Yeah, the concept terrorism is getting overused, misused and abused.
But the UN still got bombed in Iraq. Soft targets got bombed in India. And if you don't believe that there are people that any rational individual would identify as terrorists, not to mention conventional political forces, who are exploring the use of electronic invasion and disruption as either stand-alone attacks or as parallel methods to increase the effectiveness of conventional attacks, you are simply naive and uninformed. Your reaction is just as knee-jerk as you're claiming mine to be. The difference is that your reaction is based on ideology while mine is based on data.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/cy be rwar/vulnerable/grid.html
http://www.vaonline.org/internet_terrorism.html
http://www.terrorismanswers.com/terrorism/cybert er rorism_print.html
Well, look at it this way - if we didn't have the parade of sort of hokey viruses and worms being (usually fairly badly) written by, essentially, hobbyists, then our systems would be wide open to a couple of things -
- Well written viruses properly designed for maximum impact, stealth and damage, propagated by terrorists or other people looking to take advantage of economic/information system instability, and
Security holes not noticed or taken seriously being used in a less random way that doesn't broadcast itself in an obvious way - thus giving people with criminal intentions a lot of access to computer power and the ability to use it stealthily.
Viruses force people to notice and take security holes seriously.
Go and under Preferences->Homepage goto the section "Exclude Stories from the Homepage" and select "Caldera" and "IBM" and you won't be bothered any more with the SCO lawsuit.
Proofs of negatives are damn tough to come by - and even if the absence of proof is not the proof of absence...
Snopes doesn't really go into it true but it doesn't take a hell of a lot of investigation to call this out as bogus.
First, search around the internet and there is a certain monotony to "reports" of this game. For the most part it is clearly the repetition of some blurb someone wrote that has just gotten pasted hither and yon. There is no supporting evidence, no credible, attributed first-hand accounts. Just like a hoax: a simplistic, monolithic data source makes for a singular, monotonous presence on the 'net.
Next, the supposed ROM. The only evidence that exists of this is a screen shot that could obviously easily be faked. It's said it hangs up on the title page - how convenient. Where's the file? Who found the ROM? Where did it come from? Who's got it now? Easy enough to fake up a title page that's just a typical 80's bubble font - not even any graphics or new information, just the "game" and "company" information that already existed in the story. Most believable explanation? A lazy hoaxer just propping up a tired rumor.
Finally, the whole premise is just dumb. Video games cause amnesia and nightmares? How? Magic science, of course. Secret Military hoodoo. And like the military doesn't have an unlimited supply of seventeen and eighteen-year-olds in the enlisted ranks and guards that they could experiment on to their hearts' content. No, they'll cart experimental equipment out to the boondocks of Oregon to test teenage slackers... uh, to what end again? To collect data... on what? High scores? Giving random punks amnesia and nightmares - I'm sure it's tops on the CIA's to-do list. In fact, who exactly collected this information about kids losing their memories and waking up screaming? If someone, somewhere, legitimately discovered and demonstrated a trend, where is that person? Anyway the idea of video-game mind control is such a chestnut cliche that Harlan Ellison actually mocks it as such in the short story "The Hour that Stretches."
In short, Slashdot's proof is Snopes' proof is my proof is as good as proof that something doesn't exist gets - if there's no supporting evidence and the premise is implausible, it's as certain as it needs to be that it's just BS.
I suspect a significant element is kids. It is fairly common in this day and age that a kid has a TV in their room. The parents buy the console but the kid picks it out, right? So, while the parent may be unlikely to buy an extra DVD player for the kid's room, the savvy kid who picks the DVD playing console gets one anyway.
And yeah, you're also probably right that late DVD adopters considering a new console will see the value of killing two birds with one stone.
Yeah, the parent to your comment (now moderated into submission) is certainly a RTFA response. It's totally clear from the article that he isn't claiming he was not out of compliance - just that it wasn't gratuitous and that he felt (I think rightly) that he was being "made an example of" in a new market.
