So it is, gives lots of status updates and factoids - last one so far.. "After 90 days, when I freeze, that will be end of mission. But if I wake up again (when the sun returns to arctic circle) I will phone home."
How anthropomorphic and cute can you get!
Nasa TV just fired up, this is way better than traditional tv, you feel much more engaged with the thing following it in real time. Lots of luck to Phoenix, theres a lot of people with their fingers crossed (thumbs held in Sweden).
How do you run error correction over a link with a 15minute latency each way? Traditional IP is not going to be at all efficient. Does anyone know what the data transmission protocols are, the solution must be interesting.
I believe that this could be the only rational motivation for the policy. An excuse for harassed workers going off line from their jobs. However from any other point of view it is just a tiresome nuisance. What if your cell phone happens to be a PDA and you are carrying it to help reassemble a party of friends for lunch in the park. Being Britain people tend to queue and follow rules - even rules which should obviously be followed in the spirit rather than in the detail. Confusion strife and misery are all it will cause for those who do happen to carry a PDA.
The policy makes a good point about escaping from work. In nanny State nu-labour Britain it comes across as pompous marketing designed to appeal to those without PDA's who can then feel a self righteous glow about how good they are and how bad someone else is. It would have made more sense to have just marketed the idea that 'Leave the everyday world of work behind. You will have so much fun with your kids that you'll forget all about it' or some such.
The odd executive welded to their PDA smart phone who will be spending the next week in Chicago and Beijing is the only person likely to be inconvenienced as most people will not be carrying expensive toys likely to fly off the big dipper into the waiting concrete below. This may be the real reason for the policy. Some nice spin to stop people carrying bulky electronic toys that fall out of pockets and hit customers who sue everybody in sight.
The fear of a law suit plus dubious marketing spin sounds about right for any action in the modern world.
A very reasoned analysis of the takeover bid situation. For me I guess it all comes down to whether the prediction that Microsoft would make a success of Yahoo is correct. Like most major corporations Microsoft acquires most of its innovation and disruptive businesses from outside. I would be interested in seeing how it thought it could capitalize on the takeover. My fear being that it does not have a big slice of the 'search' market which Google is so pre-eminent in and is just seeking to have a slice of that market. The downside of that would be that Yahoo would be diverted from competing in that market in order to integrate a lot of Microsoft 'product placement' activities. This would probably damage Yahoos competitiveness rather than enhance it. If the shareholders are not getting the value out of Yahoo that they believe is possible then is it not more likely that they would get it by changing the management rather than passing control of it to another business with core skills in a completely different area? Microsoft's business tactics have relied on its monopolistic position in the past and this approach will not succeed against Google because it is Google that has the near monopoly. It is Google that gives away the "free IE browser" these days and takes away the market from other entrants. I suspect that they regard Yahoo as a useful asset as it is in much the same way that Microsoft regards Apple. A competitor that gives the illusion that there is not a monopoly in the market. They would not probably want to prop it up were it a part of Microsoft in the same way that Microsoft does Apple. So Microsoft's take over of Yahoo is not in Google's interests for many reasons. Well it will be interesting to see how it all turns out.
Thanks for the reply. It helped to appreciate that the quantum entangled pair with one launched at Alpha Centuari would have to be interrogated after the time it takes to get there at light speed for the entangled behavior to allow either end to affect the other - in this sense quantum entanglement is not in conflict with my understanding of the space time continuum. The past is the past and quantum entanglement doesn't mess with it.
I'm still thinking about collapsed waveforms and the difference between the macroscopic and the microscopic. I have played with superconductors (in an engineering sense) so its still unclear to me how you differentiate. A superconductor or liquid Helium for that matter exhibit quantum mechanical effects on a macroscopic scale. The helpful transactional model you suggest works great for me (as an object) but doesn't seem so clear in the context of macroscopic quantum effects.
I'm looking forward to the publication of the paper and the resulting discussion on information leaking out of black holes and how it relates to the boundaries of spacetime - Big bang and the future of the universe. Confusing though it may be the biggest questions in physics have advanced remarkably during my lifetime since I came across them in the 70's. I think that this advancing knowledge ultimately has a profound effect on human society. Certainly the realization that Earth is not the center of the universe made us realize that knowledge was more likely to be useful if tempered by observation rather than declared by fiat. Knowledge of the boundaries of spacetime will also exert some influence on human affairs. Similarly we may also be living in an era when life may be discovered somewhere other than Earth. We live in truly exciting times.
