1) What exactly is objectionable within the UNCRC? All it says is basically that children are people, not property; children have a right to be with family, to see both parents if they're divorced, to free speech, to privacy, and to be free of abuse. If this is all horrible in your mind, then your notion of parents' rights aren't very far from those of slaveholders.
2) So, why 7 state legislatures have introduced declarations of sovereignity? It seems to be a fringe Republican movement.
I found it odd that more than half of the states involved were blue states. So, I went to look at each bill and found the party affiliation of all the sponsors:
OK: Single Republican sponsor. Asserts 10th Amendment in general. Cites New York v. United States. Omits mention of South Dakota v. Dole. Key introduces it every year as a publicity stunt, apparently. MI: Single Republican sponsor. Direct rip-off of Key's bill from OK. AZ: Sponsored by 27 Republicans and 5 Democrats. Direct rip-off of Key's bill from OK. MO: Sponsored by 2 Republicans. Bill rejects federal abortion law, asserting the 10th Amendment. MT: Single Republican sponsor. Bill talks about exempting Montana from the commerce clause on guns. (*snicker*) NH: Sponsored by 4 Republicans. Bill text talks about "Jeffersonian principles" and states rights. WA: Sponsored by 7 Republicans. Bill text unavailable.
None of them have been passed, most have failed to pick up any respectable number of sponsors, and the Arizona one is the only that has any prospects of passing. Even if it does pass, it (1) is nothing but a gesture of protests with no actual legislative effect -- note that it doesn't actually refuse conditioned federal funds -- and (2) is nothing but smoke in the wind. It's not like every other state that asserted a 10th Amendment claim wasn't declaring their sovereignty too, and you see how well that went for most states.
No, you want an explanation? It's obviously a crank conservative movement to assert states rights as soon as they're no longer in power in the federal government. You didn't see a lot of conservatives howling about the Bush administration trying to go after medical marijuana and legalized euthanasia when west coast states tried 10th Amendment claims, did you?
"States rights" is pretty much the cry of the party who's losing in Washington. Very few people actually believe in it as a theory to be applied universally, and frankly they're not making the law.
Honestly, I don't see any point in complaining. If you're reading/posting here, you're part of the problem, not the precipitate. Or solution. Or something.
And if you vote, you have no right to protest, eh?
Man, who would give a damn about Slashdot sucking except the actual users?:grin:
It's a liberal thing to act like crimes with "good intentions" aren't really crimes.
You mean like torturing detainees? Let's not be hypocritical here.
Activism that does no real long-term harm (just rattling some cages) is far and away different from the kinds of large-scale, white-collar, property crimes and government, excessive force crimes that conservatives love to be apologists for.
Yay for legal encouragement of pussification. And people wonder why society is so fucked.
Well, you've got to consider that those are extreme examples but ones consistent with the theory. Assault was one of the first torts to recognize the concept of emotional damages -- because it's all about apprehension and not merely attempted battery.
Consider the ramifications of going the other way on some of these. If you couldn't treat a threat with a fake gun like it was a real one, you'd severely undermine the justification for using deadly force in self-defense. You'd punish people who tried to fight back before finding out if the gun shoots real bullets, by which time it might be too late.
As for the charging thing, it's a similar issue. Violent harassment and intimidation should not be given a free pass for feeling "pussified." Think of sexual assault -- just how much success does a stalker / would-be rapist have to have before you have an actual crime?
Another common example: If a thirteen year old kid threatened to attack Mike Tyson, would anyone rationally say that he actually "feared" being beaten up? No, but we'd still charge him with assault. After all, when the odds are more even, should we have the burden of proving actual fear in the victim as a prosecutor, or should we reward criminals for picking brave victims?
So, the extreme cases are just that, but assault is well founded in the general principle that we don't want people threatening people with a violation of the sanctity of their body. In a tort claim, you'd probably get off lightly in all the extreme "pussified" examples because the actual harm is so small.
Of course, I've been talking civil assault the whole time. Criminal assault usually (and confusingly) refers to attempted battery of some serious sort (which I should have noted earlier, my bad) and not what criminal law often calls "menacing." Even menacing usual must be intentional and a threat of serious bodily harm to avoid all the weird little cases I've been describing. Don't want to send someone to jail over trivialities.