And how about this gem from the parent - Making him into a martyr for open source only legitimises the belief that linux is free software (free as in beer) and, to some point, that only software "pirates" (sic) use it. What the hell, is this some weird new form of astroturfing or just up-front stupidity? Didja miss the part where CEO Ernie Ball says "You see, I'm not in this just to get free software. No. 1, I don't think there's any such thing as free software"? More to the point, he makes it totally clear that while the original impulse was fueled by anger at the way he was treated as a customer, mind you, that the continued support of open source software is informed by the belief that it's a financial winner for his business.
This story totally deserved a front page. Ernie Ball comes across as a smart, no-nonsense businessman who made open source work in a business setting and found out that there were plenty of benefits beyond getting rid of Microsoft. It's a fine case study and well worth reporting. Martyr for open source - sheesh, hit the dictionary.
I hate to say it, but when I was thrilled when I heard Nintendo was halting GC production and deciding to focus on the "next big thing." I got my GC for a song, relatively - on sale, with a rebate, a free premium game (Metroid Prime) on a Target special.
And now, the price of new and used games is going to crash. The nifty accessories will start to show up on the liquidation tables at the game stores. And as you said - I don't play hundreds of games. At any given time I'm playing about three, and because I don't devote dozens of hours a week to gaming those three games last me months.
For me, picking the loser is picking the winner as long as good games I enjoy playing are available. I'm still pissed I didn't jump on the Dreamcast bandwagon.
Concur. The myth of privatization is the myth of the "free" market in general - that competition is always and ever leading us to the best possible product at the best possible price. We all know how business actually runs. However, that doesn't necessarily mean deregulation is universally bad. I'm against it, personally, because the experience so far is that it has been implemented very poorly. But in theory, it could work - provided it is properly, pardon the irony, regulated.
It doesn't take a genius to see how an insufficiently robust and redundant power grid and poorly implemented deregulation could be synergistic. Mmm, maybe we could start getting China-style electricity in the good ol' USA.
thank goodness their lawyer's opinions matter only slightly more than my cat's.
Geez, dude, way to dis your cat. If you check his box I think you'll find something worth considerably more than than these lawyers' opinions.
Even Microsoft only had the cojones to say that things like the GPL were "viral" and "dangerous." Still, as the incredible economies of scale of electronic data reproduction and transmission make the conventional publishing paradigms less and less tenable, I suspect we may see more instances of companies making the desperate claim that copyright does not grant what it always had - the right of the creator to distribute their own work any damn way they please.
Really, Blade Runner pulls a fair number of components from the story and world of Do Androids..., but as another has said, Ridley Scotts main accomplishment is his creation of an environment suffused with futuristic ambiance.
Predictably, what is most absent from both Dick adaptations is the more philosophical edge. In Minority Report in particular the whole issue of the implications of alternate possible futures devolves to a mere plot device.
And sigh, yes, where IS a director consistently interested in the speculative genre? Spielberg seems to have some designs on that mantle, which is a shame since he's such a ham-handed, cliche driven director. Where's our sci-fi Alfred Hitchcock?
Thank you. Keep in mind also that 45 is the full test group - comprising both those receiving the active agent and those receiving placebo. So basically you've got these results on the basis of a couple dozen people.
There are other issues. Because Creatine occurs naturally in meat, they used only vegetarians in the study. While I understand their motive to reduce unknown variables in the active agent, it still boils down to using a non-typical population for the sample. Is there an impact? Who knows, unless you go the full distance, using a general population and finding some way to meter and account for their meat intake. Suffice to say, a lot of preliminary studies run afoul of the sample population they use - claims for particular foods made on the basis of a genetically discrete population's traditional diet is the classic example. Is it the diet or their genes creating the particular effect? You don't know until you test a general population.
This isn't to say this is bad science. It's just very preliminary. Unfortunately, the media judges the newsworthiness of science by how interesting, not how significant or reliable, they think the results are.
