demonstrated that the cards can be easily made to fudge election results just by doing a prior hack to them. Simple as pie. That, along with a few other big cons can indeed destroy an election.
Oh, and please don't point out that in a couple of highlighted cases of, "But Billy did it too and he didn't get in trouble", like in Canada where the voting slant was delivered to the Left. . . That stuff is totally irrelevant. Even a Right Wing ADD turd can think up the idea to rig an inconsequential election the other way to have something to point to in an effort to confuse the issue surrounding his own treason.
The only way to put an Obama in office, (because the illegal voting slant certainly isn't going to favor him), is to turn out in unanticipated numbers so that the hack is overwhelmed. This is what happened when the Democrats took Congress; there was demonstrable voting fraud, but just not enough. What a world!
Get a fucking clue fags and watch as the next demofaggot candidtate gets trounced this election cycle.
It's because we make space for these (very) young souls to live that the country is as it is. The only way for people to truly learn is to let them make mistakes. 60 million hard-core bible people determined to not question and who believe their dogmatic sound-bite political realities without spending any real time to actually explore ANY issues which might create discomfort in their pretend belief systems. . . Those people are simply going to have to learn the (very) hard way. I'm guessing they will preside like the current crop of Zionists over a bloody massacre, and then will have to play the roles of concentration camp victims next time around the loop. Just listen to the seething hate in this guy's troll; That kind of energy is expensive; like mortgaging your soul at a high interest rate. He hasn't learned yet the basic and incredibly simple rule for leading a happy and fulfilling life.
The difference between his belief system and mine is that he has to continually lie to himself and seek the company of other cultists in order to maintain the bubble illusion about a bearded hypocrite/psychopathic fairy in the sky. OTH I've got buckets of proof for the system I see functioning all around me because I'm not scared to explore that which terrifies him. Now let's all stand back as this young'n vomits at us with some of that Christian Love.
Levono is being a bit coy, it seems. (Just went through their S10 info).
You get half the memory (512Mb) and half the battery size (3 cell) of the eee1000, and there's apparently no option on their sales page to upgrade either of these on the main package. Going through their accessories page, you can separately order a gig of memory for $35 and they don't even offer a 6 cell battery yet for the S10. I would hope they make that option available soon for the main package, (the press releases say they do, so perhaps it's just a matter of waiting a few days for their supply chains to catch up.)
If they don't, however, their batteries seem to be all in the $130 - $170 range regardless of cell number. If they force people to buy a second battery just to get up to 6 cells, then that would be a bad blow.
I note that the screen is a spot bigger than the eee1000, and the keyboard is a spot smaller, being 85% of a full keyboard, where the eee1000 is 92%. Overall the chassis is almost half an inch smaller in width, ringing in at 9.8" to the eee1000's 10.25" Very nice, if you don't mind the keyboard being a touch smaller. The screen also appears to have a mat-finish; another good move on their part.
All in all, it seems like a nice little package; 512Mb is a workable size, though it might be a little tight for XP in some cases. With the features upgraded to the same level as the eee1000, it might not be quite so competitively priced as it first appears. For me, a 6 cell battery is an absolute must and I wouldn't even consider the S10 until it became available. But the S10 does come with an all-in-one card reader to the eee's SD memory slot, and you can get the S10 in Ruby Red, which I have to admit looks pretty sweet.
1. I'm glad it has been formally recognized that computer-animated humans look creepy. "Uncanny Alley". Good call and so true.
2. This isn't animation. It's digital film with an advanced form of cut & paste. --Which isn't to say that it's not cool or that it doesn't open up some new nifty options for film-makers. But animation? Come on.
They put real moving lips on animated faces back on some awful show back in the 70's, and nobody should have been proud to call that "animation" either. Basically, no animator is ever going to break the barrier in "Uncanny Alley" because photo-realism is not what animation is about. Animation is about using abstract generalizations to capture the impression of human qualities. Photo-realism simply doesn't belong in the world of hand-painted art. Animator's hands are not wired up to cameras; they're wired up to these wondrous pattern and abstraction machines which exist forever in the boundless world of dream logic. And thank-goodness for that, or we'd be a race of cold and un-feeling robots. Ick.
The other 10" netbook (MSI Wind) is selling on Amazon for $569. It seems that netbooks with 10 inches of screen (measured diagonally btw) are settling into that price range.
I must say, however, that $300 for an 8.9" screen is a darn good deal for a powerful netbook from Dell. --Though for 10" screens, the Asus eee line still impresses me more than any of the others so far; they've got a year's worth of product development under their belts at this point where everybody else is still scrambling, and Asus seems to be the only manufacturer which isn't shipping units with "crystal-bright" screens, which I know some people prefer, but for me clinched the deal by virtue of its absence. --The other perk is the presence of a massive user support community. This is the first time, possibly in my life, when I've found myself in with the popular crowd. It feels kind of weird to have the 'it' item. I can't decide if I feel dirty or elated. It's rare when "Popular" also means "Damn Good".
