but before i cracked open my math110/105 Multivariable Calculus book here at the University of Regina i thought that it might be healthy to crack open a junior highschool math textbook to brush up skills that never really had a chance to fade away to begin with. that's right, i went right from highschool, taking at least one math course every semester since BIRTH[my parent's have been throwing numbers at me in one form or another, [now to think about it, if you include music, before birth woo jsbach/pinkfloyd/eltonjohn!] pretty much since i was created.]... and part of my major is mathematics [ComputerScience/Mathematics]. fair enough... also - i'm not exactly stupid here. sure i may not be the top of my class... the classic underacheiver, but it's not my intelligence, at least i think, which is the cause. so i take and i pull open this textbook of simple, simple math...
i first notice it's from awhile back. mabye the 70s, mabye the early 80s...old stuff. it starts out defining very specific terms, such as 'membership' and a 'set' [after a breif writeup of who, cantor right?], and then proceeds to what an axiom is, the axioms of transitvity, symmetry, etc...
before i actually read the text, i got ALL The questions wrong. every single one. i knew NONE of this. i suspected it's existance, but i had never been taught any of this stuff. i remember in elementary school being told not to do any more math because 'i was getting ahead of the class' and the teacher wanted me to stay with the class. given it was a french elementary school, who knows mabye that was relevant. anyway, while i do know[or at least believe i know, or know that i believe that i know...?] that i can count to 1000 or so in both french and english,...
WHY is it that i can't do these really simple bits of math, that i'm sure have been doable since the times of Daedalus...yet if i can't do it i'd be willing to bet good money that no one who's graduated my highschool within the past 5 or so years has. that's what, 6000 people? i guess i'm not talking for very many, but this is really significant. this means that many people have no idea what a number is. that many people have no idea why specific relations hold, and proofs weren't taken until grade 12 --- in a class most people didn't take, which means people CANT recreate mathematics if they had to for whatever reason. of course one could argue that if we weren't so restricted by the axioms we have that we'd still come up with a bunch of mathematics, albeit completely different from a set of newfangled axioms, and it may solve the same, or roughly more problems than our current one, but i'm still kinda skeptical of this whole process being productive - after all if this current system of mathematics is a bad thing wouldn't it be better to raise a person up in it so that they could find out in university that "there are no absolutes", "god is not a number", or whatever you want to negate? or mabye i'm completely and utterly wrong? but the whole matter scared the hell out of me, and this was before i got into descartes and his doubting the simplest of logical reasonings. but yes. in case you hadn't been paying attention, what i'm saying is the fundemental parts of math are no longer taught in either elementary or highschool [local saskatchewan, Canada]. of course, mabye if the highschool i went to didn't have this strange mentality of 'get overinvolved in every social club and athletic group and community group you can get invovled in so that not only do you not have time enough to have a social life so you can fuck and get into trouble, but you'll be so overtired, overworked, and burnt out by the end of the 4 years you'll be either hopelessly insane or wanting to commit suicide just to get some rest... but that's all just speculation, of course...
or mabye i just suck at math? that's always an option i suppose....or mabye there's another factor? mabye it's all my fault?
when you wrote that.....i thought of a bubble with a magnet ball inside it, and then have a massive mag...wait a minute this is a geek couple...if they have magnets in their hands they'll fux0r the next computer they touch! bad idea i suppose...AVOID MAGNETS!
are you sure? should i sell all my property, buy an assault rifle, to take up arms against my local government and it's censoring of %P [where %P is being censored locally? ]? or perhaps it's the mindset that allows for widespread agreement with the government [especially in a democracy such as Canada] when it censors? i mean, who would stay in power longer, a 'democratic' government with support of a public who supports censorship, or a 'democratic' government without? perhaps my problem [that the mindset/frame of reference/set of memes in the society which we are discoursing about is outdated, innefficient, pro-censorship, dogmatic, irrational, sadistic, and just plain evil?]
Theres an assembler with interger basic?! Please tell me how to start/utilize it...is it a keyword like INITIALIZE, LOAD, SAVE ? or am i thinking of DOS 3.1 ? shoot me a link!
on reflection, i think we may actually have a lot more common than i thought. that was an interesting reply.
in the meanwhile, i'll up your idea one - - as i don't have insurance, and i don't use banks. oh wait? how about i don't let them have any of my money and then proceed to give other people [who may or may not exist, here on slashdot...you all could be bots for all i care] ideas, in an attempt to incite some sort of riot mindset---i alone can't make even a dent on this world but a million pissed off ubergeeks would make at least a good sized smoking hole---. spread the bad vibes around like liquid mold! piss eachother off until no one know who they are any more! angst all over the forums until the walls bleed! mabye when everyone looses their rationality and cool the world, the half abortion it is, will finally choke. burn it! burn it all! anihliate it! it doesn't deserve to stand here. the chance was given, and it was abused. so be it.
the great inoshiro? I remember you. i should feel humbled, or something...
in the meanwhile, I would consider it unethical, if anyone would be given a chance to, to *not* rip off an insurance broker, bank, "security" firm, or other institution.
These companies make money off of peoples paranoia - the more fear, and uncertainty they can cram into the popular mindset, the more money they will create. This fosters an environment where lies, and dark dealings are not only successful, but encouraged... the only time my family's vehicle has ever been broken into that I can remember was a week after we turned down a call for auto insurance. Strange? The same people causing the events for insurance to be there could be selling insurance? Of course this may not apply here.
they rip off their customers. This is how they stay in business. This is how all companies stay in business. If you are not ripping your customers off, you are not in business. Ripping these people off is like stealing from the rich -and keeping for the poor - because they serve no real purpose other than to drain wealth from a large group of people. Why should people have premiums to start with? Because the people in charge of such firms have to make money!~ and I think this is the sick part - their making money is some how more important than our[the customer] wellbeing and as such we'll get the raw end of the deal, whatever and whenever any deal is struck.