I don't disagree with any of these points. I don't think it's impossible to prolong life, well, indefinitely - just that I don't think anyone can predict realistically, at this point, what or how long it will take even to push us towards a modest goal like 200. It's no more scientific than anything but my instinct is I will die long before anyone hits the two century mark.
I'll note one thing about all the very sensible counterpoints you offer to my arguments - they sound expensive. However long it takes to introduce superlongevity, the very very rich will have it long before anyone else.
This is one of those things like artificial intelligence and the "singularity." Anyone willing to make a pronouncement - like we'll be living to 6000 in 2100 - is just a publicist, not a scientist. They're blowing smoke.
It seems reasonable to suggest that the programmed senescence in our cells is not just a dirty trick God played on us all. And there's a fairly obvious justification for why it exists: replication error. Cell senescence is an anti-cancer adaptation. There's little doubt in my mind that shutting off the death switch in our cells will mean cancer-o-rama. There are other issues. The regeneration (or lack thereof) of nervous tissue. Non-genetic chronic health issues like arterial plaque. An observation of roundworms and a brief stumble into organ-pigs does not a scientific assessment make. It reminds me of some people who have run cute little graphs on increasing life expectancy and decided we'll all be functionally immortal in X years. What they neglect is that while the average life expectancy may be increasing, the absolute life potential (maximum age) doesn't necessarily seem to be going anywhere in particular. More people may beat a hundred, but only a handful of freaks make it past 120.
This is a rotten fluff article with a flawed premise and a pointless exposition. There is not a single substantive ethical implication of hugely extending the human lifespan that is not already covered under expanding human population.
Hey, it's all about consumer choice, man. If you don't want the chip in your food, we're happy to implant it right into YOU! Choose any unique 3 digit ID combination from our expansive database of identifiers. Select from 5+1, 12/2, 13-7, the square root of 36... the fun possibilities are endless! Attractively implanted in your forhead... OR the back of your hand! See? It's all about choices, choices, choices.
"I wonder how true the claim is that introversion is truly hard-wired.
You do? There's absolutely no doubt in my mind."
Well, I think that it's a more complicated question than you present. I don't doubt there are hereditary, genetic, chemical issues that contribute strongly to loosely collected patterns of behavior that we label as personality. On the other hand, human beings have unique abilities to modify and choose their behavior... if this wasn't so genetic drunks and addicts would never get sober, etc. The human mind has more ability to "rewire" itself than I think it generally gets credit for - consider, for example, the astonishing recoveries some people make from catastrophic brain damage, essentially training some unorthodox part of their brain to take over functions from the parts that are destroyed.
I was intensely shy and introverted as a child, and these tendencies still make up an important part of who I am. But I also (perhaps because of my environment growing up in a small community where invisibility was impossible, with a father with a public job that made our family a center of an even smaller community) developed certain extrovert traits I showed little sign of during my "formative" years. I don't really feel like a consciously chose these elements of "extrovert camoflage," particularly. But I don't necessarily think they had as much to do with my genetic makeup or core brain chemistry as with how my particular introverted self interacted with my childhood environment.
More to the point: "...recommended that the USPS and the Department of Homeland Security develop sender identification technology for all U.S. mail. "
Yeah, and in related news Laurel and Hardy will be cooperating to invent a rocket car that can fly to the moon. God love the post office but they're perpetually fighting to stay solvent, and the OHS is just a joke, period. Beyond seven hundred questionable terrorist alerts and some pamphleteering of Tom Mix style personal survival tips that make about as much sense (and are about as likely to save lives) as "put your head between your knees and kiss your ass goodbye," OHE has basically been a functionally unfunded dead weight. There is not significantly improved coordination of our intelligence and anyone who feels the least bit more secure from terrorism is just a naive fool. International terrorism's relative disorganization, poverty, and reliance on fundamentalist zealots with their attendant mental/personality problems are the only things that make me feel any more secure - and only in the sense that Minneapolis is probably lower on the terror target list, and with the full understanding that it's just a matter of time before something horrible enough to one up 9/11 comes along.