The other elements which I'm impressed with on the 1000H are the default 6-cell battery and its nice long life, the responsive and properly sized keyboard with its sensible layout, the screen real-estate, great audio, quiet fan/HD, and excellent body design, (it's nice and rugged; doesn't feel cheaply made like some of the other netbooks I've handled). I was also pleasantly surprised with the hibernate feature in XP; until it came through the door, I was resigned to putting up with long start-up times, but with the hibernate feature it goes from cold to me typing at full speed in about 14 seconds, though I suspect that would be longer if I doubled up the memory. It currently has 1 gig, but I've not noticed any limiting issues with that at all. A gig is a lot; though it might become a bit annoying if I decide to do any heavy Photoshop work on the thing, although I can't realistically see that happening very often.
The one thing I do find is that the trackpad keys are a bit too stiff for my liking. --But at least they're in the right place, at the bottom of the trackpad. I don't know what several other designers were thinking when they put them to the sides. Weird. The only other thing I would caution people about is that the eee1000 is just this side of being too big and heavy. You need a bit of muscle to hold it in one hand while typing with the other; it's best on your lap or knee or some other surface. A Blackberry it is not, but it still slides very nicely into a backpack and it's easy enough to treat like a book around the house rather than a piece of fold-up furniture.
I've not tried out the 8.9" eee, and it does seem that the competitors have some nice netbooks out in that range, so I don't know if I'd go with Asus for one of those if I wanted the smaller screen. This new Dell machine, aside from the glossy screen, looks like a pretty decent choice if they can deliver on the projected price.
I was tempted to comment on all the ridiculous political hate-speech in evidence in the posts below and implore everybody to chill the hell out. It's Lego after all! We can get back to obsessing over WWIII after the closing ceremonies.
Then I noticed something about the models. . .
As cute as they all are, it struck me that the Chinese geeks show their deference to authority patterns in how they use the little bricks. I've seriously never seen fan-made Lego creations which obey the rules of scale as suggested by the pre-packaged little Lego people, (unless it allows for the creation of a 40-foot structure). I've seen CN towers and Space Shuttles and Eiffel Towers which stand upwards to twenty and thirty feet tall, and all manner of creation which uses Lego in a way which is quite literally 'outside the box' in terms of the suggested designs. If you're a big Lego fan group in the West, then having a big budget to make a Lego creation means you get to do dream projects. For the Olympics and the kind of money the Chinese are spending, I was fully expecting to see a 1/24 scale model of the Bird's Nest or something similarly ridiculous. But these models are just so sweet! It's almost refreshing. They look like the department store Christmas promotional models Lego puts together. Strictly by the rules, all in proper scale to the little plastic people and nothing the Lego instruction manuals or government might think of as a threatening expression of personal exuberance and un-authorized ambition.
Ugh. China scares the shit out of me, and not because they have all the money and plans to dominate the world. Heck, I love Chinese food, Chinese aesthetics and Chinese Kung-Fu!
--No, it's the all-out war on individualism and free thought, and the weird cultural embracing of that repression which makes my blood run cold. I suppose I should feel lucky that we're far more liable to be atomized by space rocks than we are to be dominated by Chinese warlords, but it still makes me shiver every now and again.
Up until this time last year, I was a proud and recalcitrant user of Win98.
I only switched to Win2000 when I started having trouble moving really big files over USB. Then my whole system did that 'releasing the magic smoke' thing and I had to buy a stack of dazzling new gear.
I was happy to discover upon switching to Win2000 that it worked really, really well. With all the service packs in place and all that jazz, I've now got a dream machine.
I waited nearly a whole decade before finally switching over, and that was enough time to see the OS clean itself up. It never crashes and does all I want/need. Cool.
I should add that I did try Ubuntu and a couple of other Linux versions first, but was dismayed to discover that my Wacom tablet wouldn't function properly under them. There are user support forums detailing long sets of baffling instructions on how to get tablets going right, but they didn't work for me and I just ended up frustrated. It reminded me of the days when ripping CD's to MP3 format was a touch & go command line process rather than the plaything of highly automated programs it is today. I'm not a Linux guru and I have no desire to climb the learning curve necessary to become one, so I dropped the whole affair. --Also QuarkExpress isn't supported by Wine. . . Oh well.
Linux is closer, and it looks fantastic and feels great to use, but it doesn't do easily (or possibly at all) what I need. When it finally arrives, I imagine I'll not need to switch to XP in 2017.
But one thing is not be ignored: idiocy is what it is. The basic question you are asking is if its ethical or good for the majority to point it out in big orange letters.
There is a time and a place for all manners of behavior.
As a general 'for instance', when prominent leaders make repeated, huge and destructive blunders, I see only benefit in pointing it out. Loudly.
But I would argue that the intent in this Slashdot section is rather more self-serving and mean-spirited in nature, seeking simply pleasure at the expense of others. Intent is a large part of the equation. One can hide from this fact, but it doesn't go away, and it certainly doesn't stop it from altering a person with repeated use. Interestingly, a roomful of sneerers doesn't add up in terms of charismatic power to one self-owned person with positive intent. People who embrace scorn are similarly ruled by it; generally shells of themselves with little real power in the face of somebody with true courage.
Like you, I'd also rather be embarrassed than an idiot, but punished, scorned and castigated? I've no patience or use for that. Treat others as you would have them treat you. (Assuming they are not psychotics who are deliberate in their 'blunders'.) Always there are provisos.
People do funny, silly things sometimes, and yes, it can be amusing and even educational to share these stories.
HOWEVER. . .