I offer a completely different solution to your problem. Look at the system as a whole, notice the greed, thoughtlessness, and anti-community ideas it festers, and destroy it by any and all means, including but not limited to insurance fraud.
these people are the same people who we could be better off without. GO OUT! get drunk! have fun with your life! waste your time! keep chatting on slashdot! keep ircing and icqing your life away! oh you victims you people without willpower, you weaklings! we are ready to live without you, and we are no longer waiting for you to keep up with us. Enjoy the last moments of your life because otherwise you'll bring us all down. we do not need and should not help these people. modern medicine and hospitals are useful for the strong - they can make use of technology to heal people who want to be healed - but those who want just to be sick throughout their days, and waste their time gambling, looking at pornograpy, shooting up, or drinking - these people don't want to be helped, if they wanted to stop whatever it is that they are doing, they would stop. cold turkey. but obviously they don't truly want to stop. so instead of willpower they manifest themselves in decedance? LET THEM DECAY! spare not your time worrying about them. make yourself strong. you are better off without their influence.
music is the only thing that keeps me on this god damned rock any more...sure i COULD be throwing caution to the wind running through the cold winter night so that i can become more physically fit so that i can singlehandedly win the war against the Americans, and then swim all the way across back the ocean so that i can bring strange european flowers back to my exigirlfreind who would then promptly have her life made better by me being in it again after saving the world ---- but unfortunately after a full day of study, philosophy class and fixing my Windows 3.1 box, i'm beat. i'm just out of inspiration. there's no real reason why i should continue any more, after all...
Why am i in university? i thought i was going to be enlightened - only i didn't realize that this it's a cold barren journey across places i'd never travel across - a mind numbing process, the acedemics have for ages been known for their ability to systematically remove anything of talent from their ranks - i work for The Man, i don't do anything all day but study...but turning the music volume up to 8 on my new Tool-AENEMA CD makes at least this day Livable. Sure, i waste some time at slashdot which i could be doing otherwise...but after a day of philosophy i find it hard to resist challanging other's opinions on matters which have nothing to do with anything...and to otherwise take up the ranks of conversation in hope that i may say something meaningful to someone else, and accomplish my goals of philosophy in some way other than reading some essay by Moore or Chrisholm or other...
i'll tell you why i'm wasting my time. i'm pacing myself. I've burned out far too many times to count, and i know right well that if you extend yourself too far you will not only do nothing productive - but you will also snap in your mindset. Jello Biafra outlined the process pretty well in his Saskatoon, Saskatchewan apperance in think in january 2002. once you burn yourself out you become one of those cold bitter people who is EXACTLY WHAT YOU WERE TRYING TO FIGHT TO BEGIN WITH. it's dialectic, and observable throughout the ages. there's no real reason why i can fight thousands of years of human history - i know my limits. i do what i can, and fight where i may. let god sort em out. i've had enough of this life thing, anyway.
so all you people out there - take my advice...you don't have to be a hardcore vegan uberactivist direct action hero. do what you can, and pace yourself. people have been fighting 'the good fight' for years, and little progress has been made. treat yourself to a good album every now and then. i'd reccomend Pink Floyd, Dark Side of the Moon for a good start. [i'd highly suggest not getting stoned, but 'whatever get's you through the night'.]
I'm not sure about you but I've never tried to cross a large area of tundra region by foot. I can assure you however that it's not quite as simple as you make it out to be. These peoples have crossed mountainous terrain and frozen wasteland alike in order to have discovered and colonized the known world here. One of the things that was made very clear to us in high school which I should have taken far more seriously is the knowledge that the land is always more powerful than you are. Don't try to master nature - it will master you. Perhaps that's just here in Canada, though, where I won't walk home outside for fear of freezing to death. But seriously, there is much to the environment and discovering most of this land than just simply 'walking across'...
what's worse? copying information that may or may not contain an encrypted file that can be decrypted through hardware/software to listen to music, enriching your life while making no one's life any worse OR paying money to a system that systematically rapes artists of their life works, not to mention leaves them at the side of a highway later on with nothing to keep them alive? where are all your one hit wonders? gone! i consider it a sin to give the RIAA Any money whatsoever. if you have to do it, you have to do it...but it doesn't make you a good person if you do it and it DEFINITELY does not make you a bad person if you don't. STOP STEALING MUSIC FROM ARTISTS -- USE GNUTELLA AND KEEP MUSIC FREE. this THE only ethical choice.
"and a fair renumeration to the artists involved. " as an artist i'm frankly offended. why should anyone pay an artist for anything? the entire point of being an artist is to create art!! to make the world a better more beautiful place!! the entire point of an artist is _not_ to make money. if you want to make money, go take up prostitution because what we do not need in this world is yet another -i-wanna-be-a-rock-and-roll-star-so-i-can-rip-off- millions-of-teenage-girls-parents-and-get-rich. I'm sick of this kind of thinking, and these kind of artists. sure, once in awhile one of these corporate rock stars ends up being a real talent, but the fact is that the *AA has vested interests in keeping the good music to themselves, and giving us the music 'that sells. the whole concept of having money in any way related to music is corrupt, and napster/gnutella helped to begin to rid the world of its influence by creating a society of people who can trade music for free. oh wait! now we can have a world where you don't have to pay for music any more, and that as an artist you can have exposure to BILLIONS of potential fans. i don't know or care about you but if i had a billion people in the world who had heard and had their life improved by hearing one of my songs, i would die a happy man...even if i hadn't made a single cent.
take for example, DJ Schnits-'i am not canadian.mp3'...taken as a satyr of some sorts of the Molson Canadian 'I AM Canadian' rant---i found people in places from Singapore to the UK who had all heard and were amused by his mp3. and i don't think he ever made any money off of that...THIS is what artists should be striving for, if anything. not money.
"Humans are genetically predisposed to religion, to believing in a
supernatual creator who loves us or hates us. "
The religions are Wired so that they catch on, like a bad joke or a good virus. I would never have beleived in a supernatural creator had i never been introduced to it in movies, books, by my parents, and i definitely would never have thought such a being cared about us, let alone loved us or hated us if it weren't for the abovementioned. The idea itself has a quality that it propegates itself very easy. Sure, there may have been a person in the past who was hardwired to think of a god, but i am not nor ever was one of those people...
there is no such thing as a foxhole in an atheist.
humans ARE hardwired to desire things, and after countless exposures to things like 'being loved' 'being hated' 'hating others', and other things in the world there may be rationality in accepting the idea of god into our minds, according to what we allready know about the outside world. Why is it that there is sunday school, where kids too young to even understand the implications of any of what they are mindlessly repeating told to mindlessly repeat things and read stories if this is not the case? it's to infect the young with the idea. same goes with all "childrens books"[that isn't cartoon/drug based], etc etc...