So thanks, no, I don't think I'll waste too much time worrying about how this dynamic duo is going to implement universal point to point mail tracking with nothing budgeted for it and the Fed looking to budget around a $475 BILLION DEFICIT, the elephant in the bedroom of any discussion of how we shall fight the filthy hun at home and abroad.
Austin said he took a plea bargain because he feared his case was eligible for a terrorism enhancement, which could have added 20 years to his sentence. The plea deal had called for him to serve four months.
I have no sympathy for this individual, and this says little about the USA system of justice (please don't infer my feelings about general issues of justice or the direction our nation is heading, I'm only commenting on this case).
The prosecutorial side of the USA justice system seeks to prosecute. This guy copped a plea. He said, I am guilty of this offense. That's that. If he believed he was innocent, that his actions were protected free speech, he should have fought it.
The spectacle of a person who is advocating overthrow of the government by force complaining about his CHOICE to plead guilty to a minor offense because of his fear of what he might be successfully prosecuted for if he choses to defy the charges just makes me laugh. I love a person advocating actions when he is not even willing to RISK the heat for merely advocating them, let alone carrying them out himself.
I consider myself an anarchist: that is, I advocate a system of government that strives for the absolute minimum of hierarchical control necessary to maintain the level of order demanded by individual communities. In practice this is a complex concept with many, many degrees of realization, and I recognize that on a national scale such an ideal could easily degrade into thinly (and ironically) disguised totalitarianism, as did attempts to nationalize Marxism in Communist nations. I have grave reservations about the USA government's actions througout the history of this nation. Despite this, I do not see the wisdom of advocating the violent overthrow of a government in a nation where fair, legal elections are possible (and happen on the community level all the time, though money and the two party system have certainly corrupted national and state level elections to some degree).
Essentially, what this says is, we can't convince the majority of our views by peaceful means, so let's overthrow it by violence and FORCE them to see the truth. This point of view is identical to the ideology that resulted in the catastrophically corrupt system in the Soviet Union, a government unable to maintain order for even a century and thus by any measurement a failure.
Austin told the judge Monday he "wasn't really thinking" when he created the Web site. "I'd be devastated if someone used this information to harm others," he said.
Austin admitted posting links about bombs to enable people to build and use them during demonstrations against interstate and foreign trade.
Sounds pretty clear to me. He admits that he was providing information to enable people to make illegal actions. This is all about this individual's choices. And can I point out, a person chosing to follow the information he provided could very well be facing an eternal sentence of being dead. I think he came out better than he had any right to expect.
Personally, I'd like to see some massive nationwide programs in the USA to create superconductor grids (massive data pipes could be bundled along with it) connecting the nations. I know that taxes and spending are the ultimate dirty words unless it's congressional pork or weapons these days, but am I the only one who thinks that we've become a bunch of pansies when it comes to massive private and public works projects? Shit like the Panama Canal, the Transatlantic Railroad, etc. are what made the modern world. We seem to have become very stingy on the vision side of things.
in high school, my chem teacher had us notch a modern penny to expose the zinc and dropped them in a beaker of acid that dissolved the zinc but not the copper (I forget what acid exactly). You could see little bubbles of gas forming as the acid ionized the zinc.
After a number of days the "pennies" were floating - they were just an incredibly thin, hollow envelope of copper that you could crumple as easily as foil. Neat.
I think you make some interesting points. We are very much a "plug and play" culture and we forget that while this makes many things more accessible, it also means you lose both a lot of "hands on" experience and a lot of choices. Although I don't have much of a personal desire to learn Morse, I think the principle extends to many things.