Where does it say that the rich have to give up what they have/earned/have been knocked down (in some instances many times)/posses just to make a bunch of liberals happy or feel better ?
I dunno. That's really more of a conservative idea of what liberals think than a liberal one. You'd have to explain it to me.
Getting taken down a peg just once isn't the same as losing everything. A lot of conservatives don't see that though. Pride is everything, and the things you value must never be questioned, or they're under attack. It's just a problem with the whole black and white mentality.
What has Gates done PERSONALLY to make slashdotters so hateful of him?
When I started getting interesting in computers as more than video game machines in the 80s & 90s, he shameless and poorly copied nearly every innovative piece of software I loved and then killed or nearly killed them with superior marketing. It was like watching an anti-meritocracy in action from my POV.
Technically, that doesn't matter at all if the victims could reasonably believe it was true. Assault is about the apprehension of unwanted contact, not an actual "swing and a miss."
Holding someone up with a realistic looking water gun is assault. So is screaming at them them that you're going to beat them until they bleed out their bone punctured cheeks while charging them, even if you stop 2 feet away and say, "Fooled ya!" As long as you make them "worry," then you've committed assault.
This is a beautiful illustration if the Liberal mindset. Rather than trying to raise the poor by eliminating mosquitoes he's trying to equalize everyone by lowering the wealthy.
Or, an alternate way to look at it is that he's trying to remind the wealthy that just sitting still and letting poor rot instead of trying to help raise them up isn't a good thing. Encouraging empathy by upsetting their comfortable little world and letting them know a little bit of what the plebians feel of fear. Sometimes you've got be knocked on your ass once to appreciate the view. Dunno why this is a "Liberal" thing in your mind (and thus bad?), but there you go.
Maybe it's just his way of saying, "Memento mori, bitches."
Obviously. If you read the text above the photo in the image, you can see that there's a lot of different car images to choose from to "find" your car in. Naturally, there's absolutely no need to create real individualized photos for a malware site, even for a "revenge" site rather than a traditional one. You would only go to that kind of trouble if the site were legit.
I'm not saying that the chemtrail thing is true, I will only say that "the government said so" is not an adequate disexplanation.
I already got a Morgellons believer, so I'm not surprised I picked up someone defending the chemtrails conspiracy belief. The problem with conspiracy theorists is that there is absolutely nobody who will be trusted with evidence of disproof or of unlikeliness. The government itself? Obviously untrustworthy! Atmospheric scientists and aeronautical engineers? In on the fix. Their very denials are proof enough! So, who is good enough to listen to?
Perhaps it is 100% bullshit, but the federal government has used the general populace as guinea pigs repeatedly - so it's easy to believe. Perhaps bullshit conspiracy theories feed on the fact that there are so many real conspiracies designed to bone the public out of something for the benefit of the few?
So, you're arguing for primarily cultural roots for the belief? Alright, then. I wonder in the alternative if it has to do with the fact that contrails are an easily observable part of life and whether our brains are wired to assume strange phenomena have unpleasant causes -- angry gods and other inhuman forces, invisible pathogens, too powerful governments, foreigners and people of other races, etc. -- rather than mundane or internal causes. Might it be the result of a survival adaptation that occasionally produces bad results in the modern world?
We learned in elementary school that clouds form on particulate matter, so we equate these clouds with pollution, and lots of it.
While the particulates help, the real primary cause of contrails is the sudden addition of extra water vapor from combustion (at higher elevations) or lower pressure vortexes from the wingtips and other surfaces (at lower levels). It's not primarily a "seeding" effect.
Spend a few days at my house, looking up, and you might start to believe it, too. But in the absence of proof, there are only two rational responses: abandon the search and call it good, or keep looking and try not to make assumptions.
The area I grew up in was a major crossing point for airplane routes. It wasn't all that unusual to be able to see three commercial airliners in the sky at the same time at least once a day, and a sky without a contrail in it was a rare occurrence. So, I'm not at all buying the circa 1996 theory that lingering trails are the result of special chemicals -- I've seen lingering trails for nearly two decades before that, and I have absolutely no reason to disbelieve the idea that atmospheric conditions have something to do with it. Contrails are just like any other cloud once formed.
