There was, perhaps inevitably, the notion, not the first or last time this will be suggested in coming weeks, that all of this poorly-articulated, diffuse and anarchic anger could only have come from the Internet.
"The confusion about the protestors' political goals is understandable," wrote a New York Times columnist Thursday, "this is the first movement born of the anarchic pathways of the Internet. There is no top-down hierarchy, no universally recognized leaders, and nobody knows what is going to happen next."
... Does this protest movement have its roots in the "anarchic pathways of the Internet?"
Sure.
"When your only tool is a computer, everything looks like the Net."
I'm sorry to disagree with the KatzBot on this one, but anti-corporatism has long and deep roots, and existed long before the Net did. In America, for example, the Green Party has consistently inveighed against corporations from its very arrival here in 1987. Several demonstrations from the '60's attacked corporatism; perhaps the most famous being Mario Savio's impassioned diatribe at the Sather Gate on the University of California's Berkeley campus during the Free Speech Movement of 1965. ("There comes a time... when you have to make clear that the Machine will be prevented from working at all..."). While the Net undoubtably played a role in organizing the upcoming protests (I was hearing about them quite consistently for a couple of months before they happened), it is not the *cause* of the protests, but merely its conduit.
Called-in from a pay phone outside Seattle. Wed., 7:30 pm Pacific time.
(Posted at www.emperors-clothes.com 12-2-99. Feel free to distribute in full including this note.)
I just spent 4 days in Seattle. The "information" people are getting from the mass media is false. This was not, as Pres. Clinton claims, a peaceful protest marred by the actions of violent protesters. This was a massive, strong but peaceful demonstration which was attacked repeatedly by the police with the express purpose of provoking a violent response to provide photo opportunities for the Western media. I know because I watched it happening. I'll tell you how they did it.
As Michel Chossudovsky says in his "Disarming the New World Order" (See Note # 1 at end for link to that article) - the government put a lot of effort into making sure the protesters in Seattle were a "loyal opposition" who wanted to reform the WTO, not get rid of it. But the people in Seattle - American steel workers, Canadian postal workers, college kids from all over, environmentalists from Australia - you name it - were not for reforming the WTO. They were for getting rid of it.
And this wasn't just true of the protesters. I interviewed delegates. None of them had anything favorable to say about the WTO. Two delegates from the Caribbean were angry about job loss. One delegate from Peru took a bullhorn and got up on a car and spoke to the protestors against the World Trade Organization. He said it hurts the workers and farmers. I interviewed a Norwegian guy from Greenpeace. Totally against it. Even a delegate from Holland said it had hurt the farmers there. He said though it is supposedly democratic, that's actually a lie: the US, England and Canada and a few others get together and decide what they want to do. Then they ask the rest of the countries to vote and if they vote wrong they threaten,"You won't get loans," or whatever. They get them to do what they want by blackmailing them. The Italians we interviewed were upset too. I couldn't find any delegates who were in favor.
So the government instigated a "riot" to discredit the movement against the WTO because they couldn't dilute it. I am not guessing about this. I was there. I saw it happening. And I will tell you I am frankly shocked to see, close up, just how little our leaders care what happens to ordinary people. Clinton can pose and speak a lot of flowery stuff but the truth is - we are nothing to them. I saw this with my own eyes.
Sunday and Monday, there was no violence. None. The people were aggressively non-violent; they were self-policing. Up until Tuesday at 4pm there was one window broken in the whole city - a McDonalds window. This compares favorably to the typical rock concert, let alone a demonstration of people who were non-violently barring entry to the World Trade Center!
At this point, a new group of police - tactical police - moved in and started gassing people and shooting rubber bullets. Is it any surprise that people got mad? Of course, the young kids hit back by breaking some windows in retaliation for being gassed, sprayed with very painful pepper gas, and shot with dangerous "rubber" bullets. The police instigated these kids, plain and simple.
Sunday and Monday they had young cops, using them to block the streets. These were trainees. But Tuesday they had the real cops; none of them were young. They were trained to attack people. A small group, maybe 100 people total, struck back. Then these cops herded that group around the city, making sure there were plenty of photo ops of "violent protesters."
A number of times they had these 100 or so protesters caught between buildings and walls of police. They could easily have arrested and detained this small number of people and gotten it over with. Instead they would gas them and let them go. Then trap them again, gas them again, and again let them go. The cops made no arrests that I know of until late Tuesday night though the skirmishing was going on from three till 9:30. The cops would blockade three or five blocks of an area, give the angry kids room to operate, keep gassing them - when you gas a person, let me tell you, it gets them fighting mad.
Tuesday night the police gassed all of downtown. This was going on from 3 PM, till 6 PM.. Gas everywhere. The kids broke a few windows - McD's, Starbucks - small stuff - burned a few garbage cans. The police were using these people as extras. It was staged. I believe also the police had their own people in there, encouraging people to break stuff - if people think I may be exaggerating, I saw supposed protesters - they were screaming and so on - and then later, when everything was over, the same people tackled other protestors and put handcuffs on them.
At 6pm they issued a State of Emergency. At that point they had pushed the 100 people outside the city limits, so the police went outside the limits too, and they started gassing that area too, gassing the neighborhoods where the regular people live. I am not exaggerating. The police were relentless.
This was in an area from the city limits for about 10 blocks to the Seattle Central Community College. If you were alive, the police gassed you. People coming back from work, kids, women, everyone. People would go out of their houses to see what was happening because these tear gas guns sound like a cannon - and they would get gassed. A block away there was a Texaco gas station - they threw tear gas at gas pumps, believe it or not - they were like vandals. They gassed a bus. I saw it with my own eyes. A bus. The driver, the riders, the people just abandoned it.
I was sitting in a little coffee shop called Rauhaus, [Jim did not spell this - the spelling may be wrong.] They were shooting "rubber" bullets at the glass. I picked up a dozen of the things in a few square feet. They were also shooting this paint that you can only see with a florescent light. They would paint anyone and everyone and then go hunting them.
Anyway, because they were gassing everybody, the local people got mad too and they joined the 100 who had been herded out of the city. So soon there were 500 including the neighborhood people and all very angry. Naturally. Because they had been gassed and hit with pepper spray, that stuff does a number on you. And shot with these damn bullets. Then people set up barricades at Seattle Central Community College. The cops organized themselves for about an hour and then moved in and gassed that area.
Today they started mass arrests. That was because Clinton - the Greeks call him the Planitarchis, Ruler of the World - was coming. Weeping crocodile tears about how he just LOVES peaceful protest, which of course you'd have to be two years old to believe he had nothing to do with the police action. This whole thing, this police attack, this was US foreign policy, not some action decided by some bureaucrat in Seattle. This was the State Department. They wanted to discredit the people.