I have found that if one spends a great deal of energy belittling and scorning others, it starts to have a negative effect upon you personally; repeated actions have a way of becoming who you are on a deep level; it becomes hard to stop.
People around you will recognize these qualities, and start to limit their own experimenting with the world for fear of making a mistake and being made to feel shame for it. They diminish their own light as you encourage them to take steps backwards into ignorance and servitude. You encourage them to live in fear rather than in acceptance of their own inevitable mistakes as they take brave steps along the road of learning.
If you want the world to become a better place, then it is more effective to find ways to teach and encourage people; instead, you explain why microwaving ice-cream doesn't work and you don't make them feel stupid and small because of it. It is an opportunity for somebody to get the thrill of learning a new feature of reality. Remember how much fun it was as a kid when the lightbulb went on and you learned how something worked? You have the chance to share that experience. Reacting in this way to others who are not as experienced as you doesn't just teach the fundamentals of preparing an ice-cream sundae, but also it teaches them how to encourage learning in others in a powerful and kind manner. These effects spread outward. --And the opposite is also true. If you teach scorn and fear, then those patterns will also propagate, affecting others in ever-widening circles.
I really don't like this trend with these new sections in Slashdot whereby it seems the goal is to laugh at all those 'Stupid People' out there. Slashdot has always had a large component of sneering, mean-spirited dis-empowering people. But never before has it been encouraged by the editorial team.
Got it. Judging by the evidence, I'd say god is "infinitely shy.":)
Ha ha! That's actually a great way of putting it. When I learned that being 'infinite' essentially locks you in place in absolutely every respect, things started to make a lot more sense. You can be filled with total awareness, but you can't act directly because you are infinitely balanced. So the idea of the human or any other fragmented being which can't see the whole is that you can actually do stuff and you think it matters. Zest for life comes from being ignorant, and yet filling that ignorance with knowledge, (exploration and seeking into the unknown) are what creates that zest. Entropic. I think this has as much to do with big bang theories as does physical expansion/collapse models. It's all connected.
Then you are describing pantheism. Most theistic religions are not pantheistic.
I'm certainly not describing any of the popular cults!
My point is that your assertion was false; the salt shaker, the monitor, do not have to be part of god for god to be infinite.
Well, they don't if god is only "Infinitely Long" or "Infinitely Wide". But to use the word "infinite" in that manner is to describe only a finite number of properties of a subject and that was not my intent. I know the math behind the concept of infinity, but I still chose to use the word because I believe the definition is appropriate when one doesn't get bogged down in points of word usage; so many attempts to communicate in the realm of difficult ideas die in this way.
God does. That's the whole point. When I say 'God', I mean everything. The two halves of your infinite plane example are abstract concepts, both contained in one mind.
God is infinite. God is everything. The salt shaker in the kitchen. The monitor you are reading this on. Those must be part of god, otherwise they are outside of god, which means god is not infinite. If the salt shaker and the monitor are not part of god, then the whole notion of god unravels.
If you can agree with this premise, it means that you are also a part of God. You also happen to be aware. This makes you are God's awareness in the space you occupy.
Simple, really. The whole 'bearded psychopath in the sky' thing is self-disproving, because to make god separate from creation means the bearded psychopath is just a bearded psychopath with some special abilities and a silly old book spouting hot P.R. about him. I don't buy into that because it sounds daft, logically broken and has too many creepy followers than can possibly be taken seriously. But people like their silly stories and they love to be conned.
When the military or a collective of enough industry voices declare where we're going to be in twenty years, you can safely bet that those advancements are already here in some dark lab someplace.
My reasoning is this: When you have developed a super-advanced technology in secret, then when it is out-moded and no longer useful because it is being replaced by an even more super-advanced secret technology, what do you do with it? Why you sell the heck out of it. Profit, profit, profit. The bad guys understand and live in the frequency of all things one can be fearful of. A big one is the Fear of Want. --Will I be safe from being homeless on the streets? Better make enough money to get a house. Will I be safe from a mortgage collapse? Better own a house and lots of extra money on top of that to see me through the hard times. Ooh, but the natives are growing restless. I better make sure my house is gated with armed guards on the walls. How much does that cost? Oh, and what if the economy collapses altogether? I'd better have enough resources saved up to be REALLY safe.
It never ends, and so greed never ends. You need more to protect what you have, which in turn needs protecting. Fear, fear, fear.
And so. . , you find schemes to make lots and lots of money. Keeping the economy running on new tech advancements; keep the people chasing after new and better stuff to replace old and outmoded stuff. So when your secret technologies which multiple agencies sworn to secrecy have been working on in compartmentalized areas with talk-and-die non-disclosure agreements signed and filed. . , when those technologies no longer serve to protect you directly because of newer and better items, you sell them! Yay!
But hold on. You can't just dump a super-advanced technology on the market just like that. People will ask, "But where did it come from? Hey! Are you making secret technologies? With tax money? Well we want some of that!"
So you need a narrative. You need to establish a logical development path for a new technology to sprout from for people to see. It doesn't have to be true, but just true enough. Think of all those poor busy-work developers re-inventing stuff in a guided manner so that their 'new' stuff lines up with the prescribed flow of stuff which you want to drop on the market in ten or twenty years time. Stuff, stuff, stuff!