"Don't let your kids have their own PC until they can buy one on their
own."
computers are cheap if you aren't so elitist-if you pointed your nose just a little below the horizon you'd see you can get most 386's for free and computers less than that for free. cheap 486's can range below 100$[canadian] to near 25$[canadian] for used...I think i had 5 computers running at one time not to long ago, and i paid 20$[canadian] for the whole hardware setup [mostly, one 3com ISA NIC card].
A more reasonable alternative may be 'when they are old enough to know how to configure their computer to attatch to the family hub/router/network/Modem, then they may view whatever they please. That would have stopped me -- most of the time that i lived at home my computer was about to be connected 'Real Soon' -- but due to problems with the process i was having trouble.
Besides that, if they fuck up a free computer with virii [not mind you that most computer virii work on anything less than windows 95 anyway...i can't speak for low levels of Linux...]...
hell, if they are smart enough to get that far, chances are they are smart enough to bypass whatever else you can throw at them [honestly]...and this is supposing there is content you wouldn't trust them with in the first place...
as for myself, i showed my dad the Usenet [he didn't realized it existed...] IMAGINE THE PORN i pointed out...! i shared:P. and what are we trying to censor, anyway, and why? are we trying to protect them from strangers? teach them to be strong. teach them how to use a weapon [firearm and or pointed edge]. my parents threw me in martial arts lessons at a young age...if i were to come across my '10 years younger' self i wouldn't mess with him even if i had a knife on me. there are scary people in the Real World - deal with it.
i'll never pay for it, but i'd like to see a few schmucks with stolen credi...i mean their honest hard earned cash in the form of cheques pay for a service where they see the news 30 minutes before everyone else and if it get's rid of the dupes---score!
someone else here entertained an interesting buisiness idea which i hope someone persues[setting up a 'emergency bandwidth' mirror for sites about to get slashdotted for cash]...
and so long as it doesn't change anything for me i don't mind it. i'll start complaining when they take away things they've given the free-slashdot-luser and giving them to only the paying ones...
don't get me wrong, i don't want to sound like one of those false altruist losers who claims
'i am poorer than you so everyone else and you should be as poor as me' but your post made me quirk up for some odd reason. you've been down roads that i'm just starting on and know what your talking about. chastize me if i overstep my youthful zeal, as you deserve my respect - if anything
some points:
i'm not sure what you mean by 'handouts' or 'contacts'.
university students here are not eligable for welfare [!].
also keep in mind that you [the specific, elemental you.] may just be talented or lucky. it may not be the case, but it also may. i made it out of my old hometown because i knew that no one who lived there was going anywhere fast.~.being successful in making out of there alive makes me think that i can make it to somewhere nice - and this place isn't all that bad. of course all this was before i realized that there may be no place for me in this world [or any other]...but that's a different thread...
"is a question of are you willing"
willing to sacrifice everything, personal posessions, moral highground and anything else i may have ever had possession of? sure.
but mabye if the question were a little different i'd have a different awnser---
is a question of are you willing to propegate the system that put you here to begin with.
no i'm not willing to do that. I can barely look at myself in the mirror now, lying and stealing and ripping off people for a living [a la selling pizza at extrodinarily high prices so that my employer will have enough money to justify paying me]...
"do not lend your voice to that which you wish to be free from"-Jewel
i do agree that everyone has a choice...i'd dissagree that this means anything.
idea #1 -- why not distributed thinking ? sure i don't think i'ts ever been done before, but just mabye --- if a large enough pool of shared-minds were together, they could accomplish things that us think-for-yourself people coudln't even dream of. that of course is fantasy and'l never happen, of course
idea #2 -- i'm not sure about you, but thanks to my introduction to computers at an early age, i'm a little better off intellectually, i think. I would have been a lot more, i think, had my parents not been paranoid that i'd break something and never let me save anything [even saved games:( ] to disk, or make any changes on the old Amiga2000.
but being a Computer Science major i had to start somewhere. but still i don't think your problem is with computers/personal computers in general as much as it is with *modern* computers/personal computers. why not give the little ones an 8 bit system? with a command line? where you could browse through the source if something goes wrong to correct it? i'm not saying the BASIC of the Apple//e and Commadore64 were great, but im sure someone could come up with some descent ideas in regards to making a cheap premodern system to make youngins use and hone their problem solving skillz and mabye end up letting them hack, just a little bit...
of course, neither of the groups you mentioned were the first to 'discover' the continent we call america. the "natives" have been here for what, thousands of years? and furthermore they have colonized most of the massive continent quite fruitfully and almost peacefully in some places.
if your analogy holds, perhaps we will find the grey aliens on the moon coexisting with eachother, waiting for some dominant english/norwegian/columbus/spaniard folk to genocide them...
i hope there are more people out there like you. It's amazing how hard it is to try to convince others what you are saying - they have been in the path of the market cannon's for too long and it only makes sense to them that the only way to get a machine to run twice as fast is to buy twice as fast hardware [nevermind that the current hardware is running a bloated-OS, running bloated-gui-programs, often with spyware/adware/virusware/JUNK/running in the background.]
i make a point not to make freinds with people for reasons of personal gain. i mean at all. If i find someone who is even talking to me at any point because they think that they can make money off of me, as the sole reason for talking to me, then i begin to lose interest.
The entire idea reeks to me --- and i thought *i* had trouble looking in the mirror every morning --- how is it that you can handle talking to people who very well you know that are only talking to you because they think that you can get them rich/laid/a better job? When i talk to anyone, i talk to them as a peer[or possibly a supperior or underling]--but never as someone to take advantage of. mabye that's my biggest flaw- i don't know.
Sure if i had a freind, who was qualified, and needing a job, and a job to fill[pfft like that'l ever happen], i would match the two. but i would sure as hell never talk to that person again, freind or not, if they were just talking to me to get the job/girl/money/etc. this is how other people may use other people and abuse other people's trust, but not with me. i don't put up with that cr4p.