When things started on Sunday, there was a protest rally of solidarity involving people from different walks of life. Monday it got even bigger. Tuesday there was a big sort of carnival where people were doing different things, a band was playing music and people were blocking the World Trade Center. And about 3 PM the cops started throwing tear gas.
The thing that drove Clinton crazy was that on Tuesday the protesters had succeeded in making nonviolent human chains and had therefore stopped everyone from going into the World Trade Center. Only maybe 27 delegates got through, mostly US and British. There were what seemed like tens of thousands of protesters involved. So the police did their gassing number against these nonviolent people to break up the human chains and make the protesters look violent.
Today (Wednesday) I followed the union protest put together by the Longshoremen's Union. They went down to the docks and had a rally then marched to Third Avenue. As soon as they got there the cops started gassing them. There was an old lady there. She had gone downtown by bus to buy something. This lady was in her 70's and I saw her trying to run, but she couldn't breathe. She was in shock. I carried her to a building entryway. She was gasping, terrified. She had been in Germany, and it was like she was having flashbacks. The tear gas sounds like gunfire and there were helicopters overhead, sirens, cops on horses, everything.
They had clearly made a decision to destroy this movement.
So anyway there I was with her in this building and she wanted to go to the hospital but there was tear gas everywhere and I was afraid if I tried to move her she'd be gassed again. I went to this line of cops and begged - I mean begged - these riot police to help her. They ignored me. A girl told me later that a one year old had been gassed. And I myself saw a girl no more than 18 - a cop had busted her lip wide open - she was bleeding - and then they gassed everyone including her. After that she was kneeling on the ground crying like a baby and praying for 15 minutes, Hail Mary, Hail Mary. Over and over. She was in a state of shock. They just gassed these people who were sitting down non-violently and doing nothing. Nothing.
At one point the Seattle Mayor said his boys were not using rubber bullets. Miraculously, by then I had ten in my pocket. I could open a little market, sell the things. They are everywhere. I and other people started giving them to delegates and stuff. "See what they're doing? They're shooting "rubber" bullets and lying about it." We showed them to the media. I guess enough people and the media got the information because the Mayor made a new statement then that they were using them. As if he hadn't known.
They shot rubber bullets from four feet away into the face of a guy next to me, broke all his front teeth. When that happened I lost it. I forgot I was supposed to be getting the news for all of you and I started yelling at the cops, "What the hell is wrong with you? Are you sick, man?" So this cop aimed his gun right at me. That was his answer. So I first put my hands in front of my face because I didn't want to lose my teeth. And then I thought, to hell with it. I was wearing my target shirt that said "Collateral Damage", you know? With a bullseye target, like they wore during the bombing in Yugoslavia. And I told this guy, "Go ahead, shoot! Here! Here's the target!" He didn't shoot me.
I want to emphasize, these protesters were NOT violent people. They were the most non-violent people I have ever seen. Even when I was screaming at the cop, this girl came up to me and said, "Do not scream. This is non-violent." These people were too much to believe. They must meditate all the time, I don't know.
Clinton said he supports nonviolent protest. That is baloney. Today (Wed.) the protesters were causing absolutely no "trouble". In downtown the cops had people running who weren't even protesters - like that old lady or just people going to work or shopping - everyone was getting gassed. The busses weren't running because of the gas. I was lucky to catch one with a driver who could still see. I begged him to drive the old lady home - the driver changed his route especially for her. If you want to find human decency, stay away from the Planitarchis. Go to the to regular people. They have some. The Planitarchis lost all his years ago. Now he wouldn't know human decency if it came up and bit him.
So now I have made personal acquaintance with the people who run this country, and they are quite simply scum. There were people at work, people with babies, they were all getting gassed because the government would not allow an assembly of people speaking their minds. It is the same as what happened in Athens. Clinton's requirements on the Greek government created the riot and he did the same thing here. And then he says he supports nonviolent protest? How? By shooting rubber bullets? And today they outlawed gas masks. They want to make sure everyone gets his money's worth.
Today, just like yesterday night, the police were in the residential neighborhoods. People in cafés were getting gassed and shot at, you could hear it on the windows, bang, bang, bang. A guy trying to cross the street to go to his house got gassed. First a drunk guy outside a bar yelled at the cops "Get out of here!" so they gassed him. And then this other guys was just crossing the street to go home so the cops figured, might as well gas him too. People got gassed for coming out of restaruants and bars and coffeee shops. I'm amazed that nobody died who had asthma or something.
Or maybe somebody did die and they didn't talk about it. I mean after all, it's just collateral damage..
***
Note # 1 - For a critical look at the World Trade Organization, click on SEATTLE AND BEYOND
The World Trade Organization is a complicated topic, and both the talks being held and the variety of protests confronting it are far too complicated for the feeble minds of our readers to fully comprehend. We would never want to inconvenience our readers by giving them information that is complex or contrary to the opinions we've already fed you. Therefore, we're going to lie our fool tushies off during our WTO coverage.
Here's how:
- -- On the WTO Itself:
* We will repeatedly tell you, as WTO proponents do, that world trade means jobs, and that Washington state in particular depends on world trade. The implication, sometimes explicit, is that anti-WTO activists oppose world trade, which is untrue. They generally oppose the specific mechanisms--i.e., unfettered capitalism--by which the WTO governs world trade. There are many other possible ways to arrange for world trade and a globalized economy, but we won't tell you that. We also won't tell you that while trade creates jobs, the neoliberal policies of the WTO, on average, force down the wages and standards of jobs in both developed couuntries and developing ones. Behemoths like Microsoft and Boeing can outsource work to India or Mexico (respectively), where workers are paid far less than in Seattle. Eventually, wages and benefits in Seattle will have to drop to compete.
* We'll tell you that the primary beneficiaries of unfettered trade are regular folks like you and me. Not hardly. Workers at Boeing may owe their jobs to trade, and family farms may export their wares. But Boeing itself, or huge agribusiness concerns, benefit far more from free trade. In fact, policies of the WTO are part of what's driving small farmers out of business; and as mentioned above, Boeing workers can lose their jobs to cheaper overseas help. Free trade is designed to help the huge transnational corporations that can move resources around the globe at the drop of a hat. Whether it helps, or, more likely, hurts the average citizen is strictly incidental.
* The Clinton Administration cares about jobs, the environment, and labor. This is a lie told by government officials, which we will repeat uncritically. In fact, Clinton is a prime architect of the WTO, and his administration has overseen one of the greatest Wall Street booms in history- -and one of the greatest increases in the gap between incomes of the wealthy and those of average citizens. The donations of these huge corporations are what keep Clinton and Gore or Bush in office. Their policies have been a relentless sellout of the environment to huge corporations, and favoritism to those orporations over the interests of labor. They don't care about you. They think you're just so many sheep to be manipulated. We help.