The interesting thing to me about quantum entanglement is that it points towards an incorrect appreciation of what time is. It suggests that for an appropriately chosen set of entangled particles there is an ever present now up until the point where you interrogate one of them and thereby apparently determine the state of the other.
Spacetime has always existed and can always be seen in any state that it is/has been/will be if you have access to the light cone from it. What is weird is that human beings only seem to have access to past light cones. Why? All laws of physics are completely symmetrical to the past and the future but we can only see one way.
I can fire off a quantum entangled particle off to my ancestor on alpha centuri and either they or I can look at one of the pairs and determine the state of the other, but only they can train their super-scope (tm) on me and see me typing - I cannot fire up my scope and look at them. What gives?
I am collapsed waveforms apparently (at least my atoms haven't appeared spontaneously on the moon recently, unless I was asleep at the time) with a special status that allows me to go around collapsing other waveforms willy-nilly - at will. Collapsed waveforms apparently do not have an ever present now like their un-collapsed quantum entangled cousins. Its all very confusing.
In the old world before the age of the internets it would be entirely appropriate for someone who persuaded another to kill themselves to be treated as having committed a criminal act.
In fact it is still highly illegal in real life to assist someone to kill themselves with no suggestion of persuasion - you cannot hand a terminally ill person a bottle of pills to kill themselves with at a time of their choosing. Instead you have to chain the sick person up and watch gleefully as the tumor eats their brain and crushes every nerve in their bones so that they die in excruciating agony with no control over their bowels or bladder and deprived of vision, speech and movement die in appalling isolation. Thats how much we and the law despise assisting the suicide of another apparently.
So should the act of posting stuff on the internets be subject to legal scrutiny and potential criminal judgment? Well, I don't know. The cut and paste world where we can all see photos of our friend committing illegal acts on Facebook, bebo et-al may eventually come to be judged by different rules from real life. But right now the hatred that ensures that terminally ill people are crucified is almost certainly going to come down hard on anyone messing about online.
If you want to have rational freedom on the internets then you are going to have to get it in the real world too.
Markets are regulated by states so as to provide a happy medium between efficiency and sustainable growth. The sub-prime market for example was allowed to spiral out of control and has dumped sh1t on the world economy - so much so that states have had to buy large chunks of the banking system to prevent meltdown and worldwide economic collapse. You and I will be paying huge chunks of taxes to fund the efficient little buggers who packaged up worthless debt and sold it on in this market for decades. It is debatable whether Ichan and his ilk are also trashing our economies in the interest of their own profit. At some point Governments will squash bugs like him if it becomes obvious that they are more damaging than promoting efficient and effective market transactions. Politicians do not like watching large employers destroyed by greedy people because they have to answer to the swathes of pissed off former employees. Look at the phenomenon of 'anonymous' who have decided through no common political or social association to destroy Scientology because they are obviously obnoxious. No democratic government is going to ignore the possibility that their voters are going to organize against them because the system is so lax that overt injustice is being sanctioned by politicians. Icahn is not unstoppable just because he is doing what the market regulation allows him to do today. He will be called to account eventually if his actions have obviously negative consequences. The ecosystem has a structure which can be changed by politicians. What do you think the G8 has its cosy little chats about? They trade tweaks to the market structure.
The answer is "we don't know" and "ask me why we don't know"
But remember that a 7 year old may not yet have the conceptual framework to deal with this - try again at age 11 or so.
We have lots of explanations along the lines of "the tooth fairy did it" or "Santa Klaus did it" or "god did it" but all of these ultimately just reveal the fact that we don't know yet, but we have lots of speculation.
If its beyond the lightspeed*age of the universe we can know nothing about it - and quite possibly the universe goes on beyond the observable bit essentialy for ever. We can never confirm or deny it by direct observation. Therefore there are quite possibly an infinite number of stars. Just dont ask me which kind of infinity it is.