You had me on the first line, (assuming it's true.) Everything branched off from that first assumption which, since you love Hotmail makes all other assumptions totally baseless. Gosh, a person who loves Hotmail would offer up a completely different profile!
Thanks for responding! I can always use a good kick in the ass when deserving. --Life is complex and while you can certainly measure people based on behavior and put together logical pathways based on seed information, this is just another example of why it's important to gather as much of that seed info as you can before storming off in what seems like an obvious direction.
when a person has several different email addresses, at several different domains, with real names, fantasy names, numbers and everything, along with a huge list of Mailinator addresses?
It means there is a lot more information to work with when doing a psyche profile on you. Unless you are gaming the system by deliberately creating misleading 'cigars' for a psychologist to trip over, then you are revealing your soul. Fantasy names? Sheesh! A person's fantasies tell you gobs of stuff about them.
There are limits, of course. A fantasy name on its own needs a reference point to be truly revealing. "Fuzzyfox123@dot.com" (for example) offers a fair bit of insight on its own, but if people know it's connected to you, then your whole life is pretty much an open page.
You don't like Hotmail. Therefore, you consider yourself knowledgeable about all things computer, probably to the point of arrogance, since you must look down upon all those who can't tell the difference between a web service you consider lousy and one which you consider decent. You have an awareness of privacy issues, suggesting intelligence above average which you stake rather a high degree of your personal sense of self-worth upon, suggesting you contain well-concealed (even from yourself most of the time) personal doubts about other aspects of your life. Your sense of humor is dry and your personality is such that you probably hide behind a rationalist behavior set to avoid the challenges brought by strong emotions. You're probably white with a middle-income background which allowed you to own the expensive computer gear with which you were able to evolve your knowledge base, and (this is going out on a limb) you believe in gun ownership though you don't have one yourself, and you think Barak Obama is an ass, but you'll probably vote for him anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you really think people want to destroy the world in Moores Watchmen universe?
No. I guess I didn't make myself clear enough. --I was saying that Moore was saying the exact opposite; you describe his position accurately. What I was saying was that his position was uninformed and that the real situation in the world is vastly more complex and indeed does contain people who are eager to see the world burn.
-FL
The "sexy actors in spandex" look like the characters in the comic. Why would you expect them to not look like that?
We must be looking at different images. The comics were drawn in a style which made a clear attempt to make even beautiful people look very human, awkward and un-glamorized. I'm simply basing my views based what I've seen. In the comics, the second Silk Specter, for example, was just a confused woman in a dippy miniskirt who didn't look particularly super, which I thought carried Moore's message very well. Compare that to the scary and ultra-hot Batman-ized kung-fu version of her in the promotional clips. Dan in the comics had a middle-aged overweight thing going rather than the dapper and agile leap-to-the-ground with cool-capes ablaze image portrayed in the clips. Rorschach is supposed to look creepy in the film because he's the obvious target for even simple-minded casting, since his character is not meant to be a sympathetic hero.
My one hesitation is that these are promotional clips, so perhaps the producers are trying to hit the sexy angle in order to make money on opening day. Maybe the film will carry a very different message from the one broadcast by the advertising, but I my, um, spider-sense is ringing off the hook on this.
We'll have to wait and see, and I suspect we WILL see. I strongly doubt this film will be held up for long with so much money at stake.
-FL
Maybe I'm naive but I don't seriously believe that many people in power WANT to destroy the world. [...] Who do you think wants to destroy the world?
Just posting like that (saying where your current thinking is and asking questions) suggests strongly that you're anything but naive but simply haven't connected to the relevant information yet.
There are a number in the scientific community who promote the idea of a sudden 90% population reduction. This guy and others like him who are a little less exhibitionist carry a surprising amount of support in the academic and political communities. Where wealth and the fear of losing that wealth go hand in hand.
There are secret societies which are big into such plans. This video touches on a couple of the more outward notions held by some people with influence, (though this video has it's own stupidities built-in, but it seems impossible to do any research without having to scrape off the personal bias of any given researcher. Endless amounts of reductionist comparison need to be done when looking at this stuff.)
There's tons and tons of information out there. Dig in! Looking into the whole Denver Airport thing is fascinating. Weighing in on both sides of that argument lead to some interesting results.
Good luck and don't worry; fear is normal but if you keep your wits about you, the world gets a LOT brighter afterwards, more so than it even seems now. Knowledge protects in ways we can't even imagine.
-FL
Ha ha!
And there it is; that Christian Love, in all-caps too. --I'm never sure when I predict a mental melt-down and subsequent explosion if it will actually happen. Sometimes just having the prediction stuck under their noses is enough to shut these weird little fish down.
Though, I'm not convinced that this isn't just a clever Leftist troll trying to get me to point out the deficiencies in lower-functioning thinking.
Still. . . Assuming that this guy is for real, you can read a ton into the fact that he uses "Your" instead of "You're". If he can't even absorb and fix such a basic fundamental of written communication which when dropped conjures the image of actual drool spilling from his lower-lip, then how can he be expected to see and absorb any of the more complex aspects of reality?
These guys are both un-fixable and quite hilarious. I wonder if I can make him spin in rage so fast that he actually bleeds from his ears? Let's try! --I'm laughing at YOU because you're clearly damaged goods and you can't contain your rage when somebody pokes a hole or two in your barely held-together web of faulty reason. Spin, baby, spin! Maybe punch a wall or two. That will be ever SO impressive! Ha ha ha!