I'm far from old, but still probably a bit dated by the fact that I was among the first trig and calc high school students who had access to an affordable (less than $50) scientific calculator with the major trig and log functions built in. I was lucky enough to be in an advanced program where the same teacher followed us through advanced math, trig and calc for three years. This teacher insisted that we develop the ability to carry out these functions by hand using printed tables and even gave us a little working knowledge of how a slide rule worked. One could say this was a waste of time, and this may be so from the perspective of just coming up with the correct answer for an individual problem. But even without coming up with arcane scenarios like when the terrorists set off the EMP and I need to crunch logs by hand, I really believe that going through this learning process gave me a fundamental understanding of what these equations really meant, and where the numbers that popped up on my calculators LCD display came from. That basis stayed with me (even though I would have to scrub some serious rust off the skillz to do any of that by hand today) and helped me with tough concepts throughout calculus, physics, and physical chemistry in college.
As far as I know a working knowledge of Morse is still a requirement for a ham radio license, if so I think it shows an understanding of the same fundamental principle.
Tinkering with things like a Linux partition on your PC may be the morse code kits that people disdain tomorrow - in that context, maybe some slashdotters can understand a little better why keeping seemingly arcane knowledge alive is a good thing.
Yeah, that's why a chess computer still can't beat a grand master... oh. Wait.
"His approach relies on two concepts, gathering huge amounts of data, and applying statistical models to this data."
This actually reminds me of the story of how Robert Morris built a spell-check with no lexicon at all - it just looked for statistical anomolies. Of course it wasn't perfect, just an interesting exercise.
I'm also strangely reminded of my dad, a retired minsister. In the seminary he found Latin fairly easy but Greek difficult, so he always kept a Greek/Latin New Testament handy as a cheat to help translate from the Greek. Parallel data indeed.
Slashdot Mirror
But the UN still got bombed in Iraq. Soft targets got bombed in India. And if you don't believe that there are people that any rational individual would identify as terrorists, not to mention conventional political forces, who are exploring the use of electronic invasion and disruption as either stand-alone attacks or as parallel methods to increase the effectiveness of conventional attacks, you are simply naive and uninformed. Your reaction is just as knee-jerk as you're claiming mine to be. The difference is that your reaction is based on ideology while mine is based on data.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/c
http://www.vaonline.org/internet_terrorism.html
http://www.terrorismanswers.com/terrorism/cyber
http://www.strategypage.com/dls/articles2001/20
http://www.abs-cbnnews.com/abs_news_body.asp?se
- Well written viruses properly designed for maximum impact, stealth and damage, propagated by terrorists or other people looking to take advantage of economic/information system instability, and
Security holes not noticed or taken seriously being used in a less random way that doesn't broadcast itself in an obvious way - thus giving people with criminal intentions a lot of access to computer power and the ability to use it stealthily.
Viruses force people to notice and take security holes seriously.
but I'm so lazy!
That's why it's so important to make sure you've got GOD on your side before you start slingin' stones, dumbasses.
Gotta admit, tho, even I am getting sick of the constant SCO-a-thon on
Snopes doesn't really go into it true but it doesn't take a hell of a lot of investigation to call this out as bogus.
First, search around the internet and there is a certain monotony to "reports" of this game. For the most part it is clearly the repetition of some blurb someone wrote that has just gotten pasted hither and yon. There is no supporting evidence, no credible, attributed first-hand accounts. Just like a hoax: a simplistic, monolithic data source makes for a singular, monotonous presence on the 'net.
Next, the supposed ROM. The only evidence that exists of this is a screen shot that could obviously easily be faked. It's said it hangs up on the title page - how convenient. Where's the file? Who found the ROM? Where did it come from? Who's got it now? Easy enough to fake up a title page that's just a typical 80's bubble font - not even any graphics or new information, just the "game" and "company" information that already existed in the story. Most believable explanation? A lazy hoaxer just propping up a tired rumor.
Finally, the whole premise is just dumb. Video games cause amnesia and nightmares? How? Magic science, of course. Secret Military hoodoo. And like the military doesn't have an unlimited supply of seventeen and eighteen-year-olds in the enlisted ranks and guards that they could experiment on to their hearts' content. No, they'll cart experimental equipment out to the boondocks of Oregon to test teenage slackers... uh, to what end again? To collect data... on what? High scores? Giving random punks amnesia and nightmares - I'm sure it's tops on the CIA's to-do list. In fact, who exactly collected this information about kids losing their memories and waking up screaming? If someone, somewhere, legitimately discovered and demonstrated a trend, where is that person? Anyway the idea of video-game mind control is such a chestnut cliche that Harlan Ellison actually mocks it as such in the short story "The Hour that Stretches."