* In discussing the WTO, we will focus solely on how it helps or hurts America, and ignore the rest of the world, especially developing countries. If developing countries are mentioned, we will equate the interests of a few elites with those of the country as a whole. This gives an incredibly distorted view of the true damage caused by WTO policies. We will uncritically repeat the myth that these countries are better off with the jobs provided by transnational corporations, ignoring other means of developing economies that might not remove so many resources and so much capital from these countries, and might promote greater democracy and better standards of living.
* We will repeat the accusations that WTO critics have not done their homework, without giving them any forums to display their understanding of the issues; that WTO critics are solely oppositional, without airing any of their positive proposals for promoting fairer trade; and that WTO critics are marginal members of society, without listing their mainstream supporters.
- -- On the Protests:
* You can safely take any estimate we publish of demonstration crowd sizes and multiply them by ten to arrive at a truer estimate of size. Actually, the exact multiplier is nine: first, police will reduce their estimate by a factor of three, and then we will reduce the police estimate by a further factor of three. This is to make you feel safer. It's for your own good.
* We won't lie about student walk-outs, worker sick-ins, or other efforts by ordinary workers and students to shut down Seattle as part of this protest. We'll just ignore them. They're just too difficult to quantify.
* Any "violence" that erupts will be the responsibility of the demonstators. We will ignore the "nonviolent" horses, batons, mace, pepper spray, rubber bullets, and guns brought by security forces. That's crowd control, not violence.
* We will rely almost exclusively on "official" sources--WTO organizers, the police, elected officials, and other government employees. This isn't a lie, exactly. We'll simply report their spin on the facts as the objective truth, and not report any other spin or try to synthesize competing versions of events. This will give WTO advocates the most positive possible light.
* We will marginalize demonstators wherever possible. Photos will show the most outrageous costumes, emphasizing that these are not normal people. Organizers are "paid organizers," although the Seattle Host Organization paid people, too. Foreign demonstrators will become "outside agitators." If necessary, we will redbait.
* We will emphasize conflict, property destruction, violence, and hostility. The 99% of peaceful, nonviolent demonstrator are boring. They are also much too responsible.>
* Wherever possible we will refer to anti-WTO activists as anti-trade rather than "fair trade" proponents. This makes them seem less reasonable.
* We will focus a lot on the inconvenience of demonstrations to commuters and other "ordinary citizens," as though the protesters were not ordinary and as though Seattle gridlock was not ordinary, either. This also implies that traffic reports are of equal importance to global trade issues.
* Conversely, we will NOT report the impact on Seattle's homeless of WTO organizing--namely, loss of motel and shelter space, street sweeps, and crackdowns on tent cities and other attempts at visibility. We would never ignore these demonstrations. It's too big and too exciting a story. But we will make a point wherever possible to lie so as to deny their credibility. After all, if protesters are correct and free trade is a threat to the world's environment, standard of living, and democracy, then we must be called upon to act.
eat-the-state@scn.org is the mailing list for distribution of "Eat The State!", the e-mail version of the periodical. To subscribe or unsubscribe, send your request to majordomo@scn.org.
This is one of those life-imitating-art-imitating-life recursive things. Apparently Mr. Youens, some eight months before he committed his acts, signed a guestbook at this site, which is specifically about murders -- serial, mass, and otherwise. After he did the deed, the site owner put up a page *about* him, noting that "this is the first time that I know of any of you lot [i.e. guest book signers] going through with your plans." (The site contains a link to the guestbook).
Nerd relevance: the family of the victim is now calling for ' regulation of the internet, "I'm angry because we as a public have so little control over what is on the Internet." ' They go on to say that sites like this, which "advocate criminal actions" should be removed from the net. Needless to say, the site's owner is "astounded" and finds such suggestions "ludicrous".
BTW, Youens' occupation is listed here as "software engineer" [third-hand info, tho].
See the white puffs of tear gas and hear the terrifying pop of plastic bullet guns in RealVideo here.
Did you know that, by the Geneva Convention, it's illegal to use tear gas in war, yet nations are allowed to use it on their own citizens? (And guess which well-known state managed to slip *that* in there...?)
Saayyy...You've got the fastidious monomania that we at HardAss Software are always looking for! Do you work well by yourself? Yes? Like to TAKE OUT ill-spawned processes? Great! I think you'll FIT IN well here!
[Man: mining the responses to this geek profile question was our best recruitment strategy EVER!]
Look here for biographical information about Andrew Wiles. Also look here for some more resources including a pointer to Wiles' original article on solving it. And a good, fairly non-technical book on the subject is Simon Singh's Fermat's Enigma.
AFAIK, any unclassified document published by the Government of the United States is in the public domain.
Thus, even though the NS* holds the patent, they hold it *for the People* of the United States. Therefore we can use this technology by virtue of the fact that we are American citizens.
"...it is the firmly established policy of the United States that U.S. forces will fight in full compliance with the law of war."
This is, IMHO, a fscking crock. Just last year, the United States broke several International Treaties (and ignored a vote by the Congress) to engage in an illegal war on Yugoslavia. Sidestepping the fact that Milosovic is an *elected* leader, we violated international borders. We used *illegal* cluster bombs. We poisoned the earth with "depleted" uranium bombs. We inserted Special Op forces. Journalists were manipulated with false "atrocity" stories. Anyone who believes this pious "full compliance" crap is either naive or in the pay of the American warlords.
Were these students over 18? Yes? Was a warrant issued by a judge and executed by a duly appointed law officer? No? Then their rights were violated. IANAL, but I would say that they have an open-and-shut case against CMU, *especially* if CMU receives federal money. Here is the text of the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution. (I end up having to quote this so often that I have the Constitution bookmarked. The U.S. Constitution.)
Amendment 4 - PROBABLE CAUSE The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Hi. Yes, I think that you should be. Isn't it just like a corporation (owned by M$, no less) to make a big deal about *their* trademarks, copyrights, etc. and then go and rip off your comments, completely ignoring the sign that says that you own your own writings. In fact, under US copyright law, you *do* own what you posted and therefore you have every right to sue MSNBC for copyright infringement (and, no, you don't have to stick a copyright notice in there either.) Of course, they will either claim that it was "fair use" or that they "paraphrased" it; still, this could break some interesting legal ground in the courts. Keep us posted.
Further down in this thread, rlk posts the response from thomas.loc.gov, but it is a temporary dynamic link, so I will tell you how to find it using Thomas. (Knowing how to use Thomas, BTW, is a Very Useful Thing.)