-FL
Hot young actors with all the right moves playing characters in the Watchmen film? Come ON people!
I think everybody salivating for this film has seriously missed the point of the story.
Go back and re-read the comics. The WHOLE point of the comics was that the dream of superheros was juvenile and false, a band-aid solution which simply could not address the real problems of general self-destructive tendencies in people, and that it was the realization of this which drove Viedt to enact his 'master plan'. Casting sexy actors to look awesome in spandex is a dead giveaway that this film is the Watchmen antichrist. But of course, the antichrist is supposed to be popular. . .
I hope this film dies in the can.
For what it's worth, I think Alan Moore wasn't casting a wide enough net. In the 80's and 90's, his view of corruption was, while earnest, simple and naive; blaming the threat of nuclear holocaust simply on good humans going astray while they tried to do the right thing. He didn't see the psychopath, or the threat of world-spanning cults, or loonie social darwinists arguing in favor of deliberate population-thinning by massive orders of magnitude. --To name but a few forces in play. Many people in power WANT to destroy the world; it's not a mistake, it's a deliberate goal. Still, for a comic from two decades ago, The Watchmen was well-done even if it was the product of a clever man with the same mentality of a highschool kid suddenly and passionately aware that the rain forests are being cut down.
I'd be curious to see how Moore might have written that same story today, assuming he hasn't stopped absorbing knowledge.
-FL
The optical readers can be easily hacked as has been definitively demonstrated to anybody with eyes. Go to the big Free Documentary Website, and watch "Hacking Democracy" again if you missed it the first time on HBO.
There is simply a situation of rampant criminal negligence being perpetrated all across the states. The Right Wing way of doing things is to chin-jut at and ignore the law when it doesn't suit them and then lie about it afterwards. They do it again and again and again, and being caught once or made to feel shame for being a shit doesn't work; they're like the little bully/problem kid in kindergarten. You have to MAKE them follow the rules because they're petulant kids with no sense of responsibility. And I'm not talking about Republicans. (Though, I would imagine these days that there are few real people left in the Republican party.) I'm talking about the brain-damage victims; you know the type I mean.
There is broad proof of discarded paper records of votes which the documentarians dug out of trash bins and manually counted to discover that, 'Yes' election fraud is entirely real. But so what? With responsible people, being caught is enough to fix the problem. With problem kids, they shrug at you and say, "Yeah, SO?" And since these twerps are in offices both high and low, nothing has been done.
The skinny: The data cards which plug into the optical readers are brought to and from the voting site by corporate monkeys for the voting machine companies, and it was demonstrated that the cards can be easily made to fudge election results just by doing a prior hack to them. Simple as pie. That, along with a few other big cons can indeed destroy an election.
Oh, and please don't point out that in a couple of highlighted cases of, "But Billy did it too and he didn't get in trouble", like in Canada where the voting slant was delivered to the Left. . . That stuff is totally irrelevant. Even a Right Wing ADD turd can think up the idea to rig an inconsequential election the other way to have something to point to in an effort to confuse the issue surrounding his own treason.
The only way to put an Obama in office, (because the illegal voting slant certainly isn't going to favor him), is to turn out in unanticipated numbers so that the hack is overwhelmed. This is what happened when the Democrats took Congress; there was demonstrable voting fraud, but just not enough. What a world!
-FL
Get a fucking clue fags and watch as the next demofaggot candidtate gets trounced this election cycle.
It's because we make space for these (very) young souls to live that the country is as it is. The only way for people to truly learn is to let them make mistakes. 60 million hard-core bible people determined to not question and who believe their dogmatic sound-bite political realities without spending any real time to actually explore ANY issues which might create discomfort in their pretend belief systems. . . Those people are simply going to have to learn the (very) hard way. I'm guessing they will preside like the current crop of Zionists over a bloody massacre, and then will have to play the roles of concentration camp victims next time around the loop. Just listen to the seething hate in this guy's troll; That kind of energy is expensive; like mortgaging your soul at a high interest rate. He hasn't learned yet the basic and incredibly simple rule for leading a happy and fulfilling life.
The difference between his belief system and mine is that he has to continually lie to himself and seek the company of other cultists in order to maintain the bubble illusion about a bearded hypocrite/psychopathic fairy in the sky. OTH I've got buckets of proof for the system I see functioning all around me because I'm not scared to explore that which terrifies him. Now let's all stand back as this young'n vomits at us with some of that Christian Love.
-FL
Ho, ho! And the horses are at the gate!
Levono is being a bit coy, it seems. (Just went through their S10 info).
You get half the memory (512Mb) and half the battery size (3 cell) of the eee1000, and there's apparently no option on their sales page to upgrade either of these on the main package. Going through their accessories page, you can separately order a gig of memory for $35 and they don't even offer a 6 cell battery yet for the S10. I would hope they make that option available soon for the main package, (the press releases say they do, so perhaps it's just a matter of waiting a few days for their supply chains to catch up.)
If they don't, however, their batteries seem to be all in the $130 - $170 range regardless of cell number. If they force people to buy a second battery just to get up to 6 cells, then that would be a bad blow.