In short, Slashdot's proof is Snopes' proof is my proof is as good as proof that something doesn't exist gets - if there's no supporting evidence and the premise is implausible, it's as certain as it needs to be that it's just BS.
And yeah, you're also probably right that late DVD adopters considering a new console will see the value of killing two birds with one stone.
And how about this gem from the parent - Making him into a martyr for open source only legitimises the belief that linux is free software (free as in beer) and, to some point, that only software "pirates" (sic) use it. What the hell, is this some weird new form of astroturfing or just up-front stupidity? Didja miss the part where CEO Ernie Ball says "You see, I'm not in this just to get free software. No. 1, I don't think there's any such thing as free software"? More to the point, he makes it totally clear that while the original impulse was fueled by anger at the way he was treated as a customer, mind you, that the continued support of open source software is informed by the belief that it's a financial winner for his business.
This story totally deserved a front page. Ernie Ball comes across as a smart, no-nonsense businessman who made open source work in a business setting and found out that there were plenty of benefits beyond getting rid of Microsoft. It's a fine case study and well worth reporting. Martyr for open source - sheesh, hit the dictionary.
And now, the price of new and used games is going to crash. The nifty accessories will start to show up on the liquidation tables at the game stores. And as you said - I don't play hundreds of games. At any given time I'm playing about three, and because I don't devote dozens of hours a week to gaming those three games last me months.
For me, picking the loser is picking the winner as long as good games I enjoy playing are available. I'm still pissed I didn't jump on the Dreamcast bandwagon.
It doesn't take a genius to see how an insufficiently robust and redundant power grid and poorly implemented deregulation could be synergistic. Mmm, maybe we could start getting China-style electricity in the good ol' USA.
Geez, dude, way to dis your cat. If you check his box I think you'll find something worth considerably more than than these lawyers' opinions.
Even Microsoft only had the cojones to say that things like the GPL were "viral" and "dangerous." Still, as the incredible economies of scale of electronic data reproduction and transmission make the conventional publishing paradigms less and less tenable, I suspect we may see more instances of companies making the desperate claim that copyright does not grant what it always had - the right of the creator to distribute their own work any damn way they please.
Predictably, what is most absent from both Dick adaptations is the more philosophical edge. In Minority Report in particular the whole issue of the implications of alternate possible futures devolves to a mere plot device.
And sigh, yes, where IS a director consistently interested in the speculative genre? Spielberg seems to have some designs on that mantle, which is a shame since he's such a ham-handed, cliche driven director. Where's our sci-fi Alfred Hitchcock?
There are other issues. Because Creatine occurs naturally in meat, they used only vegetarians in the study. While I understand their motive to reduce unknown variables in the active agent, it still boils down to using a non-typical population for the sample. Is there an impact? Who knows, unless you go the full distance, using a general population and finding some way to meter and account for their meat intake. Suffice to say, a lot of preliminary studies run afoul of the sample population they use - claims for particular foods made on the basis of a genetically discrete population's traditional diet is the classic example. Is it the diet or their genes creating the particular effect? You don't know until you test a general population.
This isn't to say this is bad science. It's just very preliminary. Unfortunately, the media judges the newsworthiness of science by how interesting, not how significant or reliable, they think the results are.
I'll note one thing about all the very sensible counterpoints you offer to my arguments - they sound expensive. However long it takes to introduce superlongevity, the very very rich will have it long before anyone else.