First go to Thomas. At the top there is a search for specific bills. You are looking today for either S. 1255 [the Senate version] or H.R. 3028. I found those numbers by going into the Congressional Record, selecting the most recent issue (i.e. yesterday when the deed was done), selecting the Daily Digest hyperlink, zipping down to the House of Representatives, and finding the bill entitled "Preventing the Misappropriation of Marks". Right there is all the information I needed: which bills and what action was taken. In fact, there are hyperlinks to the text of the bills right there. But I was interested in what the representatives actually said about them, so I chose the hyperlink where it says Pages. This led me to the official transcript of the action on the floor. That in itself was very interesting. Those pages also contained the text of the two bills as read by the Clerk.
Again I would like to urge all/.ers to learn how to use this free resource to keep an eye on the Congress. The initiative for Thomas was spearheaded by Newt Gingrich; in my eyes, that almost makes up for his cockamamie Contract On America.
If you read the original article, it mentions that the Pioneers are "spin stabilized"; i.e. the spacecraft is spinning around its axis in order to remain stable as it moves forward. Considering the speed at which it is going, it is probably encountering both gas drag and dust particles at a high rate of speed. While a direct impact with a dust particle would not appreciably slow it down, the impacts of many particles could cause the spacecraft to vibrate infinitestimally, and at that velocity, could amplify the drag effect of hydrogen gas in that non-empty "empty" space, leading to the observed slowdown with no apparent cause.
If you read the bill that establishes the concept of, and penalties for, cybersquatting, you will see that the point of it was to protect trademarks. Since, AFAIK, "offensive" words can't be used as trademarks, your point is, uh, pointless. It's a free world and if someone wants to pre-emptively squat on a domain name to keep someone else from using it, and there's no trademark issue -- what's the problem?
Once computers are designed by other computers, not humans, they should become even more powerful as genetic programming methods create efficiencies we could not have created.
Clearly, you know nothing about "genetic programming". First of all, genetic programming doew not necessarily create "efficiencies". Genetic programming is merely a method to utilize recombination of pre-existing templates to create structures that are more "fit" to solve an existing problem. Thus genetic programming methods are of necessity *convergent*. Human brains have evolved to solve the "survival" problem, but there is a long ways between DNA and human survival. Survival, by the way, is a divergence problem.
Secondly, the genetic programs that have, so far, "evolved" have their 'inventors' scratching their heads. While it is true that these programs *have* sometimes formed more "efficient" solutions, a) their structure is completely ad hoc and does not follow any duplicable plan; and b) clearly cannot be generalized: these structures only solve the problem given.
I remember 15 years ago when the same predictions were made for so-called "expert systems".
Don't get me wrong: I design and build "genetic programming" (and "neural networks": I find that the synergy between these two complemetary methods is useful). But don't leap to conclusions based on speculation.
Simply by the current growth in CPU power, by 2030 at least, computers will have a processing power equivalent to the human brain.
Good grief. Just because computers *may* have as many components as a human brain 30 years down the road does *not* mean that they will be "equivalent" to the human brain. Remember that the human brain consists of billions of neurons, *each* connected to (on the average) 10,000 others. Even our best neurophysiologists have *no idea* how this highly interconnected network operates. And, with a few exceptions, all computers today (and for the foreseeable future) will continue to be serial processors, unlike the brain, which is a parallel processor par excellance.
IMHO, recursive moderation solves one problem and creates another. Sure, the watchers are watched, but, as we've seen in this topic, people who do a lot of moderation lose karma. Not good. Furthermore, the obsession with karma obfuscates why we even come to/.: to find the nuggets of information hidden in the dungpile of noise.
I have a solution:
1) Let everyone moderate -- or not moderate, if they choose -- everything but their own posts. However, each person could only moderate a given post once per day (say).
2) Don't, however, *show* the scores of comments. Thus, each comment stands on its own. Internally, of course, scoring would be kept so people could still use highest scores first.
3) Permit moderators to score each comment on 3 different scales at once: Boring -> Interesting; Redundant -> Insightful; Stupid -> Intelligent. This takes care of the what-word-shall-I-use-to-describe-this problem.
4) Show each scale as a balance, and start every post off in the middle. (e.g. -5 to +5, all start at 0).
5) Keep track of the comments that are *not* moderated, i.e. they come back still rated at 0,0,0. The higher a percentage not moderated a comment gets, the less passion it is arousing.
6) By popping up each comment as a separate browser window that vanishes when the rating is submitted, moderation is performed automatically, without anyone *having* to rate it if they don't want.
7) You have to have an account to rate anything. So you can cruise as an AC if you don't feel like rating today.
8) Have a "churn" rating on every comment: The more ratings coming in (per day, say) on a comment, the longer it -- and its associated topic -- will "live". (Also see (5) above: the lack of passion might be an indicator of oncoming death.)
Since every comment is automatically rated by everybody who reads it, yet any given comment can be rated by an individual only on a periodic basis, any individual cannot substantially skew the results. Subjectivity is completely removed from the moderation equation.
Does anybody know of European groups (that we can support) that would lobby against this?
Yes. The Green Party. It is much stronger in Europe than here. One of their 4 Pillars [i.e. paramount values] is Grassroots Democracy. The Greens are in the government in at least three European governments, as well as the European Parliment. (And, as long as you're at it, please support the American Greens as well.)
I quote here from "Science, Computers and People" -- a work by the legendary mathematician Stanislaw Ulam. (von Neumann and Ulam worked together at Los Alamos during WWII.) This is from Chapter 18: "John von Neumann on Computers and the Brain":
"Von Neumann became interested in the possibilities of electronic computing machines during the Second World War. In the beginning he was primarily concerned with the logic of the operation of such machines, but he was the first to devise a means by which a machine with fixed circuits could deal flexibly with a variety of mathematical problems. Before he had entered the field, the solution of each problem required a different set of wiring connections."
From Chapter 16:
"[D]uring 1944 and 1945, he formulated the now fundamental methods of translating a set of mathematical procedures into a language of instructions for a computing machine. The electronic machines of that time (e.g., the Eniac) lacked the flexibility and generality which they now possess in the handling of mathematical problems...The engineering of the computing machines owes a great deal to von Neumann. The logical schemata of the machines, the planning of the relative roles of their memory, their speed, the selection of fundamental 'orders' and their circuits in the present machines bear heavily the imprint of his ideas. Von Neumann himself supervised the construction of a machine at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton...In receiving the Fermi prize of the Atomic Energy Commission, von Neumann was cited especially for his contribution to the development of computing on the electronic machines..."