I note that the screen is a spot bigger than the eee1000, and the keyboard is a spot smaller, being 85% of a full keyboard, where the eee1000 is 92%. Overall the chassis is almost half an inch smaller in width, ringing in at 9.8" to the eee1000's 10.25" Very nice, if you don't mind the keyboard being a touch smaller. The screen also appears to have a mat-finish; another good move on their part.
All in all, it seems like a nice little package; 512Mb is a workable size, though it might be a little tight for XP in some cases. With the features upgraded to the same level as the eee1000, it might not be quite so competitively priced as it first appears. For me, a 6 cell battery is an absolute must and I wouldn't even consider the S10 until it became available. But the S10 does come with an all-in-one card reader to the eee's SD memory slot, and you can get the S10 in Ruby Red, which I have to admit looks pretty sweet.
And they're off!
-FL
1. I'm glad it has been formally recognized that computer-animated humans look creepy. "Uncanny Alley". Good call and so true.
2. This isn't animation. It's digital film with an advanced form of cut & paste. --Which isn't to say that it's not cool or that it doesn't open up some new nifty options for film-makers. But animation? Come on.
They put real moving lips on animated faces back on some awful show back in the 70's, and nobody should have been proud to call that "animation" either. Basically, no animator is ever going to break the barrier in "Uncanny Alley" because photo-realism is not what animation is about. Animation is about using abstract generalizations to capture the impression of human qualities. Photo-realism simply doesn't belong in the world of hand-painted art. Animator's hands are not wired up to cameras; they're wired up to these wondrous pattern and abstraction machines which exist forever in the boundless world of dream logic. And thank-goodness for that, or we'd be a race of cold and un-feeling robots. Ick.
-FL
The other 10" netbook (MSI Wind) is selling on Amazon for $569. It seems that netbooks with 10 inches of screen (measured diagonally btw) are settling into that price range.
I must say, however, that $300 for an 8.9" screen is a darn good deal for a powerful netbook from Dell. --Though for 10" screens, the Asus eee line still impresses me more than any of the others so far; they've got a year's worth of product development under their belts at this point where everybody else is still scrambling, and Asus seems to be the only manufacturer which isn't shipping units with "crystal-bright" screens, which I know some people prefer, but for me clinched the deal by virtue of its absence. --The other perk is the presence of a massive user support community. This is the first time, possibly in my life, when I've found myself in with the popular crowd. It feels kind of weird to have the 'it' item. I can't decide if I feel dirty or elated. It's rare when "Popular" also means "Damn Good".
The other elements which I'm impressed with on the 1000H are the default 6-cell battery and its nice long life, the responsive and properly sized keyboard with its sensible layout, the screen real-estate, great audio, quiet fan/HD, and excellent body design, (it's nice and rugged; doesn't feel cheaply made like some of the other netbooks I've handled). I was also pleasantly surprised with the hibernate feature in XP; until it came through the door, I was resigned to putting up with long start-up times, but with the hibernate feature it goes from cold to me typing at full speed in about 14 seconds, though I suspect that would be longer if I doubled up the memory. It currently has 1 gig, but I've not noticed any limiting issues with that at all. A gig is a lot; though it might become a bit annoying if I decide to do any heavy Photoshop work on the thing, although I can't realistically see that happening very often.
The one thing I do find is that the trackpad keys are a bit too stiff for my liking. --But at least they're in the right place, at the bottom of the trackpad. I don't know what several other designers were thinking when they put them to the sides. Weird. The only other thing I would caution people about is that the eee1000 is just this side of being too big and heavy. You need a bit of muscle to hold it in one hand while typing with the other; it's best on your lap or knee or some other surface. A Blackberry it is not, but it still slides very nicely into a backpack and it's easy enough to treat like a book around the house rather than a piece of fold-up furniture.
I've not tried out the 8.9" eee, and it does seem that the competitors have some nice netbooks out in that range, so I don't know if I'd go with Asus for one of those if I wanted the smaller screen. This new Dell machine, aside from the glossy screen, looks like a pretty decent choice if they can deliver on the projected price.
-FL
I was tempted to comment on all the ridiculous political hate-speech in evidence in the posts below and implore everybody to chill the hell out. It's Lego after all! We can get back to obsessing over WWIII after the closing ceremonies.
Then I noticed something about the models. . .
As cute as they all are, it struck me that the Chinese geeks show their deference to authority patterns in how they use the little bricks. I've seriously never seen fan-made Lego creations which obey the rules of scale as suggested by the pre-packaged little Lego people, (unless it allows for the creation of a 40-foot structure). I've seen CN towers and Space Shuttles and Eiffel Towers which stand upwards to twenty and thirty feet tall, and all manner of creation which uses Lego in a way which is quite literally 'outside the box' in terms of the suggested designs. If you're a big Lego fan group in the West, then having a big budget to make a Lego creation means you get to do dream projects. For the Olympics and the kind of money the Chinese are spending, I was fully expecting to see a 1/24 scale model of the Bird's Nest or something similarly ridiculous. But these models are just so sweet! It's almost refreshing. They look like the department store Christmas promotional models Lego puts together. Strictly by the rules, all in proper scale to the little plastic people and nothing the Lego instruction manuals or government might think of as a threatening expression of personal exuberance and un-authorized ambition.