As for absence of proof... There is absolutely no evidence that certain contrails are actually chemtrails. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, and a certain level of skepticism is healthy -- especially when the experts agree that there's no cause for worry. At a certain point, we all have to trust the words of others about the way the world works. We can't be masters of all fields of study, and clinging to a belief that cuts counter to the consensus of people who have dedicated their lives to the study of a field and who certainly know more than you do is nothing more than sheerest ego -- especially when you don't offer a rational reason why they're wrong and how your alternate theory improves upon theirs. So, when people who study weather and people who make plans both disavow the theory, I go with them over someone whose credentials largely come down to paranoia and obsession.
I met once (and from thorough discussion would admit) a lady over in Orange city of California that has Morgellon's Disease. She even has video on YouTube. She is not delusional and has accepted that her health difficulties are just an autoimmune response to her cells having incorporated new functions directly from environmental influences not in her comfort or favor.
Sorry, but "accepting" something that has no basis in reality is being delusional. Just where does she get his whole "cells having incorporated new functions" nonsense from in the first place? I'm glad she's losing her tactile hallucinations, but she's not doing it through genuine medicine. If the placebo effect does it for her, then I wish her well.
But she's still crazy. Watch her first video. She goes to a doctor, they tell her what's going on, and she (like every other supposed "Morgellons" sufferer) rejects the diagnosis under the belief that she simply has the ability to tell tactile delusion from reality as if she's an objective observer on the whole situation. Instead, she turns to any solution that involves her body and not her mind, eventually spiraling into pushing quack medicines.
Look at her solution in the video! "NutraSilver?" It's just colloidal silver, a common quack cure for diseases popular in the conspiracy theory community -- gaining popularity during the Y2K scare.
But get this -- the manufacturers claim that their brand of colloidal silver is special because it uses "clustered water" (whatever kind of homeopathic / polywater / physics-defying BS that's supposed to be!) to "vector silver particles to the pathogens" without even once identifying what the pathogen behind Morgellons is supposed to be! Never mind that there's never been evidence of colloidal silver doing anything to bacteria in vivo. Never mind that in vitro studies are inconclusive. Never mind that even the few studies that have suggested an effect only showed an effect to bacteria in a petri dish (and not viruses, protozoans, fungi, or macroparasites). Forget all that -- just how the hell is silver supposed to do anything to an "autoimmune disease" as she calls her disease?
Oh, but even better is the claim that it's totally safe and causes no agyria "because it's pure silver and not a compound." The interesting thing about that is that tests on silver products that showed anti-bacterial effect in a petri dish is that the only ones that did have an effect were the ones that had ionic compounds -- the very compounds that lead to the worst agyria. So, even if silver was as awesome as they said it was, their product is designed to get the least effect out of it. (If you ignore the insane "clustered water" claims. "P-Chem? What's that? Hydrogen bonding? That's stable, right?")
So, what we have is a quack disease with a quack cure. What NutraSilver is claiming is frankly morally horrifying -- a fake cure for a fake disease. Pure con artistry at its finest, selling a potentially dangerous product to a vulnerable population, discouraging them from getting the help they actually need. Disgusting. And she's helping spread the lies.
Does cloud seeding explain all of the paranoid "chemtrail" chatter found in the seedy underbelly of the internets?
No. Crazy doesn't need an explanation. Witness "Morgellons Syndrome," people who think the moon landing was faked, and alien abductees. Some delusions just go viral on their own.
That said, sometimes I wonder if there *is* an explanation. Is there a way to predict what kinds of delusions will go mass delusion and which will stay localized to a few crazies (like Time Cube)? I mean, we know that trans-cranial magnetic stimulation can recreate the paralysis, terror, and hallucinations of an "alien abduction," so there's an underlying biological explanation for this. "Morgellons" (and delusional parasitosis in general) is more common among women over 40. Does that indicate a biological root? On the other hand, I feel skeptical about suggesting a strong biological link behind "the moon landing was faked" crazies; that's probably more the result of cultural influences, but is there any biological reason why that one resonates with some people still in a way that "9/11 was faked" no longer really does for nearly as many people after only 8 years?