So networking gets you a job [as in, it is pragmatic] - so what? - this 'networking' is demeaning to civilized social discourse - which is much more important in any stretchoftheimagination than your own well being --- where is the trust? where is the love in your fellow man? where is that feeling that you aren't there just because you are about to be exploited by someone bigger than you? all of this is so horribly wrong. without the basic levels of serenity and peace of mind that even
that level of trust can bring, you will always be afraid - and paranoid, and you should always be afraid, and paranoid-because this sort of behavior , if spread throughout enough, will cause an impact on and against you.
what a shame, that people who consider networking as a serious thing exist in the first place i did a really poor job of showing how evil networking truly is, but i hope you readers who are there who still care got the message anyhow.
i'm going to crawl back into my shell now.
there are many many people who would love the hardware you use right now. Mabye it won't be state of the art any more...who cares? imagine all the stuff that you are using it for - - at last us below-the-poverty-line may be able to do those things too...
I'm pretty damn happy using djgpp, IE 3.0, 1-2-3, and a whole whack of programs instead of having to use DOSSHELL, EDIT, and and the like...
don't just toss your old computer parts, if there is anything to salvage, salvage it and give it to groups such as SasktelPioneers, or whoever it is that locally distributes computers to those who can't get them when they are straight out of the box...
just as people 10 years from now will be tossing computers that can't do real-time, surrealistic fractal VR... there is no excuse to throw any computer out, unless there is something seriously wrong with it. stupidity is not an excuse, either.
"only then will I retire as a musician." That's noble. I'll one up you, however ---
Once they have attained that level of genius in pattern recognition, i'll try my hardest to make a level of greatness in music above what they are capable of. Even if i do not have the "genius" required, i'll still make a go of it. And i'd hope that musicians such as you, and everyone else out there would join me in this effort. hell we could get the pattern recognition to help us in some way shape or form! but honestly, just because we got stairway to heaven, does not mean that all guitar players should have given up learning to play the guitar, becuase there allready existed a "near perfect" song, and therefor no need to persue music much more forward than that. so what if the next epoch of music is going to be started by a computer? it's just the next one. there will be one after that. right?
it's just another step going somewhere - i would not suspect them of showcasing this as if it were an accomplishment in itself, there is obviously something else coming. Perhaps the next wave of pattern recognition is going to put bands, such as metallica, into permenant retirement, as it will not be that unfeasible to have a computer make its' own hit-pop songs, which due to the fact which you so kindly pointed out that the RIAA makes songs popular themselves, that the RIAA won't even need to screw over musicians any more to reap insane profits. If this is the case, i'm all for it, as i don't like seeing musicians [other than metallica] get the rotten end of the deal, especially a deal that some people are born into [listening and idolizing music throughout their upbringing, only to be owned by universal via mp3.com, etc]
but seriously, why not? these are some of the wealthiest people around, and they have serious problems with existing technology. Imagine a watermark that was composed into the song. would p2p networks be capable of throwing this off? perhaps. But it doesn't matter which way you throw it, such a conception is going to give them even more control over the music we listen to, not that they are wanting in much in the first place there. I was watching i think it was 'spy kids 2'[don't ask] and there was a few sequences of 'high tech' going all wrong...and i'm thinking this is brewing an ideaology in our young citizens who are watching this and then the next day i saw my first christina augularea(sp?) video. woa softporn. not that i'm totally against that or anything, but this is serious power they are weilding here. where was i. oh yes. the next step...where else could they go? i'm imagining that this is going to be a further tool used to promote not only new artists,
but old ones as well in a way. after all, "hey! 'the green backs' sounds kinda like pearl jam!" sells pearl jam records, doesn't it?
so what is the meaning? i just skimmed through this thing andi'm not paying attention to a word your saying musicgod, what the hell are you saying anyway?
well you have three options
This is not the last we are going to hear of this technology, or at least it's going to lead into something more...
if you enjoy music, and are strong enough...boycott the riaa. it can take some effort, especially if you really love music and live in a backwards world where there are no independant outlets...but fight them... they will destroy your music, if you do not. [unless your also a musician, then post underneath this post so i and whoever else can see you crazy cubic zirconiums!]
musicgod needs some female companionship. apply here then he'll be quiet more.
green backs used to be here. not sure if they are still there any more.
i saw uhf for the first time in my life just recently. i would highly reccomend it to anyone who is skeptical... being a janitor type mabye i just feel more represented, or something~
of course, i've only got the first track done, and the next two recorded, so i figure it can't run any more than
750$, plus around 1$ per disc sold. mabye the rest of you musicians find things work differently, i'm not sure. all one really needs is a descent computer[descent>=400Mhz era with ok sound card][what,1000$?], microphones[30-120$], instruments[which the musicians should have], musicians[musicans will and should do anything for free. or mabye food.]...other stuff[electronic toys *cough theramin*] would probably help but they are not necessary. i'm sure musicians in the 1800s didn't need a brand new style of electronic feedback noise or custom created sound waves...and i don't remember them complaining about it.... of course if you have nowhere to record you'll likely have to go to a studio. especially for vocals[i still have yet to get a _descent_ vocal recording done, but i havn't tried that hard...].
either way, if this could be done using home video cameras, and home [macintosh] computers with a budget of practically nil[although, i'm sure they could have if they had wanted to] for the project [to my knowledge, of course]... - you can get studio quality sound on your own. if all else fails,..what really is keeping you from making your own microphones? tape recorders? tin foil or otherwise phonograph presses?
be proud of your work, if nothing else, musicians...if you have been just in your attempt, you have made the world a better place. almost forgot - distribution? put it on an ftp server. if your good, someone will mirror you. don't even touch mp3.com, they are owned by those who would seek to make you a weak, thin and broken hopeless, after they steal your work, and make you pay them for screwing you over. keep music free.
i, myself, i've only bought one cd from a *aa based system since napster. no let me rephrase this. since naspster *CAME DOWN*. i bought well over 10 CDs(not much for someone making less than minnimum wage, i might add), while i was on napster. the only CD i made an excuse for was still(possibly one of the best cds in my collection...i'd reccomend this to even the most antiriaa pf people)... but yea. kudos to you people who could start sometihng like this, but i'm hoping that the *more* significant portion are those who *don't buy CDs AT ALL* - the riaa can burn in it's own profitless spiral into the void. Burn anything you can burn off of Gnutella(or whatever your source is)...and then find local talent to fill the rest of your music needs. but i guess not everyone can do this - good luck to those who start this day event then!