Hack the account and find what you can. Do not be expected to be thanked for doing it - you may very well end up being hated by the family for revealing information. However it is the right thing to do. Asking questions should be what humans are about and who are we to deny humanity. Good luck.
Hmm, I just worked out that I spend $4748 a year on petrol to commute to work here in the UK (50 Miles a day). So the hardware would only cost me two years of petrol recipts. The main question would therefore be how expensive the sugars would be to run the thing. (oh and the government tax on making the stuff yourself - after all in Browns Britain if it moves then he taxes it. About 70% of the price of Petrol and diesel is currently tax).
So how come the business need for this ghastly 1Gb prototype application hadn't been identified and slotted in to the IT departments project list. It wouldn't be because they are all too busy sucking up to the ERP project so that they get skilz that will pump their income up beyond human comprehension would it?
Simple fact is that for a variety of reasons the IT department is often too busy elsewhere to find and cater for all business needs. The business needs the innovation of superusers because they are at the coal face and can see what they are. Too many businesses are missing out on a whole raft of creativity and innovation because they assume that the IT department has it covered.
Glad to hear that your IT department recognizes this need and that you get to convert some nasty prototype into something industrial strength and almost immortal. Sounds like you work for a smart business. Though it sounds to me more like you are jealous of the superusers because they only have to build prototypes whilst building industrial strength is hard hard hard. Keep up the good work:-)
Hurrah, all I have ever wanted from a laptop is portability and battery life.
Sadly all manufacturers have ever tried to sell me is larger, faster, heavier space heaters with shorter and shorter battery lives. I have a JVC mininote laptop from a few years back, its battery life isnt brilliant but it weighs nothing and wasnt unreasonably expensive. I will be buying one of these new generation laptops fairly soon, they look great.
I broke the USB ports on the JVC when I dropped it and I carry and 'usb plug in' anything 'desktop' that I need on the road (like my media collection) so a replacement is due.
God is just a meme that people get infected with. The first job of the meme is to protect itself from destruction, in fact religion is the definition of a successful meme. Its hardly surprising that we can reconcile anything from cosmology with religion. It would be a pretty crap religion if it couldn't worm its way into compatibility in our heads.
I did not say that advertising revenue isn't spent on good things. I said that the psychology of much advertising is bankrupt and bad for society.
Not all advertising is evil and corrupting either. Advertising which tells you that a product exists is not inherently bad. However I think that advertising which focuses on things that people are fearful about breeds a fearful society. Advertising which invents a lifestyle brand association is often either a lie or a deceptive fantasy. Branded products are often more expensive than unbranded - the difference is spent on advertising.
Just because advertising is paying for valuable web services does not mean that you are not paying for them.
I don't hold out much hope of finding a better market method of funding good web content. But that doesn't stop me complaining about the bad effects of some advertising. We can and do regulate what advertisers are allowed to do and I suggest that fear based advertising is one more thing that needs some regulation.
100% agree. Its not a constitutional right for businesses to try and brainwash me with messages of fear and loathing. Advertising is responsible for lots of evil - try buying cars based on their environmental impact or fuel consumption, you cant. All cars are sold based on whether they kill your children or whether they improve your social status/chance of procreating. So there isn't any data available on anything else. In the end society starts to evaluate everything based on lowest common denominator psychology, the advertising industry is not a good institution. On the whole we would be better off without most of it. See you in Marlborough country.
Religion is any meme that claims that it is a religion.
What we have to question is whether we should afford this particular meme the legal status of a religion. Society accords a special status to religious memes such as tax breaks, admission of its leaders into political debate and various other accommodations.
By popular acclaim Scientology is not a meme that we would like to accept as a religion. Its behaviour is agressive and antisocial at complete variance with the majority of other religions.
All memes have systems to protect themselves and to destroy other memes, medieval Christianity burned people who didn't follow the party line exactly, radical Islam still expects to convert the world using violence. However all sophisticated modern religions have adapted to the modern world in which diplomacy, brand promotion and the programing of children protect the meme and ensure its propagation quite nicely thank you very much.