As you can see, it was in fact John von Neumann who *invented* the concept of the stored program and thus what we now understand as computers. While perhaps it was others who had the idea that electronic components could be strung together to solve problems (whether it was Zuse, Astanoff/Berry or Mauchley/ Eckert), it was von Neumann's conceptual breakthrough that opened the door to true computing.
[quote] My Hercules contact also sent me over another email, this time in regards to the USENET post that accused company officials of mismanagement and embezzlement.
"I want to let you know that rumors of embezzlement and mismanagement are false. In fact, the most of the employees, including upper management, have been working for weeks without pay." [/quote]
As its implementation requires channel capacity that, for a fixed separation [of users' locations], increases exponentially with the commitment time, it is not a practical solution to the problem of long-term bit commitment.
Well -- yeah. It works because nothing is revealed until everything is revealed, as it were. It collapses to the concepts: 1)that you can't decrypt a message until you receive all the bits of it + 2)one-time pad. It introduces the additional complication of communication between users (that's where relativity comes in -- the light cone limits transmission speed, but the authors very gracefully fold in the idea of quantum communication and classical communication being identically undecryptable under this protocol.) Clever, but [currently] useless.
Slashdot Mirror
"The confusion about the protestors' political goals is understandable," wrote a New York Times columnist Thursday, "this is the first movement born of the anarchic pathways of the Internet. There is no top-down hierarchy, no universally recognized leaders, and nobody knows what is going to happen next."
Sure.
"When your only tool is a computer, everything looks like the Net."
I'm sorry to disagree with the KatzBot on this one, but anti-corporatism has long and deep roots, and existed long before the Net did. In America, for example, the Green Party has consistently inveighed against corporations from its very arrival here in 1987. Several demonstrations from the '60's attacked corporatism; perhaps the most famous being Mario Savio's impassioned diatribe at the Sather Gate on the University of California's Berkeley campus during the Free Speech Movement of 1965. ("There comes a time ... when you have to make clear that the Machine will be prevented from working at all..."). While the Net undoubtably played a role in organizing the upcoming protests (I was hearing about them quite consistently for a couple of months before they happened), it is not the *cause* of the protests, but merely its conduit.
Subject: COLLATERAL DAMAGE IN SEATTLE
COLLATERAL DAMAGE IN SEATTLE
by Portland student/reporter Jim Desyllas
Called-in from a pay phone outside Seattle. Wed., 7:30 pm Pacific time.
(Posted at www.emperors-clothes.com 12-2-99. Feel free to distribute in full including this note.)
I just spent 4 days in Seattle. The "information" people are getting from the mass media is false. This was not, as Pres. Clinton claims, a peaceful protest marred by the actions of violent protesters. This was a massive, strong but peaceful demonstration which was attacked repeatedly by the police with the express purpose of provoking a violent response to provide photo opportunities for the Western media. I know because I watched it happening. I'll tell you how they did it.
As Michel Chossudovsky says in his "Disarming the New World Order" (See Note # 1 at end for link to that article) - the government put a lot of effort into making sure the protesters in Seattle were a "loyal opposition" who wanted to reform the WTO, not get rid of it. But the people in Seattle - American steel workers, Canadian postal workers, college kids from all over, environmentalists from Australia - you name it - were not for reforming the WTO. They were for getting rid of it.
And this wasn't just true of the protesters. I interviewed delegates. None of them had anything favorable to say about the WTO. Two delegates from the Caribbean were angry about job loss. One delegate from Peru took a bullhorn and got up on a car and spoke to the protestors against the World Trade Organization. He said it hurts the workers and farmers. I interviewed a Norwegian guy from Greenpeace. Totally against it. Even a delegate from Holland said it had hurt the farmers there. He said though it is supposedly democratic, that's actually a lie: the US, England and Canada and a few others get together and decide what they want to do. Then they ask the rest of the countries to vote and if they vote wrong they threaten,"You won't get loans," or whatever. They get them to do what they want by blackmailing them. The Italians we interviewed were upset too. I couldn't find any delegates who were in favor.
So the government instigated a "riot" to discredit the movement against the WTO because they couldn't dilute it. I am not guessing about this. I was there. I saw it happening. And I will tell you I am frankly shocked to see, close up, just how little our leaders care what happens to ordinary people. Clinton can pose and speak a lot of flowery stuff but the truth is - we are nothing to them. I saw this with my own eyes.
Sunday and Monday, there was no violence. None. The people were aggressively non-violent; they were self-policing. Up until Tuesday at 4pm there was one window broken in the whole city - a McDonalds window. This compares favorably to the typical rock concert, let alone a demonstration of people who were non-violently barring entry to the World Trade Center!
At this point, a new group of police - tactical police - moved in and started gassing people and shooting rubber bullets. Is it any surprise that people got mad? Of course, the young kids hit back by breaking some windows in retaliation for being gassed, sprayed with very painful pepper gas, and shot with dangerous "rubber" bullets. The police instigated these kids, plain and simple.
Sunday and Monday they had young cops, using them to block the streets. These were trainees. But Tuesday they had the real cops; none of them were young. They were trained to attack people. A small group, maybe 100 people total, struck back. Then these cops herded that group around the city, making sure there were plenty of photo ops of "violent protesters."
A number of times they had these 100 or so protesters caught between buildings and walls of police. They could easily have arrested and detained this small number of people and gotten it over with. Instead they would gas them and let them go. Then trap them again, gas them again, and again let them go. The cops made no arrests that I know of until late Tuesday night though the skirmishing was going on from three till 9:30. The cops would blockade three or five blocks of an area, give the angry kids room to operate, keep gassing them - when you gas a person, let me tell you, it gets them fighting mad.
Tuesday night the police gassed all of downtown. This was going on from 3 PM, till 6 PM.. Gas everywhere. The kids broke a few windows - McD's, Starbucks - small stuff - burned a few garbage cans. The police were using these people as extras. It was staged. I believe also the police had their own people in there, encouraging people to break stuff - if people think I may be exaggerating, I saw supposed protesters - they were screaming and so on - and then later, when everything was over, the same people tackled other protestors and put handcuffs on them.
At 6pm they issued a State of Emergency. At that point they had pushed the 100 people outside the city limits, so the police went outside the limits too, and they started gassing that area too, gassing the neighborhoods where the regular people live. I am not exaggerating. The police were relentless.
This was in an area from the city limits for about 10 blocks to the Seattle Central Community College. If you were alive, the police gassed you. People coming back from work, kids, women, everyone. People would go out of their houses to see what was happening because these tear gas guns sound like a cannon - and they would get gassed. A block away there was a Texaco gas station - they threw tear gas at gas pumps, believe it or not - they were like vandals. They gassed a bus. I saw it with my own eyes. A bus. The driver, the riders, the people just abandoned it .