Slashdot Mirror
but before i cracked open my math110/105 Multivariable Calculus book here at the University of Regina i thought that it might be healthy to crack open a junior highschool math textbook to brush up skills that never really had a chance to fade away to begin with. that's right, i went right from highschool, taking at least one math course every semester since BIRTH[my parent's have been throwing numbers at me in one form or another, [now to think about it, if you include music, before birth woo jsbach/pinkfloyd/eltonjohn!] pretty much since i was created.]... and part of my major is mathematics [ComputerScience/Mathematics]. fair enough... also - i'm not exactly stupid here. sure i may not be the top of my class... the classic underacheiver, but it's not my intelligence, at least i think, which is the cause. so i take and i pull open this textbook of simple, simple math...
...
i first notice it's from awhile back. mabye the 70s, mabye the early 80s...old stuff. it starts out defining very specific terms, such as 'membership' and a 'set' [after a breif writeup of who, cantor right?], and then proceeds to what an axiom is, the axioms of transitvity, symmetry, etc...
before i actually read the text, i got ALL The questions wrong. every single one. i knew NONE of this. i suspected it's existance, but i had never been taught any of this stuff. i remember in elementary school being told not to do any more math because 'i was getting ahead of the class' and the teacher wanted me to stay with the class. given it was a french elementary school, who knows mabye that was relevant. anyway, while i do know[or at least believe i know, or know that i believe that i know...?] that i can count to 1000 or so in both french and english,
WHY is it that i can't do these really simple bits of math, that i'm sure have been doable since the times of Daedalus...yet if i can't do it i'd be willing to bet good money that no one who's graduated my highschool within the past 5 or so years has. that's what, 6000 people? i guess i'm not talking for very many, but this is really significant. this means that many people have no idea what a number is. that many people have no idea why specific relations hold, and proofs weren't taken until grade 12 --- in a class most people didn't take, which means people CANT recreate mathematics if they had to for whatever reason. of course one could argue that if we weren't so restricted by the axioms we have that we'd still come up with a bunch of mathematics, albeit completely different from a set of newfangled axioms, and it may solve the same, or roughly more problems than our current one, but i'm still kinda skeptical of this whole process being productive - after all if this current system of mathematics is a bad thing wouldn't it be better to raise a person up in it so that they could find out in university that "there are no absolutes", "god is not a number", or whatever you want to negate? or mabye i'm completely and utterly wrong? but the whole matter scared the hell out of me, and this was before i got into descartes and his doubting the simplest of logical reasonings. but yes. in case you hadn't been paying attention, what i'm saying is the fundemental parts of math are no longer taught in either elementary or highschool [local saskatchewan, Canada]. of course, mabye if the highschool i went to didn't have this strange mentality of 'get overinvolved in every social club and athletic group and community group you can get invovled in so that not only do you not have time enough to have a social life so you can fuck and get into trouble, but you'll be so overtired, overworked, and burnt out by the end of the 4 years you'll be either hopelessly insane or wanting to commit suicide just to get some rest... but that's all just speculation, of course...
or mabye i just suck at math? that's always an option i suppose....or mabye there's another factor? mabye it's all my fault?
when you wrote that.....i thought of a bubble with a magnet ball inside it, and then have a massive mag...wait a minute this is a geek couple...if they have magnets in their hands they'll fux0r the next computer they touch! bad idea i suppose...AVOID MAGNETS!
are you sure? should i sell all my property, buy an assault rifle, to take up arms against my local government and it's censoring of %P [where %P is being censored locally? ]? or perhaps it's the mindset that allows for widespread agreement with the government [especially in a democracy such as Canada] when it censors? i mean, who would stay in power longer, a 'democratic' government with support of a public who supports censorship, or a 'democratic' government without? perhaps my problem [that the mindset/frame of reference/set of memes in the society which we are discoursing about is outdated, innefficient, pro-censorship, dogmatic, irrational, sadistic, and just plain evil?]
Theres an assembler with interger basic?! Please tell me how to start/utilize it...is it a keyword like INITIALIZE, LOAD, SAVE ? or am i thinking of DOS 3.1 ? shoot me a link!
on reflection, i think we may actually have a lot more common than i thought. that was an interesting reply.
in the meanwhile, i'll up your idea one - - as i don't have insurance, and i don't use banks. oh wait? how about i don't let them have any of my money and then proceed to give other people [who may or may not exist, here on slashdot...you all could be bots for all i care] ideas, in an attempt to incite some sort of riot mindset---i alone can't make even a dent on this world but a million pissed off ubergeeks would make at least a good sized smoking hole---. spread the bad vibes around like liquid mold! piss eachother off until no one know who they are any more! angst all over the forums until the walls bleed! mabye when everyone looses their rationality and cool the world, the half abortion it is, will finally choke. burn it! burn it all! anihliate it! it doesn't deserve to stand here. the chance was given, and it was abused. so be it.
in the meanwhile, I would consider it unethical, if anyone would be given a chance to, to *not* rip off an insurance broker, bank, "security" firm, or other institution.
- These companies make money off of peoples paranoia - the more fear, and uncertainty they can cram into the popular mindset, the more money they will create. This fosters an environment where lies, and dark dealings are not only successful, but encouraged... the only time my family's vehicle has ever been broken into that I can remember was a week after we turned down a call for auto insurance. Strange? The same people causing the events for insurance to be there could be selling insurance? Of course this may not apply here.
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they rip off their customers. This is how they stay in business. This is how all companies stay in business. If you are not ripping your customers off, you are not in business. Ripping these people off is like stealing from the rich -and keeping for the poor - because they serve no real purpose other than to drain wealth from a large group of people. Why should people have premiums to start with? Because the people in charge of such firms have to make money!~ and I think this is the sick part - their making money is some how more important than our[the customer] wellbeing and as such we'll get the raw end of the deal, whatever and whenever any deal is struck.