One of the most unpleasant things about Scientology is that its main protective mechanism is to destroy anyone who leaves the "church". By definition this includes anyone who is skeptical or has no interest in religion at all, it is not powerful enough to attack other religions but it is very clear that should it ever become powerful enough it would seek to destroy members of other religions.
Basically it is a meme that behaves in a disgusting anti social manner and anyone who notes that this is the case is a target for members of the "church" to destroy. I have not noted this as a tactic of the Catholic church over the outing of its slow reaction to the complaints that some of its priests were molesting children, it did not in general try to destroy the complainants.
You can argue whether the "church" of Scientology is damaging its members, in the long run it will die out in a Darwinian fashion if it is harming them. It is notable that the success of many mainstream religions is because the community supports members of the church and the expense of kneeling on stone floors chanting nonsense has generally been outweighed by the lucrative support of fellow church goers - the meme is sucessful. This may change as we attempt to end discrimination or corruption in society through the rule of law, but it has certainly been a factor in the survival of mainstream religions in the past.
If Scientology does things that break the law then citizens should rightly be outraged. We should also be entitled to be moraly outraged if it uses uncivilised tactics to attack outsiders. The legal question of whether or not it is a religion is arbitary nonsense but we all have a right to decide whether it is moraly right or not to give it that legal status. In general you make your mind up about that based on what you know about them.
What I know about them is that most of the internet thinks that they are a scam and the only news stories I ever see about them are about how they gag people from learning more about them and about what legal cases they are fighting to try and destroy former members with. From what I know it sounds to me like they don't deserve the legal status of being a religion.
However its all a moot point as I believe that people are leaving it in droves and that its only a matter of time before it goes belly up anyway. I suspect that it is this tendency which the opportunist 'anonymous' group have spotted and seen as an opportunity to exercise their prankster skills over.
Thats a fine speech he gave there with three 90th birthday wishes for discovery of extra terrestrial life, clean energy and an end to conflict in Sri Lanka. The moving finger writes and having writ moves on...
Slashdot Mirror
Oh no.. not again
Best of luck from Plymouth UK, go find us some water ice!
So it is, gives lots of status updates and factoids - last one so far..
"After 90 days, when I freeze, that will be end of mission. But if I wake up again (when the sun returns to arctic circle) I will phone home."
How anthropomorphic and cute can you get!
Nasa TV just fired up, this is way better than traditional tv, you feel much more engaged with the thing following it in real time. Lots of luck to Phoenix, theres a lot of people with their fingers crossed (thumbs held in Sweden).
How do you run error correction over a link with a 15minute latency each way? Traditional IP is not going to be at all efficient. Does anyone know what the data transmission protocols are, the solution must be interesting.
I believe that this could be the only rational motivation for the policy. An excuse for harassed workers going off line from their jobs. However from any other point of view it is just a tiresome nuisance. What if your cell phone happens to be a PDA and you are carrying it to help reassemble a party of friends for lunch in the park. Being Britain people tend to queue and follow rules - even rules which should obviously be followed in the spirit rather than in the detail. Confusion strife and misery are all it will cause for those who do happen to carry a PDA.
The policy makes a good point about escaping from work. In nanny State nu-labour Britain it comes across as pompous marketing designed to appeal to those without PDA's who can then feel a self righteous glow about how good they are and how bad someone else is. It would have made more sense to have just marketed the idea that 'Leave the everyday world of work behind. You will have so much fun with your kids that you'll forget all about it' or some such.
The odd executive welded to their PDA smart phone who will be spending the next week in Chicago and Beijing is the only person likely to be inconvenienced as most people will not be carrying expensive toys likely to fly off the big dipper into the waiting concrete below. This may be the real reason for the policy. Some nice spin to stop people carrying bulky electronic toys that fall out of pockets and hit customers who sue everybody in sight.
The fear of a law suit plus dubious marketing spin sounds about right for any action in the modern world.