I was sitting in a little coffee shop called Rauhaus, [Jim did not spell this - the spelling may be wrong.] They were shooting "rubber" bullets at the glass. I picked up a dozen of the things in a few square feet. They were also shooting this paint that you can only see with a florescent light. They would paint anyone and everyone and then go hunting them.
Anyway, because they were gassing everybody, the local people got mad too and they joined the 100 who had been herded out of the city. So soon there were 500 including the neighborhood people and all very angry. Naturally. Because they had been gassed and hit with pepper spray, that stuff does a number on you. And shot with these damn bullets. Then people set up barricades at Seattle Central Community College. The cops organized themselves for about an hour and then moved in and gassed that area.
Today they started mass arrests. That was because Clinton - the Greeks call him the Planitarchis, Ruler of the World - was coming. Weeping crocodile tears about how he just LOVES peaceful protest, which of course you'd have to be two years old to believe he had nothing to do with the police action. This whole thing, this police attack, this was US foreign policy, not some action decided by some bureaucrat in Seattle. This was the State Department. They wanted to discredit the people.
When things started on Sunday, there was a protest rally of solidarity involving people from different walks of life. Monday it got even bigger. Tuesday there was a big sort of carnival where people were doing different things, a band was playing music and people were blocking the World Trade Center. And about 3 PM the cops started throwing tear gas.
The thing that drove Clinton crazy was that on Tuesday the protesters had succeeded in making nonviolent human chains and had therefore stopped everyone from going into the World Trade Center. Only maybe 27 delegates got through, mostly US and British. There were what seemed like tens of thousands of protesters involved. So the police did their gassing number against these nonviolent people to break up the human chains and make the protesters look violent.
Today (Wednesday) I followed the union protest put together by the Longshoremen's Union. They went down to the docks and had a rally then marched to Third Avenue. As soon as they got there the cops started gassing them. There was an old lady there. She had gone downtown by bus to buy something. This lady was in her 70's and I saw her trying to run, but she couldn't breathe. She was in shock. I carried her to a building entryway. She was gasping, terrified. She had been in Germany, and it was like she was having flashbacks. The tear gas sounds like gunfire and there were helicopters overhead, sirens, cops on horses, everything.
They had clearly made a decision to destroy this movement.
So anyway there I was with her in this building and she wanted to go to the hospital but there was tear gas everywhere and I was afraid if I tried to move her she'd be gassed again. I went to this line of cops and begged - I mean begged - these riot police to help her. They ignored me. A girl told me later that a one year old had been gassed. And I myself saw a girl no more than 18 - a cop had busted her lip wide open - she was bleeding - and then they gassed everyone including her. After that she was kneeling on the ground crying like a baby and praying for 15 minutes, Hail Mary, Hail Mary. Over and over. She was in a state of shock. They just gassed these people who were sitting down non-violently and doing nothing. Nothing.
At one point the Seattle Mayor said his boys were not using rubber bullets. Miraculously, by then I had ten in my pocket. I could open a little market, sell the things. They are everywhere. I and other people started giving them to delegates and stuff. "See what they're doing? They're shooting "rubber" bullets and lying about it." We showed them to the media. I guess enough people and the media got the information because the Mayor made a new statement then that they were using them. As if he hadn't known.
They shot rubber bullets from four feet away into the face of a guy next to me, broke all his front teeth. When that happened I lost it. I forgot I was supposed to be getting the news for all of you and I started yelling at the cops, "What the hell is wrong with you? Are you sick, man?" So this cop aimed his gun right at me. That was his answer. So I first put my hands in front of my face because I didn't want to lose my teeth. And then I thought, to hell with it. I was wearing my target shirt that said "Collateral Damage", you know? With a bullseye target, like they wore during the bombing in Yugoslavia. And I told this guy, "Go ahead, shoot! Here! Here's the target!" He didn't shoot me.
I want to emphasize, these protesters were NOT violent people. They were the most non-violent people I have ever seen. Even when I was screaming at the cop, this girl came up to me and said, "Do not scream. This is non-violent." These people were too much to believe. They must meditate all the time, I don't know.
Clinton said he supports nonviolent protest. That is baloney. Today (Wed.) the protesters were causing absolutely no "trouble". In downtown the cops had people running who weren't even protesters - like that old lady or just people going to work or shopping - everyone was getting gassed. The busses weren't running because of the gas. I was lucky to catch one with a driver who could still see. I begged him to drive the old lady home - the driver changed his route especially for her. If you want to find human decency, stay away from the Planitarchis. Go to the to regular people. They have some. The Planitarchis lost all his years ago. Now he wouldn't know human decency if it came up and bit him.
So now I have made personal acquaintance with the people who run this country, and they are quite simply scum. There were people at work, people with babies, they were all getting gassed because the government would not allow an assembly of people speaking their minds. It is the same as what happened in Athens. Clinton's requirements on the Greek government created the riot and he did the same thing here. And then he says he supports nonviolent protest? How? By shooting rubber bullets? And today they outlawed gas masks. They want to make sure everyone gets his money's worth.
Today, just like yesterday night, the police were in the residential neighborhoods. People in cafés were getting gassed and shot at, you could hear it on the windows, bang, bang, bang. A guy trying to cross the street to go to his house got gassed. First a drunk guy outside a bar yelled at the cops "Get out of here!" so they gassed him. And then this other guys was just crossing the street to go home so the cops figured, might as well gas him too. People got gassed for coming out of restaruants and bars and coffeee shops. I'm amazed that nobody died who had asthma or something.
Or maybe somebody did die and they didn't talk about it. I mean after all, it's just collateral damage..
***
Note # 1 - For a critical look at the World Trade Organization, click on SEATTLE AND BEYOND
If you would like to browse articles from Emperors-Clothes.com, click here: Click here: The Emperors Clothes
----by the editorial staff at the big dailies--
The World Trade Organization is a complicated topic, and both the talks being held and the variety of protests confronting it are far too complicated for the feeble minds of our readers to fully comprehend. We would never want to inconvenience our readers by giving them information that is complex or contrary to the opinions we've already fed you. Therefore, we're going to lie our fool tushies off during our WTO coverage.
Here's how:
- -- On the WTO Itself:
* We will repeatedly tell you, as WTO proponents do, that world trade means jobs, and that Washington state in particular depends on world trade. The implication, sometimes explicit, is that anti-WTO activists oppose world trade, which is untrue. They generally oppose the specific mechanisms--i.e., unfettered capitalism--by which the WTO governs world trade. There are many other possible ways to arrange for world trade and a globalized economy, but we won't tell you that. We also won't tell you that while trade creates jobs, the neoliberal policies of the WTO, on average, force down the wages and standards of jobs in both developed couuntries and developing ones. Behemoths like Microsoft and Boeing can outsource work to India or Mexico (respectively), where workers are paid far less than in Seattle. Eventually, wages and benefits in Seattle will have to drop to compete.