I offer a completely different solution to your problem. Look at the system as a whole, notice the greed, thoughtlessness, and anti-community ideas it festers, and destroy it by any and all means, including but not limited to insurance fraud.these people are the same people who we could be better off without. GO OUT! get drunk! have fun with your life! waste your time! keep chatting on slashdot! keep ircing and icqing your life away! oh you victims you people without willpower, you weaklings! we are ready to live without you, and we are no longer waiting for you to keep up with us. Enjoy the last moments of your life because otherwise you'll bring us all down. we do not need and should not help these people. modern medicine and hospitals are useful for the strong - they can make use of technology to heal people who want to be healed - but those who want just to be sick throughout their days, and waste their time gambling, looking at pornograpy, shooting up, or drinking - these people don't want to be helped, if they wanted to stop whatever it is that they are doing, they would stop. cold turkey. but obviously they don't truly want to stop. so instead of willpower they manifest themselves in decedance? LET THEM DECAY! spare not your time worrying about them. make yourself strong. you are better off without their influence.
music is the only thing that keeps me on this god damned rock any more...sure i COULD be throwing caution to the wind running through the cold winter night so that i can become more physically fit so that i can singlehandedly win the war against the Americans, and then swim all the way across back the ocean so that i can bring strange european flowers back to my exigirlfreind who would then promptly have her life made better by me being in it again after saving the world ---- but unfortunately after a full day of study, philosophy class and fixing my Windows 3.1 box, i'm beat. i'm just out of inspiration. there's no real reason why i should continue any more, after all...
Why am i in university? i thought i was going to be enlightened - only i didn't realize that this it's a cold barren journey across places i'd never travel across - a mind numbing process, the acedemics have for ages been known for their ability to systematically remove anything of talent from their ranks - i work for The Man, i don't do anything all day but study...but turning the music volume up to 8 on my new Tool-AENEMA CD makes at least this day Livable. Sure, i waste some time at slashdot which i could be doing otherwise...but after a day of philosophy i find it hard to resist challanging other's opinions on matters which have nothing to do with anything...and to otherwise take up the ranks of conversation in hope that i may say something meaningful to someone else, and accomplish my goals of philosophy in some way other than reading some essay by Moore or Chrisholm or other...
i'll tell you why i'm wasting my time. i'm pacing myself. I've burned out far too many times to count, and i know right well that if you extend yourself too far you will not only do nothing productive - but you will also snap in your mindset. Jello Biafra outlined the process pretty well in his Saskatoon, Saskatchewan apperance in think in january 2002. once you burn yourself out you become one of those cold bitter people who is EXACTLY WHAT YOU WERE TRYING TO FIGHT TO BEGIN WITH. it's dialectic, and observable throughout the ages. there's no real reason why i can fight thousands of years of human history - i know my limits. i do what i can, and fight where i may. let god sort em out. i've had enough of this life thing, anyway.
so all you people out there - take my advice...you don't have to be a hardcore vegan uberactivist direct action hero. do what you can, and pace yourself. people have been fighting 'the good fight' for years, and little progress has been made. treat yourself to a good album every now and then. i'd reccomend Pink Floyd, Dark Side of the Moon for a good start. [i'd highly suggest not getting stoned, but 'whatever get's you through the night'.]
I'm not sure about you but I've never tried to cross a large area of tundra region by foot. I can assure you however that it's not quite as simple as you make it out to be. These peoples have crossed mountainous terrain and frozen wasteland alike in order to have discovered and colonized the known world here. One of the things that was made very clear to us in high school which I should have taken far more seriously is the knowledge that the land is always more powerful than you are. Don't try to master nature - it will master you. Perhaps that's just here in Canada, though, where I won't walk home outside for fear of freezing to death. But seriously, there is much to the environment and discovering most of this land than just simply 'walking across'...
what's worse? copying information that may or may not contain an encrypted file that can be decrypted through hardware/software to listen to music, enriching your life while making no one's life any worse OR paying money to a system that systematically rapes artists of their life works, not to mention leaves them at the side of a highway later on with nothing to keep them alive? where are all your one hit wonders? gone! i consider it a sin to give the RIAA Any money whatsoever. if you have to do it, you have to do it...but it doesn't make you a good person if you do it and it DEFINITELY does not make you a bad person if you don't. STOP STEALING MUSIC FROM ARTISTS -- USE GNUTELLA AND KEEP MUSIC FREE. this THE only ethical choice.
"and a fair renumeration to the artists involved. "- millions-of-teenage-girls-parents-and-get-rich. I'm sick of this kind of thinking, and these kind of artists. sure, once in awhile one of these corporate rock stars ends up being a real talent, but the fact is that the *AA has vested interests in keeping the good music to themselves, and giving us the music 'that sells. the whole concept of having money in any way related to music is corrupt, and napster/gnutella helped to begin to rid the world of its influence by creating a society of people who can trade music for free. oh wait! now we can have a world where you don't have to pay for music any more, and that as an artist you can have exposure to BILLIONS of potential fans. i don't know or care about you but if i had a billion people in the world who had heard and had their life improved by hearing one of my songs, i would die a happy man...even if i hadn't made a single cent.
as an artist i'm frankly offended. why should anyone pay an artist for anything? the entire point of being an artist is to create art!! to make the world a better more beautiful place!! the entire point of an artist is _not_ to make money. if you want to make money, go take up prostitution because what we do not need in this world is yet another -i-wanna-be-a-rock-and-roll-star-so-i-can-rip-off
take for example, DJ Schnits-'i am not canadian.mp3'...taken as a satyr of some sorts of the Molson Canadian 'I AM Canadian' rant---i found people in places from Singapore to the UK who had all heard and were amused by his mp3. and i don't think he ever made any money off of that...THIS is what artists should be striving for, if anything. not money.