A very reasoned analysis of the takeover bid situation. For me I guess it all comes down to whether the prediction that Microsoft would make a success of Yahoo is correct. Like most major corporations Microsoft acquires most of its innovation and disruptive businesses from outside. I would be interested in seeing how it thought it could capitalize on the takeover. My fear being that it does not have a big slice of the 'search' market which Google is so pre-eminent in and is just seeking to have a slice of that market. The downside of that would be that Yahoo would be diverted from competing in that market in order to integrate a lot of Microsoft 'product placement' activities. This would probably damage Yahoos competitiveness rather than enhance it. If the shareholders are not getting the value out of Yahoo that they believe is possible then is it not more likely that they would get it by changing the management rather than passing control of it to another business with core skills in a completely different area? Microsoft's business tactics have relied on its monopolistic position in the past and this approach will not succeed against Google because it is Google that has the near monopoly. It is Google that gives away the "free IE browser" these days and takes away the market from other entrants. I suspect that they regard Yahoo as a useful asset as it is in much the same way that Microsoft regards Apple. A competitor that gives the illusion that there is not a monopoly in the market. They would not probably want to prop it up were it a part of Microsoft in the same way that Microsoft does Apple. So Microsoft's take over of Yahoo is not in Google's interests for many reasons. Well it will be interesting to see how it all turns out.
Thanks for the reply. It helped to appreciate that the quantum entangled pair with one launched at Alpha Centuari would have to be interrogated after the time it takes to get there at light speed for the entangled behavior to allow either end to affect the other - in this sense quantum entanglement is not in conflict with my understanding of the space time continuum. The past is the past and quantum entanglement doesn't mess with it.
I'm still thinking about collapsed waveforms and the difference between the macroscopic and the microscopic. I have played with superconductors (in an engineering sense) so its still unclear to me how you differentiate. A superconductor or liquid Helium for that matter exhibit quantum mechanical effects on a macroscopic scale. The helpful transactional model you suggest works great for me (as an object) but doesn't seem so clear in the context of macroscopic quantum effects.
I'm looking forward to the publication of the paper and the resulting discussion on information leaking out of black holes and how it relates to the boundaries of spacetime - Big bang and the future of the universe. Confusing though it may be the biggest questions in physics have advanced remarkably during my lifetime since I came across them in the 70's. I think that this advancing knowledge ultimately has a profound effect on human society. Certainly the realization that Earth is not the center of the universe made us realize that knowledge was more likely to be useful if tempered by observation rather than declared by fiat. Knowledge of the boundaries of spacetime will also exert some influence on human affairs. Similarly we may also be living in an era when life may be discovered somewhere other than Earth. We live in truly exciting times.
The interesting thing to me about quantum entanglement is that it points towards an incorrect appreciation of what time is. It suggests that for an appropriately chosen set of entangled particles there is an ever present now up until the point where you interrogate one of them and thereby apparently determine the state of the other.
Spacetime has always existed and can always be seen in any state that it is/has been/will be if you have access to the light cone from it. What is weird is that human beings only seem to have access to past light cones. Why? All laws of physics are completely symmetrical to the past and the future but we can only see one way.
I can fire off a quantum entangled particle off to my ancestor on alpha centuri and either they or I can look at one of the pairs and determine the state of the other, but only they can train their super-scope (tm) on me and see me typing - I cannot fire up my scope and look at them. What gives?
I am collapsed waveforms apparently (at least my atoms haven't appeared spontaneously on the moon recently, unless I was asleep at the time) with a special status that allows me to go around collapsing other waveforms willy-nilly - at will. Collapsed waveforms apparently do not have an ever present now like their un-collapsed quantum entangled cousins. Its all very confusing.
In the old world before the age of the internets it would be entirely appropriate for someone who persuaded another to kill themselves to be treated as having committed a criminal act.
In fact it is still highly illegal in real life to assist someone to kill themselves with no suggestion of persuasion - you cannot hand a terminally ill person a bottle of pills to kill themselves with at a time of their choosing. Instead you have to chain the sick person up and watch gleefully as the tumor eats their brain and crushes every nerve in their bones so that they die in excruciating agony with no control over their bowels or bladder and deprived of vision, speech and movement die in appalling isolation. Thats how much we and the law despise assisting the suicide of another apparently.
So should the act of posting stuff on the internets be subject to legal scrutiny and potential criminal judgment? Well, I don't know. The cut and paste world where we can all see photos of our friend committing illegal acts on Facebook, bebo et-al may eventually come to be judged by different rules from real life. But right now the hatred that ensures that terminally ill people are crucified is almost certainly going to come down hard on anyone messing about online.