* We'll tell you that the primary beneficiaries of unfettered trade are regular folks like you and me. Not hardly. Workers at Boeing may owe their jobs to trade, and family farms may export their wares. But Boeing itself, or huge agribusiness concerns, benefit far more from free trade. In fact, policies of the WTO are part of what's driving small farmers out of business; and as mentioned above, Boeing workers can lose their jobs to cheaper overseas help. Free trade is designed to help the huge transnational corporations that can move resources around the globe at the drop of a hat. Whether it helps, or, more likely, hurts the average citizen is strictly incidental.
* The Clinton Administration cares about jobs, the environment, and labor. This is a lie told by government officials, which we will repeat uncritically. In fact, Clinton is a prime architect of the WTO, and his administration has overseen one of the greatest Wall Street booms in history- -and one of the greatest increases in the gap between incomes of the wealthy and those of average citizens. The donations of these huge corporations are what keep Clinton and Gore or Bush in office. Their policies have been a relentless sellout of the environment to huge corporations, and favoritism to those orporations over the interests of labor. They don't care about you. They think you're just so many sheep to be manipulated. We help.
* In discussing the WTO, we will focus solely on how it helps or hurts America, and ignore the rest of the world, especially developing countries. If developing countries are mentioned, we will equate the interests of a few elites with those of the country as a whole. This gives an incredibly distorted view of the true damage caused by WTO policies. We will uncritically repeat the myth that these countries are better off with the jobs provided by transnational corporations, ignoring other means of developing economies that might not remove so many resources and so much capital from these countries, and might promote greater democracy and better standards of living.
* We will repeat the accusations that WTO critics have not done their homework, without giving them any forums to display their understanding of the issues; that WTO critics are solely oppositional, without airing any of their positive proposals for promoting fairer trade; and that WTO critics are marginal members of society, without listing their mainstream supporters.
- -- On the Protests:
* You can safely take any estimate we publish of demonstration crowd sizes and multiply them by ten to arrive at a truer estimate of size. Actually, the exact multiplier is nine: first, police will reduce their estimate by a factor of three, and then we will reduce the police estimate by a further factor of three. This is to make you feel safer. It's for your own good.
* We won't lie about student walk-outs, worker sick-ins, or other efforts by ordinary workers and students to shut down Seattle as part of this protest. We'll just ignore them. They're just too difficult to quantify.
* Any "violence" that erupts will be the responsibility of the demonstators. We will ignore the "nonviolent" horses, batons, mace, pepper spray, rubber bullets, and guns brought by security forces. That's crowd control, not violence.
* We will rely almost exclusively on "official" sources--WTO organizers, the police, elected officials, and other government employees. This isn't a lie, exactly. We'll simply report their spin on the facts as the objective truth, and not report any other spin or try to synthesize competing versions of events. This will give WTO advocates the most positive possible light.
* We will marginalize demonstators wherever possible. Photos will show the most outrageous costumes, emphasizing that these are not normal people. Organizers are "paid organizers," although the Seattle Host Organization paid people, too. Foreign demonstrators will become "outside agitators." If necessary, we will redbait.
* We will emphasize conflict, property destruction, violence, and hostility. The 99% of peaceful, nonviolent demonstrator are boring. They are also much too responsible.>
* Wherever possible we will refer to anti-WTO activists as anti-trade rather than "fair trade" proponents. This makes them seem less reasonable.
* We will focus a lot on the inconvenience of demonstrations to commuters and other "ordinary citizens," as though the protesters were not ordinary and as though Seattle gridlock was not ordinary, either. This also implies that traffic reports are of equal importance to global trade issues.
* Conversely, we will NOT report the impact on Seattle's homeless of WTO organizing--namely, loss of motel and shelter space, street sweeps, and crackdowns on tent cities and other attempts at visibility. We would never ignore these demonstrations. It's too big and too exciting a story. But we will make a point wherever possible to lie so as to deny their credibility. After all, if protesters are correct and free trade is a threat to the world's environment, standard of living, and democracy, then we must be called upon to act.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
- --ETS! News Service EAT THE STATE! P.O. Box 85541 Seattle WA 98145 USA 206-903-9461 ets@scn.org
http://EatTheState.org
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * INFO * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
eat-the-state@scn.org is the mailing list for distribution of "Eat The State!", the e-mail version of the periodical. To subscribe or unsubscribe, send your request to majordomo@scn.org.
Contains RealVideo, RealAudio and news from the streets by eyewitnesses.
This is one of those life-imitating-art-imitating-life recursive things. Apparently Mr. Youens, some eight months before he committed his acts, signed a guestbook at this site, which is specifically about murders -- serial, mass, and otherwise. After he did the deed, the site owner put up a page *about* him, noting that "this is the first time that I know of any of you lot [i.e. guest book signers] going through with your plans." (The site contains a link to the guestbook).
Nerd relevance: the family of the victim is now calling for ' regulation of the internet, "I'm angry because we as a public have so little control over what is on the Internet." ' They go on to say that sites like this, which "advocate criminal actions" should be removed from the net. Needless to say, the site's owner is "astounded" and finds such suggestions "ludicrous".
BTW, Youens' occupation is listed here as "software engineer" [third-hand info, tho].
aka http://206.168.174.20/imc/
See the white puffs of tear gas and hear the terrifying pop of plastic bullet guns in RealVideo here.
Did you know that, by the Geneva Convention, it's illegal to use tear gas in war, yet nations are allowed to use it on their own citizens? (And guess which well-known state managed to slip *that* in there...?)
[Man: mining the responses to this geek profile question was our best recruitment strategy EVER!]
Apparently he thinks it's a ONE-finger salute. How appropriate.
Thus, even though the NS* holds the patent, they hold it *for the People* of the United States. Therefore we can use this technology by virtue of the fact that we are American citizens.
Thanks a lot, Nosuch! Keep up the good work!
This is, IMHO, a fscking crock. Just last year, the United States broke several International Treaties (and ignored a vote by the Congress) to engage in an illegal war on Yugoslavia. Sidestepping the fact that Milosovic is an *elected* leader, we violated international borders. We used *illegal* cluster bombs. We poisoned the earth with "depleted" uranium bombs. We inserted Special Op forces. Journalists were manipulated with false "atrocity" stories. Anyone who believes this pious "full compliance" crap is either naive or in the pay of the American warlords.