"Humans are genetically predisposed to religion, to believing in a supernatual creator who loves us or hates us. "
The religions are Wired so that they catch on, like a bad joke or a good virus. I would never have beleived in a supernatural creator had i never been introduced to it in movies, books, by my parents, and i definitely would never have thought such a being cared about us, let alone loved us or hated us if it weren't for the abovementioned. The idea itself has a quality that it propegates itself very easy. Sure, there may have been a person in the past who was hardwired to think of a god, but i am not nor ever was one of those people... there is no such thing as a foxhole in an atheist.
humans ARE hardwired to desire things, and after countless exposures to things like 'being loved' 'being hated' 'hating others', and other things in the world there may be rationality in accepting the idea of god into our minds, according to what we allready know about the outside world. Why is it that there is sunday school, where kids too young to even understand the implications of any of what they are mindlessly repeating told to mindlessly repeat things and read stories if this is not the case? it's to infect the young with the idea. same goes with all "childrens books"[that isn't cartoon/drug based], etc etc...
"Don't let your kids have their own PC until they can buy one on their own."
:P. and what are we trying to censor, anyway, and why? are we trying to protect them from strangers? teach them to be strong. teach them how to use a weapon [firearm and or pointed edge]. my parents threw me in martial arts lessons at a young age...if i were to come across my '10 years younger' self i wouldn't mess with him even if i had a knife on me. there are scary people in the Real World - deal with it.
computers are cheap if you aren't so elitist-if you pointed your nose just a little below the horizon you'd see you can get most 386's for free and computers less than that for free. cheap 486's can range below 100$[canadian] to near 25$[canadian] for used...I think i had 5 computers running at one time not to long ago, and i paid 20$[canadian] for the whole hardware setup [mostly, one 3com ISA NIC card]. A more reasonable alternative may be 'when they are old enough to know how to configure their computer to attatch to the family hub/router/network/Modem, then they may view whatever they please. That would have stopped me -- most of the time that i lived at home my computer was about to be connected 'Real Soon' -- but due to problems with the process i was having trouble. Besides that, if they fuck up a free computer with virii [not mind you that most computer virii work on anything less than windows 95 anyway...i can't speak for low levels of Linux...]...
hell, if they are smart enough to get that far, chances are they are smart enough to bypass whatever else you can throw at them [honestly]...and this is supposing there is content you wouldn't trust them with in the first place...
as for myself, i showed my dad the Usenet [he didn't realized it existed...] IMAGINE THE PORN i pointed out...! i shared
i'll never pay for it, but i'd like to see a few schmucks with stolen credi...i mean their honest hard earned cash in the form of cheques pay for a service where they see the news 30 minutes before everyone else and if it get's rid of the dupes---score!
someone else here entertained an interesting buisiness idea which i hope someone persues[setting up a 'emergency bandwidth' mirror for sites about to get slashdotted for cash]...
and so long as it doesn't change anything for me i don't mind it. i'll start complaining when they take away things they've given the free-slashdot-luser and giving them to only the paying ones...
don't get me wrong, i don't want to sound like one of those false altruist losers who claims 'i am poorer than you so everyone else and you should be as poor as me' but your post made me quirk up for some odd reason. you've been down roads that i'm just starting on and know what your talking about. chastize me if i overstep my youthful zeal, as you deserve my respect - if anything
some points: i'm not sure what you mean by 'handouts' or 'contacts'.
university students here are not eligable for welfare [!].
also keep in mind that you [the specific, elemental you.] may just be talented or lucky. it may not be the case, but it also may. i made it out of my old hometown because i knew that no one who lived there was going anywhere fast.~.being successful in making out of there alive makes me think that i can make it to somewhere nice - and this place isn't all that bad. of course all this was before i realized that there may be no place for me in this world [or any other]...but that's a different thread...
"is a question of are you willing" willing to sacrifice everything, personal posessions, moral highground and anything else i may have ever had possession of? sure. but mabye if the question were a little different i'd have a different awnser--- is a question of are you willing to propegate the system that put you here to begin with. no i'm not willing to do that. I can barely look at myself in the mirror now, lying and stealing and ripping off people for a living [a la selling pizza at extrodinarily high prices so that my employer will have enough money to justify paying me]...
"do not lend your voice to that which you wish to be free from"-Jewel
i do agree that everyone has a choice...i'd dissagree that this means anything.
idea #1 -- why not distributed thinking ? sure i don't think i'ts ever been done before, but just mabye --- if a large enough pool of shared-minds were together, they could accomplish things that us think-for-yourself people coudln't even dream of. that of course is fantasy and'l never happen, of course
:( ] to disk, or make any changes on the old Amiga2000.
idea #2 -- i'm not sure about you, but thanks to my introduction to computers at an early age, i'm a little better off intellectually, i think. I would have been a lot more, i think, had my parents not been paranoid that i'd break something and never let me save anything [even saved games
but being a Computer Science major i had to start somewhere. but still i don't think your problem is with computers/personal computers in general as much as it is with *modern* computers/personal computers. why not give the little ones an 8 bit system? with a command line? where you could browse through the source if something goes wrong to correct it? i'm not saying the BASIC of the Apple//e and Commadore64 were great, but im sure someone could come up with some descent ideas in regards to making a cheap premodern system to make youngins use and hone their problem solving skillz and mabye end up letting them hack, just a little bit...
of course, neither of the groups you mentioned were the first to 'discover' the continent we call america. the "natives" have been here for what, thousands of years? and furthermore they have colonized most of the massive continent quite fruitfully and almost peacefully in some places.
if your analogy holds, perhaps we will find the grey aliens on the moon coexisting with eachother, waiting for some dominant english/norwegian/columbus/spaniard folk to genocide them...
i hope there are more people out there like you. It's amazing how hard it is to try to convince others what you are saying - they have been in the path of the market cannon's for too long and it only makes sense to them that the only way to get a machine to run twice as fast is to buy twice as fast hardware [nevermind that the current hardware is running a bloated-OS, running bloated-gui-programs, often with spyware/adware/virusware/JUNK/running in the background.]
i make a point not to make freinds with people for reasons of personal gain. i mean at all. If i find someone who is even talking to me at any point because they think that they can make money off of me, as the sole reason for talking to me, then i begin to lose interest.
The entire idea reeks to me --- and i thought *i* had trouble looking in the mirror every morning --- how is it that you can handle talking to people who very well you know that are only talking to you because they think that you can get them rich/laid/a better job? When i talk to anyone, i talk to them as a peer[or possibly a supperior or underling]--but never as someone to take advantage of. mabye that's my biggest flaw- i don't know. Sure if i had a freind, who was qualified, and needing a job, and a job to fill[pfft like that'l ever happen], i would match the two. but i would sure as hell never talk to that person again, freind or not, if they were just talking to me to get the job/girl/money/etc. this is how other people may use other people and abuse other people's trust, but not with me. i don't put up with that cr4p.