Is "chemtrail" chatter the work of one inventive crazy whose explanations got popular among the crowd of paranoids who are easily influenced in that direction, or is there some deeper reason why that pattern of delusion resonates with some people. Is it biological? The result of deep-seated assumptions of our culture and way of life? Just the shallow zeitgeist of the day?
I dunno, but I like to think about this sort of thing. People are just the funniest creatures in creation some days.
PDF is not intended as a format for editing. It is an electronic form of paper.
Two points.
1) You're simply wrong. There have been PDF editing tools long before the format became ubiquitous as a "read everywhere" standard -- Adobe Acrobat. (What "Abode Acrobat Reader" reads.)
2) I wasn't aware that paper could not be edited. Then again, I use pencil instead of pens.
At one place I worked, the firewall was a machine named Cerberus. Although, as someone else mentioned, machines have a tendency to get repurposed without ever having their names changed.
You mean how over time they start out shiny and amusing and eventually get plodding and depressing? Or have I got the names confused?
If it doesn't have a tablet or at least a very large image collection on it, something's wrong. Gotta love the ref, though. I'm surprised that I've never named a machine that given that I name my machines after AIs and that Zelazny was my favorite author. I should fix that with my next machine.
You're the new guy they just hired to replace him. Who cares about CNAMEs when you're on the server looking at the hostname? Someone tells you 'daffy' and 'kirk' are down. What are they? What do they do?
If you don't know CNAMEs, you probably shouldn't have been hired to manage the network since it's a big part of how things work there. Just like you shouldn't have been hired if they used NIS and you didn't know that. Or WINS. Or whatever. Maybe that's not your fault; I doubt the people hiring you might know that.
But if you're frankly too damned uninformed to try nslookup or even just try pinging or remote logging into the frakkin' machine, maybe you shouldn't have lied on your resume and your experience managing systems and should go back to working at Kinkos.
We've had free (and Free) PDF readers covered for years.
But what about PDF editors? And I don't mean things like OpenOffice that can output its native format into PDF outputs (but can't open the PDFs and edit them) or any similar program on Mac OS X able to print anything to PDF. I mean something that can open and edit a PDF file generated by some other tool where you don't have the original source (or there is none in the case of a scanner scanning to PDF). I mean Adobe Acrobat replacements. Not Acrobat Reader replacements.
You didn't think the whole world has adopted modern, Western sensibilities about the presence of supernatural monsters and black sorcerers behind every rock and tree? Take away the use of human body parts in tribal rituals, we weren't all that different 400 years ago or even 200 years ago. We all get a good laugh about it, but it's a real cultural problem there.
Not, not really. I'll openly admit that I was just piggy-backing off of the post closest to the top most relevant to the little dig I wanted to make at Slashdot's collective "video game violence studies are always hogwash" position. I regretted using the word "everyone" as soon as I posted because I think I came off as accusing you too. My bad.
I do, however, absolutely believe that I am better equipped to choose what media I consume than any politician.
Oh, yeah. I totally agree there. I don't honestly think that video game violence causes any increase in crime levels -- I just think they increase aggression, and adults are more than capable of dealing with that responsibly unless they're mentally disturbed, and I also think that that risk is no grounds for restraining sane people's entertainment.
Slashdot Mirror
Two questions:
1) What exactly is objectionable within the UNCRC? All it says is basically that children are people, not property; children have a right to be with family, to see both parents if they're divorced, to free speech, to privacy, and to be free of abuse. If this is all horrible in your mind, then your notion of parents' rights aren't very far from those of slaveholders.
2) So, why 7 state legislatures have introduced declarations of sovereignity? It seems to be a fringe Republican movement.
I found it odd that more than half of the states involved were blue states. So, I went to look at each bill and found the party affiliation of all the sponsors:
OK: Single Republican sponsor. Asserts 10th Amendment in general. Cites New York v. United States. Omits mention of South Dakota v. Dole. Key introduces it every year as a publicity stunt, apparently.
MI: Single Republican sponsor. Direct rip-off of Key's bill from OK.
AZ: Sponsored by 27 Republicans and 5 Democrats. Direct rip-off of Key's bill from OK.
MO: Sponsored by 2 Republicans. Bill rejects federal abortion law, asserting the 10th Amendment.
MT: Single Republican sponsor. Bill talks about exempting Montana from the commerce clause on guns. (*snicker*)
NH: Sponsored by 4 Republicans. Bill text talks about "Jeffersonian principles" and states rights.