Amendment 4 - PROBABLE CAUSE The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Hi. Yes, I think that you should be. Isn't it just like a corporation (owned by M$, no less) to make a big deal about *their* trademarks, copyrights, etc. and then go and rip off your comments, completely ignoring the sign that says that you own your own writings. In fact, under US copyright law, you *do* own what you posted and therefore you have every right to sue MSNBC for copyright infringement (and, no, you don't have to stick a copyright notice in there either.) Of course, they will either claim that it was "fair use" or that they "paraphrased" it; still, this could break some interesting legal ground in the courts. Keep us posted.
First go to Thomas. At the top there is a search for specific bills. You are looking today for either S. 1255 [the Senate version] or H.R. 3028. I found those numbers by going into the Congressional Record, selecting the most recent issue (i.e. yesterday when the deed was done), selecting the Daily Digest hyperlink, zipping down to the House of Representatives, and finding the bill entitled "Preventing the Misappropriation of Marks". Right there is all the information I needed: which bills and what action was taken. In fact, there are hyperlinks to the text of the bills right there. But I was interested in what the representatives actually said about them, so I chose the hyperlink where it says Pages. This led me to the official transcript of the action on the floor. That in itself was very interesting. Those pages also contained the text of the two bills as read by the Clerk.
Again I would like to urge all /.ers to learn how to use this free resource to keep an eye on the Congress. The initiative for Thomas was spearheaded by Newt Gingrich; in my eyes, that almost makes up for his cockamamie Contract On America.
True, but you could email him 10,000 copies of it!
Clearly, you know nothing about "genetic programming". First of all, genetic programming doew not necessarily create "efficiencies". Genetic programming is merely a method to utilize recombination of pre-existing templates to create structures that are more "fit" to solve an existing problem. Thus genetic programming methods are of necessity *convergent*. Human brains have evolved to solve the "survival" problem, but there is a long ways between DNA and human survival. Survival, by the way, is a divergence problem.
Secondly, the genetic programs that have, so far, "evolved" have their 'inventors' scratching their heads. While it is true that these programs *have* sometimes formed more "efficient" solutions, a) their structure is completely ad hoc and does not follow any duplicable plan; and b) clearly cannot be generalized: these structures only solve the problem given.
I remember 15 years ago when the same predictions were made for so-called "expert systems".
Don't get me wrong: I design and build "genetic programming" (and "neural networks": I find that the synergy between these two complemetary methods is useful). But don't leap to conclusions based on speculation.
Simply by the current growth in CPU power, by 2030 at least, computers will have a processing power equivalent to the human brain.
Good grief. Just because computers *may* have as many components as a human brain 30 years down the road does *not* mean that they will be "equivalent" to the human brain. Remember that the human brain consists of billions of neurons, *each* connected to (on the average) 10,000 others. Even our best neurophysiologists have *no idea* how this highly interconnected network operates. And, with a few exceptions, all computers today (and for the foreseeable future) will continue to be serial processors, unlike the brain, which is a parallel processor par excellance.
I have a solution:
1) Let everyone moderate -- or not moderate, if they choose -- everything but their own posts. However, each person could only moderate a given post once per day (say).
2) Don't, however, *show* the scores of comments. Thus, each comment stands on its own. Internally, of course, scoring would be kept so people could still use highest scores first.
3) Permit moderators to score each comment on 3 different scales at once: Boring -> Interesting; Redundant -> Insightful; Stupid -> Intelligent. This takes care of the what-word-shall-I-use-to-describe-this problem.
4) Show each scale as a balance, and start every post off in the middle. (e.g. -5 to +5, all start at 0).
5) Keep track of the comments that are *not* moderated, i.e. they come back still rated at 0,0,0. The higher a percentage not moderated a comment gets, the less passion it is arousing.
6) By popping up each comment as a separate browser window that vanishes when the rating is submitted, moderation is performed automatically, without anyone *having* to rate it if they don't want.
7) You have to have an account to rate anything. So you can cruise as an AC if you don't feel like rating today.
8) Have a "churn" rating on every comment: The more ratings coming in (per day, say) on a comment, the longer it -- and its associated topic -- will "live". (Also see (5) above: the lack of passion might be an indicator of oncoming death.)
Since every comment is automatically rated by everybody who reads it, yet any given comment can be rated by an individual only on a periodic basis, any individual cannot substantially skew the results. Subjectivity is completely removed from the moderation equation.
Yes. The Green Party. It is much stronger in Europe than here. One of their 4 Pillars [i.e. paramount values] is Grassroots Democracy. The Greens are in the government in at least three European governments, as well as the European Parliment. (And, as long as you're at it, please support the American Greens as well.)
"Your Online Unalienable Rights"? [YOUR]
(Yes, I did crib it from the Declaration of Independence. If it was good enough for Thomas Jefferson, it's good enough for me!)
"Von Neumann became interested in the possibilities of electronic computing machines during the Second World War. In the beginning he was primarily concerned with the logic of the operation of such machines, but he was the first to devise a means by which a machine with fixed circuits could deal flexibly with a variety of mathematical problems. Before he had entered the field, the solution of each problem required a different set of wiring connections."
From Chapter 16:
"[D]uring 1944 and 1945, he formulated the now fundamental methods of translating a set of mathematical procedures into a language of instructions for a computing machine. The electronic machines of that time (e.g., the Eniac) lacked the flexibility and generality which they now possess in the handling of mathematical problems...The engineering of the computing machines owes a great deal to von Neumann. The logical schemata of the machines, the planning of the relative roles of their memory, their speed, the selection of fundamental 'orders' and their circuits in the present machines bear heavily the imprint of his ideas. Von Neumann himself supervised the construction of a machine at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton...In receiving the Fermi prize of the Atomic Energy Commission, von Neumann was cited especially for his contribution to the development of computing on the electronic machines..."
As you can see, it was in fact John von Neumann who *invented* the concept of the stored program and thus what we now understand as computers. While perhaps it was others who had the idea that electronic components could be strung together to solve problems (whether it was Zuse, Astanoff/Berry or Mauchley/ Eckert), it was von Neumann's conceptual breakthrough that opened the door to true computing.
[quote] My Hercules contact also sent me over another email, this time in regards to the USENET post that accused company officials of mismanagement and embezzlement.
"I want to let you know that rumors of embezzlement and mismanagement are false. In fact, the most of the employees, including upper management, have been working for weeks without pay." [/quote]
Well -- yeah. It works because nothing is revealed until everything is revealed, as it were. It collapses to the concepts: 1)that you can't decrypt a message until you receive all the bits of it + 2)one-time pad. It introduces the additional complication of communication between users (that's where relativity comes in -- the light cone limits transmission speed, but the authors very gracefully fold in the idea of quantum communication and classical communication being identically undecryptable under this protocol.) Clever, but [currently] useless.
----------