So networking gets you a job [as in, it is pragmatic] - so what? - this 'networking' is demeaning to civilized social discourse - which is much more important in any stretchoftheimagination than your own well being --- where is the trust? where is the love in your fellow man? where is that feeling that you aren't there just because you are about to be exploited by someone bigger than you? all of this is so horribly wrong. without the basic levels of serenity and peace of mind that even that level of trust can bring, you will always be afraid - and paranoid, and you should always be afraid, and paranoid-because this sort of behavior , if spread throughout enough, will cause an impact on and against you.
what a shame, that people who consider networking as a serious thing exist in the first place
i did a really poor job of showing how evil networking truly is, but i hope you readers who are there who still care got the message anyhow. i'm going to crawl back into my shell now.
there are many many people who would love the hardware you use right now. Mabye it won't be state of the art any more...who cares? imagine all the stuff that you are using it for - - at last us below-the-poverty-line may be able to do those things too... I'm pretty damn happy using djgpp, IE 3.0, 1-2-3, and a whole whack of programs instead of having to use DOSSHELL, EDIT, and and the like... don't just toss your old computer parts, if there is anything to salvage, salvage it and give it to groups such as Sasktel Pioneers, or whoever it is that locally distributes computers to those who can't get them when they are straight out of the box... just as people 10 years from now will be tossing computers that can't do real-time, surrealistic fractal VR ... there is no excuse to throw any computer out, unless there is something seriously wrong with it. stupidity is not an excuse, either.
hell SETI needs processing power, even...
"only then will I retire as a musician." That's noble. I'll one up you, however --- Once they have attained that level of genius in pattern recognition, i'll try my hardest to make a level of greatness in music above what they are capable of. Even if i do not have the "genius" required, i'll still make a go of it. And i'd hope that musicians such as you, and everyone else out there would join me in this effort. hell we could get the pattern recognition to help us in some way shape or form! but honestly, just because we got stairway to heaven, does not mean that all guitar players should have given up learning to play the guitar, becuase there allready existed a "near perfect" song, and therefor no need to persue music much more forward than that. so what if the next epoch of music is going to be started by a computer? it's just the next one. there will be one after that. right?
but seriously, why not? these are some of the wealthiest people around, and they have serious problems with existing technology. Imagine a watermark that was composed into the song. would p2p networks be capable of throwing this off? perhaps. But it doesn't matter which way you throw it, such a conception is going to give them even more control over the music we listen to, not that they are wanting in much in the first place there. I was watching i think it was 'spy kids 2'[don't ask] and there was a few sequences of 'high tech' going all wrong...and i'm thinking
this is brewing an ideaology in our young citizens who are watching this and then the next day i saw my first christina augularea(sp?) video. woa softporn. not that i'm totally against that or anything, but this is serious power they are weilding here. where was i. oh yes. the next step...where else could they go? i'm imagining that this is going to be a further tool used to promote not only new artists, but old ones as well in a way. after all, "hey! 'the green backs' sounds kinda like pearl jam!" sells pearl jam records, doesn't it?
so what is the meaning? i just skimmed through this thing andi'm not paying attention to a word your saying musicgod, what the hell are you saying anyway? well you have three options
-
This is not the last we are going to hear of this technology, or at least it's going to lead into something more...
- if you enjoy music, and are strong enough
...boycott the riaa. it can take some effort, especially if you really love music and live in a backwards world where there are no independant outlets...but fight them... they will destroy your music, if you do not. [unless your also a musician, then post underneath this post so i and whoever else can see you crazy cubic zirconiums!]
- musicgod needs some female companionship. apply here then he'll be quiet more.
green backs used to be here. not sure if they are still there any more.i saw uhf for the first time in my life just recently. i would highly reccomend it to anyone who is skeptical... being a janitor type mabye i just feel more represented, or something~
- a moderate quality microphone, 30$
- a t-connection 0$[gift certificate]
- everything else - everyone else's junk 0$
- 50 Cds-~50$
of course, i've only got the first track done, and the next two recorded, so i figure it can't run any more than 750$, plus around 1$ per disc sold. mabye the rest of you musicians find things work differently, i'm not sure. all one really needs is a descent computer[descent>=400Mhz era with ok sound card][what,1000$?], microphones[30-120$], instruments[which the musicians should have], musicians[musicans will and should do anything for free. or mabye food.]...other stuff[electronic toys *cough theramin*] would probably help but they are not necessary. i'm sure musicians in the 1800s didn't need a brand new style of electronic feedback noise or custom created sound waves...and i don't remember them complaining about it.either way, if this could be done using home video cameras, and home [macintosh] computers with a budget of practically nil[although, i'm sure they could have if they had wanted to] for the project [to my knowledge, of course]... - you can get studio quality sound on your own. if all else fails,..what really is keeping you from making your own microphones? tape recorders? tin foil or otherwise phonograph presses?
be proud of your work, if nothing else, musicians...if you have been just in your attempt, you have made the world a better place.
almost forgot - distribution? put it on an ftp server. if your good, someone will mirror you. don't even touch mp3.com, they are owned by those who would seek to make you a weak, thin and broken hopeless, after they steal your work, and make you pay them for screwing you over. keep music free.
i, myself, i've only bought one cd from a *aa based system since napster. no let me rephrase this. since naspster *CAME DOWN*. i bought well over 10 CDs(not much for someone making less than minnimum wage, i might add), while i was on napster. the only CD i made an excuse for was still(possibly one of the best cds in my collection...i'd reccomend this to even the most antiriaa pf people)... but yea. kudos to you people who could start sometihng like this, but i'm hoping that the *more* significant portion are those who *don't buy CDs AT ALL* - the riaa can burn in it's own profitless spiral into the void. Burn anything you can burn off of Gnutella(or whatever your source is)...and then find local talent to fill the rest of your music needs. but i guess not everyone can do this - good luck to those who start this day event then!