Ugh. China scares the shit out of me, and not because they have all the money and plans to dominate the world. Heck, I love Chinese food, Chinese aesthetics and Chinese Kung-Fu!
--No, it's the all-out war on individualism and free thought, and the weird cultural embracing of that repression which makes my blood run cold. I suppose I should feel lucky that we're far more liable to be atomized by space rocks than we are to be dominated by Chinese warlords, but it still makes me shiver every now and again.
-FL
Up until this time last year, I was a proud and recalcitrant user of Win98.
I only switched to Win2000 when I started having trouble moving really big files over USB. Then my whole system did that 'releasing the magic smoke' thing and I had to buy a stack of dazzling new gear.
I was happy to discover upon switching to Win2000 that it worked really, really well. With all the service packs in place and all that jazz, I've now got a dream machine.
I waited nearly a whole decade before finally switching over, and that was enough time to see the OS clean itself up. It never crashes and does all I want/need. Cool.
I should add that I did try Ubuntu and a couple of other Linux versions first, but was dismayed to discover that my Wacom tablet wouldn't function properly under them. There are user support forums detailing long sets of baffling instructions on how to get tablets going right, but they didn't work for me and I just ended up frustrated. It reminded me of the days when ripping CD's to MP3 format was a touch & go command line process rather than the plaything of highly automated programs it is today. I'm not a Linux guru and I have no desire to climb the learning curve necessary to become one, so I dropped the whole affair. --Also QuarkExpress isn't supported by Wine. . . Oh well.
Linux is closer, and it looks fantastic and feels great to use, but it doesn't do easily (or possibly at all) what I need. When it finally arrives, I imagine I'll not need to switch to XP in 2017.
-FL
But one thing is not be ignored: idiocy is what it is. The basic question you are asking is if its ethical or good for the majority to point it out in big orange letters.
There is a time and a place for all manners of behavior.
As a general 'for instance', when prominent leaders make repeated, huge and destructive blunders, I see only benefit in pointing it out. Loudly.
But I would argue that the intent in this Slashdot section is rather more self-serving and mean-spirited in nature, seeking simply pleasure at the expense of others. Intent is a large part of the equation. One can hide from this fact, but it doesn't go away, and it certainly doesn't stop it from altering a person with repeated use. Interestingly, a roomful of sneerers doesn't add up in terms of charismatic power to one self-owned person with positive intent. People who embrace scorn are similarly ruled by it; generally shells of themselves with little real power in the face of somebody with true courage.
Like you, I'd also rather be embarrassed than an idiot, but punished, scorned and castigated? I've no patience or use for that. Treat others as you would have them treat you. (Assuming they are not psychotics who are deliberate in their 'blunders'.) Always there are provisos.
-FL
HOWEVER. . .
I have found that if one spends a great deal of energy belittling and scorning others, it starts to have a negative effect upon you personally; repeated actions have a way of becoming who you are on a deep level; it becomes hard to stop.
People around you will recognize these qualities, and start to limit their own experimenting with the world for fear of making a mistake and being made to feel shame for it. They diminish their own light as you encourage them to take steps backwards into ignorance and servitude. You encourage them to live in fear rather than in acceptance of their own inevitable mistakes as they take brave steps along the road of learning.
If you want the world to become a better place, then it is more effective to find ways to teach and encourage people; instead, you explain why microwaving ice-cream doesn't work and you don't make them feel stupid and small because of it. It is an opportunity for somebody to get the thrill of learning a new feature of reality. Remember how much fun it was as a kid when the lightbulb went on and you learned how something worked? You have the chance to share that experience. Reacting in this way to others who are not as experienced as you doesn't just teach the fundamentals of preparing an ice-cream sundae, but also it teaches them how to encourage learning in others in a powerful and kind manner. These effects spread outward. --And the opposite is also true. If you teach scorn and fear, then those patterns will also propagate, affecting others in ever-widening circles.
I really don't like this trend with these new sections in Slashdot whereby it seems the goal is to laugh at all those 'Stupid People' out there. Slashdot has always had a large component of sneering, mean-spirited dis-empowering people. But never before has it been encouraged by the editorial team.
Ask: "Am I helping the world or harming it?"
-FL
Got it. Judging by the evidence, I'd say god is "infinitely shy." :)
Ha ha! That's actually a great way of putting it. When I learned that being 'infinite' essentially locks you in place in absolutely every respect, things started to make a lot more sense. You can be filled with total awareness, but you can't act directly because you are infinitely balanced. So the idea of the human or any other fragmented being which can't see the whole is that you can actually do stuff and you think it matters. Zest for life comes from being ignorant, and yet filling that ignorance with knowledge, (exploration and seeking into the unknown) are what creates that zest. Entropic. I think this has as much to do with big bang theories as does physical expansion/collapse models. It's all connected.
-FL
Then you are describing pantheism. Most theistic religions are not pantheistic.
I'm certainly not describing any of the popular cults!
My point is that your assertion was false; the salt shaker, the monitor, do not have to be part of god for god to be infinite.
Well, they don't if god is only "Infinitely Long" or "Infinitely Wide". But to use the word "infinite" in that manner is to describe only a finite number of properties of a subject and that was not my intent. I know the math behind the concept of infinity, but I still chose to use the word because I believe the definition is appropriate when one doesn't get bogged down in points of word usage; so many attempts to communicate in the realm of difficult ideas die in this way.