WA: Sponsored by 7 Republicans. Bill text unavailable.
None of them have been passed, most have failed to pick up any respectable number of sponsors, and the Arizona one is the only that has any prospects of passing. Even if it does pass, it (1) is nothing but a gesture of protests with no actual legislative effect -- note that it doesn't actually refuse conditioned federal funds -- and (2) is nothing but smoke in the wind. It's not like every other state that asserted a 10th Amendment claim wasn't declaring their sovereignty too, and you see how well that went for most states.
No, you want an explanation? It's obviously a crank conservative movement to assert states rights as soon as they're no longer in power in the federal government. You didn't see a lot of conservatives howling about the Bush administration trying to go after medical marijuana and legalized euthanasia when west coast states tried 10th Amendment claims, did you?
"States rights" is pretty much the cry of the party who's losing in Washington. Very few people actually believe in it as a theory to be applied universally, and frankly they're not making the law.
Honestly, I don't see any point in complaining. If you're reading/posting here, you're part of the problem, not the precipitate. Or solution. Or something.
And if you vote, you have no right to protest, eh?
Man, who would give a damn about Slashdot sucking except the actual users? :grin:
It's a liberal thing to act like crimes with "good intentions" aren't really crimes.
You mean like torturing detainees? Let's not be hypocritical here.
Activism that does no real long-term harm (just rattling some cages) is far and away different from the kinds of large-scale, white-collar, property crimes and government, excessive force crimes that conservatives love to be apologists for.
Yay for legal encouragement of pussification. And people wonder why society is so fucked.
Well, you've got to consider that those are extreme examples but ones consistent with the theory. Assault was one of the first torts to recognize the concept of emotional damages -- because it's all about apprehension and not merely attempted battery.
Consider the ramifications of going the other way on some of these. If you couldn't treat a threat with a fake gun like it was a real one, you'd severely undermine the justification for using deadly force in self-defense. You'd punish people who tried to fight back before finding out if the gun shoots real bullets, by which time it might be too late.
As for the charging thing, it's a similar issue. Violent harassment and intimidation should not be given a free pass for feeling "pussified." Think of sexual assault -- just how much success does a stalker / would-be rapist have to have before you have an actual crime?
Another common example: If a thirteen year old kid threatened to attack Mike Tyson, would anyone rationally say that he actually "feared" being beaten up? No, but we'd still charge him with assault. After all, when the odds are more even, should we have the burden of proving actual fear in the victim as a prosecutor, or should we reward criminals for picking brave victims?
So, the extreme cases are just that, but assault is well founded in the general principle that we don't want people threatening people with a violation of the sanctity of their body. In a tort claim, you'd probably get off lightly in all the extreme "pussified" examples because the actual harm is so small.
Of course, I've been talking civil assault the whole time. Criminal assault usually (and confusingly) refers to attempted battery of some serious sort (which I should have noted earlier, my bad) and not what criminal law often calls "menacing." Even menacing usual must be intentional and a threat of serious bodily harm to avoid all the weird little cases I've been describing. Don't want to send someone to jail over trivialities.
Where does it say that the rich have to give up what they have/earned/have been knocked down (in some instances many times)/posses just to make a bunch of liberals happy or feel better ?
I dunno. That's really more of a conservative idea of what liberals think than a liberal one. You'd have to explain it to me.
Getting taken down a peg just once isn't the same as losing everything. A lot of conservatives don't see that though. Pride is everything, and the things you value must never be questioned, or they're under attack. It's just a problem with the whole black and white mentality.
Without them you'd be a continuously expanding ball of flesh...
Isn't that the American Dream?
What has Gates done PERSONALLY to make slashdotters so hateful of him?
When I started getting interesting in computers as more than video game machines in the 80s & 90s, he shameless and poorly copied nearly every innovative piece of software I loved and then killed or nearly killed them with superior marketing. It was like watching an anti-meritocracy in action from my POV.
Technically, that doesn't matter at all if the victims could reasonably believe it was true.
Assault is about the apprehension of unwanted contact, not an actual "swing and a miss."