If you want to have rational freedom on the internets then you are going to have to get it in the real world too.
Markets are regulated by states so as to provide a happy medium between efficiency and sustainable growth. The sub-prime market for example was allowed to spiral out of control and has dumped sh1t on the world economy - so much so that states have had to buy large chunks of the banking system to prevent meltdown and worldwide economic collapse. You and I will be paying huge chunks of taxes to fund the efficient little buggers who packaged up worthless debt and sold it on in this market for decades. It is debatable whether Ichan and his ilk are also trashing our economies in the interest of their own profit. At some point Governments will squash bugs like him if it becomes obvious that they are more damaging than promoting efficient and effective market transactions. Politicians do not like watching large employers destroyed by greedy people because they have to answer to the swathes of pissed off former employees. Look at the phenomenon of 'anonymous' who have decided through no common political or social association to destroy Scientology because they are obviously obnoxious. No democratic government is going to ignore the possibility that their voters are going to organize against them because the system is so lax that overt injustice is being sanctioned by politicians. Icahn is not unstoppable just because he is doing what the market regulation allows him to do today. He will be called to account eventually if his actions have obviously negative consequences. The ecosystem has a structure which can be changed by politicians. What do you think the G8 has its cosy little chats about? They trade tweaks to the market structure.
The answer is "we don't know" and "ask me why we don't know"
But remember that a 7 year old may not yet have the conceptual framework to deal with this - try again at age 11 or so.
We have lots of explanations along the lines of "the tooth fairy did it" or "Santa Klaus did it" or "god did it" but all of these ultimately just reveal the fact that we don't know yet, but we have lots of speculation.
If its beyond the lightspeed*age of the universe we can know nothing about it - and quite possibly the universe goes on beyond the observable bit essentialy for ever. We can never confirm or deny it by direct observation. Therefore there are quite possibly an infinite number of stars. Just dont ask me which kind of infinity it is.
Hack the account and find what you can. Do not be expected to be thanked for doing it - you may very well end up being hated by the family for revealing information. However it is the right thing to do. Asking questions should be what humans are about and who are we to deny humanity. Good luck.
Hmm, I just worked out that I spend $4748 a year on petrol to commute to work here in the UK (50 Miles a day). So the hardware would only cost me two years of petrol recipts. The main question would therefore be how expensive the sugars would be to run the thing. (oh and the government tax on making the stuff yourself - after all in Browns Britain if it moves then he taxes it. About 70% of the price of Petrol and diesel is currently tax).
Yee haw - and we seem to have an industrial sized moonshine business into the bargain!
Try the UC Berkley webcasts or Google tech talks, way more information dense than Science Channel.
So how come the business need for this ghastly 1Gb prototype application hadn't been identified and slotted in to the IT departments project list. It wouldn't be because they are all too busy sucking up to the ERP project so that they get skilz that will pump their income up beyond human comprehension would it?
:-)
Simple fact is that for a variety of reasons the IT department is often too busy elsewhere to find and cater for all business needs. The business needs the innovation of superusers because they are at the coal face and can see what they are. Too many businesses are missing out on a whole raft of creativity and innovation because they assume that the IT department has it covered.
Glad to hear that your IT department recognizes this need and that you get to convert some nasty prototype into something industrial strength and almost immortal. Sounds like you work for a smart business. Though it sounds to me more like you are jealous of the superusers because they only have to build prototypes whilst building industrial strength is hard hard hard. Keep up the good work
Hurrah, all I have ever wanted from a laptop is portability and battery life.
Sadly all manufacturers have ever tried to sell me is larger, faster, heavier space heaters with shorter and shorter battery lives. I have a JVC mininote laptop from a few years back, its battery life isnt brilliant but it weighs nothing and wasnt unreasonably expensive. I will be buying one of these new generation laptops fairly soon, they look great.
I broke the USB ports on the JVC when I dropped it and I carry and 'usb plug in' anything 'desktop' that I need on the road (like my media collection) so a replacement is due.