It seems reasonable to suggest that the programmed senescence in our cells is not just a dirty trick God played on us all. And there's a fairly obvious justification for why it exists: replication error. Cell senescence is an anti-cancer adaptation. There's little doubt in my mind that shutting off the death switch in our cells will mean cancer-o-rama. There are other issues. The regeneration (or lack thereof) of nervous tissue. Non-genetic chronic health issues like arterial plaque. An observation of roundworms and a brief stumble into organ-pigs does not a scientific assessment make. It reminds me of some people who have run cute little graphs on increasing life expectancy and decided we'll all be functionally immortal in X years. What they neglect is that while the average life expectancy may be increasing, the absolute life potential (maximum age) doesn't necessarily seem to be going anywhere in particular. More people may beat a hundred, but only a handful of freaks make it past 120.
This is a rotten fluff article with a flawed premise and a pointless exposition. There is not a single substantive ethical implication of hugely extending the human lifespan that is not already covered under expanding human population.
Hey, it's all about consumer choice, man. If you don't want the chip in your food, we're happy to implant it right into YOU! Choose any unique 3 digit ID combination from our expansive database of identifiers. Select from 5+1, 12/2, 13-7, the square root of 36... the fun possibilities are endless! Attractively implanted in your forhead... OR the back of your hand! See? It's all about choices, choices, choices.
You do? There's absolutely no doubt in my mind."
Well, I think that it's a more complicated question than you present. I don't doubt there are hereditary, genetic, chemical issues that contribute strongly to loosely collected patterns of behavior that we label as personality. On the other hand, human beings have unique abilities to modify and choose their behavior... if this wasn't so genetic drunks and addicts would never get sober, etc. The human mind has more ability to "rewire" itself than I think it generally gets credit for - consider, for example, the astonishing recoveries some people make from catastrophic brain damage, essentially training some unorthodox part of their brain to take over functions from the parts that are destroyed.
I was intensely shy and introverted as a child, and these tendencies still make up an important part of who I am. But I also (perhaps because of my environment growing up in a small community where invisibility was impossible, with a father with a public job that made our family a center of an even smaller community) developed certain extrovert traits I showed little sign of during my "formative" years. I don't really feel like a consciously chose these elements of "extrovert camoflage," particularly. But I don't necessarily think they had as much to do with my genetic makeup or core brain chemistry as with how my particular introverted self interacted with my childhood environment.
Yeah, and in related news Laurel and Hardy will be cooperating to invent a rocket car that can fly to the moon. God love the post office but they're perpetually fighting to stay solvent, and the OHS is just a joke, period. Beyond seven hundred questionable terrorist alerts and some pamphleteering of Tom Mix style personal survival tips that make about as much sense (and are about as likely to save lives) as "put your head between your knees and kiss your ass goodbye," OHE has basically been a functionally unfunded dead weight. There is not significantly improved coordination of our intelligence and anyone who feels the least bit more secure from terrorism is just a naive fool. International terrorism's relative disorganization, poverty, and reliance on fundamentalist zealots with their attendant mental/personality problems are the only things that make me feel any more secure - and only in the sense that Minneapolis is probably lower on the terror target list, and with the full understanding that it's just a matter of time before something horrible enough to one up 9/11 comes along.
So thanks, no, I don't think I'll waste too much time worrying about how this dynamic duo is going to implement universal point to point mail tracking with nothing budgeted for it and the Fed looking to budget around a $475 BILLION DEFICIT, the elephant in the bedroom of any discussion of how we shall fight the filthy hun at home and abroad.
I have no sympathy for this individual, and this says little about the USA system of justice (please don't infer my feelings about general issues of justice or the direction our nation is heading, I'm only commenting on this case).
The prosecutorial side of the USA justice system seeks to prosecute. This guy copped a plea. He said, I am guilty of this offense. That's that. If he believed he was innocent, that his actions were protected free speech, he should have fought it.
The spectacle of a person who is advocating overthrow of the government by force complaining about his CHOICE to plead guilty to a minor offense because of his fear of what he might be successfully prosecuted for if he choses to defy the charges just makes me laugh. I love a person advocating actions when he is not even willing to RISK the heat for merely advocating them, let alone carrying them out himself.