-FL
Infinite things do not have to be all-inclusive.
God does. That's the whole point. When I say 'God', I mean everything. The two halves of your infinite plane example are abstract concepts, both contained in one mind.
-FL
God is infinite. God is everything. The salt shaker in the kitchen. The monitor you are reading this on. Those must be part of god, otherwise they are outside of god, which means god is not infinite. If the salt shaker and the monitor are not part of god, then the whole notion of god unravels.
If you can agree with this premise, it means that you are also a part of God. You also happen to be aware. This makes you are God's awareness in the space you occupy.
Simple, really. The whole 'bearded psychopath in the sky' thing is self-disproving, because to make god separate from creation means the bearded psychopath is just a bearded psychopath with some special abilities and a silly old book spouting hot P.R. about him. I don't buy into that because it sounds daft, logically broken and has too many creepy followers than can possibly be taken seriously. But people like their silly stories and they love to be conned.
-FL
When the military or a collective of enough industry voices declare where we're going to be in twenty years, you can safely bet that those advancements are already here in some dark lab someplace.
My reasoning is this: When you have developed a super-advanced technology in secret, then when it is out-moded and no longer useful because it is being replaced by an even more super-advanced secret technology, what do you do with it? Why you sell the heck out of it. Profit, profit, profit. The bad guys understand and live in the frequency of all things one can be fearful of. A big one is the Fear of Want. --Will I be safe from being homeless on the streets? Better make enough money to get a house. Will I be safe from a mortgage collapse? Better own a house and lots of extra money on top of that to see me through the hard times. Ooh, but the natives are growing restless. I better make sure my house is gated with armed guards on the walls. How much does that cost? Oh, and what if the economy collapses altogether? I'd better have enough resources saved up to be REALLY safe.
It never ends, and so greed never ends. You need more to protect what you have, which in turn needs protecting. Fear, fear, fear.
And so. . , you find schemes to make lots and lots of money. Keeping the economy running on new tech advancements; keep the people chasing after new and better stuff to replace old and outmoded stuff. So when your secret technologies which multiple agencies sworn to secrecy have been working on in compartmentalized areas with talk-and-die non-disclosure agreements signed and filed. . , when those technologies no longer serve to protect you directly because of newer and better items, you sell them! Yay!
But hold on. You can't just dump a super-advanced technology on the market just like that. People will ask, "But where did it come from? Hey! Are you making secret technologies? With tax money? Well we want some of that!"
So you need a narrative. You need to establish a logical development path for a new technology to sprout from for people to see. It doesn't have to be true, but just true enough. Think of all those poor busy-work developers re-inventing stuff in a guided manner so that their 'new' stuff lines up with the prescribed flow of stuff which you want to drop on the market in ten or twenty years time. Stuff, stuff, stuff!
A silly game. Enjoy your iPods.
-FL
--You know, lawyers soliciting victims of RIAA harassment for the easy pickings. (Precedent!)
Self-punishing evil. Karmic law in action.
-FL
Huh? Score 0 "Redundant"? --Sorry, but I didn't see these links over-provided, and I found them useful. This is why I read Slashdot without filtering.
-FL
Those guys are the geek equivalent of deep South monster truck aficionados.
-FL
You had me on the first line, (assuming it's true.) Everything branched off from that first assumption which, since you love Hotmail makes all other assumptions totally baseless. Gosh, a person who loves Hotmail would offer up a completely different profile!
Thanks for responding! I can always use a good kick in the ass when deserving. --Life is complex and while you can certainly measure people based on behavior and put together logical pathways based on seed information, this is just another example of why it's important to gather as much of that seed info as you can before storming off in what seems like an obvious direction.
-FL
when a person has several different email addresses, at several different domains, with real names, fantasy names, numbers and everything, along with a huge list of Mailinator addresses?
It means there is a lot more information to work with when doing a psyche profile on you. Unless you are gaming the system by deliberately creating misleading 'cigars' for a psychologist to trip over, then you are revealing your soul. Fantasy names? Sheesh! A person's fantasies tell you gobs of stuff about them.
There are limits, of course. A fantasy name on its own needs a reference point to be truly revealing. "Fuzzyfox123@dot.com" (for example) offers a fair bit of insight on its own, but if people know it's connected to you, then your whole life is pretty much an open page.
-FL
SickofBeing@hotmail.com
You don't like Hotmail. Therefore, you consider yourself knowledgeable about all things computer, probably to the point of arrogance, since you must look down upon all those who can't tell the difference between a web service you consider lousy and one which you consider decent. You have an awareness of privacy issues, suggesting intelligence above average which you stake rather a high degree of your personal sense of self-worth upon, suggesting you contain well-concealed (even from yourself most of the time) personal doubts about other aspects of your life. Your sense of humor is dry and your personality is such that you probably hide behind a rationalist behavior set to avoid the challenges brought by strong emotions. You're probably white with a middle-income background which allowed you to own the expensive computer gear with which you were able to evolve your knowledge base, and (this is going out on a limb) you believe in gun ownership though you don't have one yourself, and you think Barak Obama is an ass, but you'll probably vote for him anyway.
How'd I do?
-FL