God is just a meme that people get infected with. The first job of the meme is to protect itself from destruction, in fact religion is the definition of a successful meme. Its hardly surprising that we can reconcile anything from cosmology with religion. It would be a pretty crap religion if it couldn't worm its way into compatibility in our heads.
I did not say that advertising revenue isn't spent on good things. I said that the psychology of much advertising is bankrupt and bad for society.
Not all advertising is evil and corrupting either. Advertising which tells you that a product exists is not inherently bad. However I think that advertising which focuses on things that people are fearful about breeds a fearful society. Advertising which invents a lifestyle brand association is often either a lie or a deceptive fantasy. Branded products are often more expensive than unbranded - the difference is spent on advertising.
Just because advertising is paying for valuable web services does not mean that you are not paying for them.
I don't hold out much hope of finding a better market method of funding good web content. But that doesn't stop me complaining about the bad effects of some advertising. We can and do regulate what advertisers are allowed to do and I suggest that fear based advertising is one more thing that needs some regulation.
100% agree. Its not a constitutional right for businesses to try and brainwash me with messages of fear and loathing. Advertising is responsible for lots of evil - try buying cars based on their environmental impact or fuel consumption, you cant. All cars are sold based on whether they kill your children or whether they improve your social status/chance of procreating. So there isn't any data available on anything else. In the end society starts to evaluate everything based on lowest common denominator psychology, the advertising industry is not a good institution. On the whole we would be better off without most of it. See you in Marlborough country.
Religion is any meme that claims that it is a religion.
What we have to question is whether we should afford this particular meme the legal status of a religion. Society accords a special status to religious memes such as tax breaks, admission of its leaders into political debate and various other accommodations.
By popular acclaim Scientology is not a meme that we would like to accept as a religion. Its behaviour is agressive and antisocial at complete variance with the majority of other religions.
All memes have systems to protect themselves and to destroy other memes, medieval Christianity burned people who didn't follow the party line exactly, radical Islam still expects to convert the world using violence. However all sophisticated modern religions have adapted to the modern world in which diplomacy, brand promotion and the programing of children protect the meme and ensure its propagation quite nicely thank you very much.
One of the most unpleasant things about Scientology is that its main protective mechanism is to destroy anyone who leaves the "church". By definition this includes anyone who is skeptical or has no interest in religion at all, it is not powerful enough to attack other religions but it is very clear that should it ever become powerful enough it would seek to destroy members of other religions.
Basically it is a meme that behaves in a disgusting anti social manner and anyone who notes that this is the case is a target for members of the "church" to destroy. I have not noted this as a tactic of the Catholic church over the outing of its slow reaction to the complaints that some of its priests were molesting children, it did not in general try to destroy the complainants.
You can argue whether the "church" of Scientology is damaging its members, in the long run it will die out in a Darwinian fashion if it is harming them. It is notable that the success of many mainstream religions is because the community supports members of the church and the expense of kneeling on stone floors chanting nonsense has generally been outweighed by the lucrative support of fellow church goers - the meme is sucessful. This may change as we attempt to end discrimination or corruption in society through the rule of law, but it has certainly been a factor in the survival of mainstream religions in the past.
If Scientology does things that break the law then citizens should rightly be outraged. We should also be entitled to be moraly outraged if it uses uncivilised tactics to attack outsiders. The legal question of whether or not it is a religion is arbitary nonsense but we all have a right to decide whether it is moraly right or not to give it that legal status. In general you make your mind up about that based on what you know about them.
What I know about them is that most of the internet thinks that they are a scam and the only news stories I ever see about them are about how they gag people from learning more about them and about what legal cases they are fighting to try and destroy former members with. From what I know it sounds to me like they don't deserve the legal status of being a religion.
However its all a moot point as I believe that people are leaving it in droves and that its only a matter of time before it goes belly up anyway. I suspect that it is this tendency which the opportunist 'anonymous' group have spotted and seen as an opportunity to exercise their prankster skills over.
Its not as fast as cable but it is as fast as my "8MB" TalkTalk ADSL in the UK which runs at a shade under 3MB per second.
Thats a fine speech he gave there with three 90th birthday wishes for discovery of extra terrestrial life, clean energy and an end to conflict in Sri Lanka. The moving finger writes and having writ moves on...
what about the Unruh effect?