I consider myself an anarchist: that is, I advocate a system of government that strives for the absolute minimum of hierarchical control necessary to maintain the level of order demanded by individual communities. In practice this is a complex concept with many, many degrees of realization, and I recognize that on a national scale such an ideal could easily degrade into thinly (and ironically) disguised totalitarianism, as did attempts to nationalize Marxism in Communist nations. I have grave reservations about the USA government's actions througout the history of this nation. Despite this, I do not see the wisdom of advocating the violent overthrow of a government in a nation where fair, legal elections are possible (and happen on the community level all the time, though money and the two party system have certainly corrupted national and state level elections to some degree).
Essentially, what this says is, we can't convince the majority of our views by peaceful means, so let's overthrow it by violence and FORCE them to see the truth. This point of view is identical to the ideology that resulted in the catastrophically corrupt system in the Soviet Union, a government unable to maintain order for even a century and thus by any measurement a failure.
Austin told the judge Monday he "wasn't really thinking" when he created the Web site. "I'd be devastated if someone used this information to harm others," he said.
Austin admitted posting links about bombs to enable people to build and use them during demonstrations against interstate and foreign trade.
Sounds pretty clear to me. He admits that he was providing information to enable people to make illegal actions. This is all about this individual's choices. And can I point out, a person chosing to follow the information he provided could very well be facing an eternal sentence of being dead. I think he came out better than he had any right to expect.
Troll
So, like, is a Mr. Microphone illegal in the U.K.? And did I just date myself by mentioning Mr. Microphone?
superconductor power
It's not science fiction, incidentally - as the link below indicates.
http://www.amsuper.com/html/newsEvents/news/105
Personally, I'd like to see some massive nationwide programs in the USA to create superconductor grids (massive data pipes could be bundled along with it) connecting the nations. I know that taxes and spending are the ultimate dirty words unless it's congressional pork or weapons these days, but am I the only one who thinks that we've become a bunch of pansies when it comes to massive private and public works projects? Shit like the Panama Canal, the Transatlantic Railroad, etc. are what made the modern world. We seem to have become very stingy on the vision side of things.
After a number of days the "pennies" were floating - they were just an incredibly thin, hollow envelope of copper that you could crumple as easily as foil. Neat.
I'm far from old, but still probably a bit dated by the fact that I was among the first trig and calc high school students who had access to an affordable (less than $50) scientific calculator with the major trig and log functions built in. I was lucky enough to be in an advanced program where the same teacher followed us through advanced math, trig and calc for three years. This teacher insisted that we develop the ability to carry out these functions by hand using printed tables and even gave us a little working knowledge of how a slide rule worked. One could say this was a waste of time, and this may be so from the perspective of just coming up with the correct answer for an individual problem. But even without coming up with arcane scenarios like when the terrorists set off the EMP and I need to crunch logs by hand, I really believe that going through this learning process gave me a fundamental understanding of what these equations really meant, and where the numbers that popped up on my calculators LCD display came from. That basis stayed with me (even though I would have to scrub some serious rust off the skillz to do any of that by hand today) and helped me with tough concepts throughout calculus, physics, and physical chemistry in college.
As far as I know a working knowledge of Morse is still a requirement for a ham radio license, if so I think it shows an understanding of the same fundamental principle.
Tinkering with things like a Linux partition on your PC may be the morse code kits that people disdain tomorrow - in that context, maybe some slashdotters can understand a little better why keeping seemingly arcane knowledge alive is a good thing.
"His approach relies on two concepts, gathering huge amounts of data, and applying statistical models to this data."
This actually reminds me of the story of how Robert Morris built a spell-check with no lexicon at all - it just looked for statistical anomolies. Of course it wasn't perfect, just an interesting exercise.
I'm also strangely reminded of my dad, a retired minsister. In the seminary he found Latin fairly easy but Greek difficult, so he always kept a Greek/Latin New Testament handy as a cheat to help translate from the Greek. Parallel data indeed.