Holding someone up with a realistic looking water gun is assault. So is screaming at them them that you're going to beat them until they bleed out their bone punctured cheeks while charging them, even if you stop 2 feet away and say, "Fooled ya!" As long as you make them "worry," then you've committed assault.
Only in the US of A.
And all other countries with an English-derived system of common law.
I'd bet that it might count in a lot of civil law countries too.
The fun case would be whether you could sustain a battery claim via mosquito if they bit.
This is a beautiful illustration if the Liberal mindset. Rather than trying to raise the poor by eliminating mosquitoes he's trying to equalize everyone by lowering the wealthy.
Or, an alternate way to look at it is that he's trying to remind the wealthy that just sitting still and letting poor rot instead of trying to help raise them up isn't a good thing. Encouraging empathy by upsetting their comfortable little world and letting them know a little bit of what the plebians feel of fear. Sometimes you've got be knocked on your ass once to appreciate the view. Dunno why this is a "Liberal" thing in your mind (and thus bad?), but there you go.
Maybe it's just his way of saying, "Memento mori, bitches."
Maybe everyone gets the same photo...
Obviously. If you read the text above the photo in the image, you can see that there's a lot of different car images to choose from to "find" your car in. Naturally, there's absolutely no need to create real individualized photos for a malware site, even for a "revenge" site rather than a traditional one. You would only go to that kind of trouble if the site were legit.
After all, do you know what a parking ticket looks like in your city, to be able to distinguish between a real one and a fake?
And if you do, then do you have any reason to believe they haven't changed ticket formats since the last time you got one?
Isn't this awesome new moderation system such a great part of this fantastic new layout?
That is exactly the reason I turned it off. Slashdot's interface is becoming all flash and no function.
I'm not saying that the chemtrail thing is true, I will only say that "the government said so" is not an adequate disexplanation.
I already got a Morgellons believer, so I'm not surprised I picked up someone defending the chemtrails conspiracy belief. The problem with conspiracy theorists is that there is absolutely nobody who will be trusted with evidence of disproof or of unlikeliness. The government itself? Obviously untrustworthy! Atmospheric scientists and aeronautical engineers? In on the fix. Their very denials are proof enough! So, who is good enough to listen to?
Perhaps it is 100% bullshit, but the federal government has used the general populace as guinea pigs repeatedly - so it's easy to believe. Perhaps bullshit conspiracy theories feed on the fact that there are so many real conspiracies designed to bone the public out of something for the benefit of the few?
So, you're arguing for primarily cultural roots for the belief? Alright, then. I wonder in the alternative if it has to do with the fact that contrails are an easily observable part of life and whether our brains are wired to assume strange phenomena have unpleasant causes -- angry gods and other inhuman forces, invisible pathogens, too powerful governments, foreigners and people of other races, etc. -- rather than mundane or internal causes. Might it be the result of a survival adaptation that occasionally produces bad results in the modern world?
We learned in elementary school that clouds form on particulate matter, so we equate these clouds with pollution, and lots of it.
While the particulates help, the real primary cause of contrails is the sudden addition of extra water vapor from combustion (at higher elevations) or lower pressure vortexes from the wingtips and other surfaces (at lower levels). It's not primarily a "seeding" effect.
Spend a few days at my house, looking up, and you might start to believe it, too. But in the absence of proof, there are only two rational responses: abandon the search and call it good, or keep looking and try not to make assumptions.
The area I grew up in was a major crossing point for airplane routes. It wasn't all that unusual to be able to see three commercial airliners in the sky at the same time at least once a day, and a sky without a contrail in it was a rare occurrence. So, I'm not at all buying the circa 1996 theory that lingering trails are the result of special chemicals -- I've seen lingering trails for nearly two decades before that, and I have absolutely no reason to disbelieve the idea that atmospheric conditions have something to do with it. Contrails are just like any other cloud once formed.
As for absence of proof... There is absolutely no evidence that certain contrails are actually chemtrails. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, and a certain level of skepticism is healthy -- especially when the experts agree that there's no cause for worry. At a certain point, we all have to trust the words of others about the way the world works. We can't be masters of all fields of study, and clinging to a belief that cuts counter to the consensus of people who have dedicated their lives to the study of a field and who certainly know more than you do is nothing more than sheerest ego -- especially when you don't offer a rational reason why they're wrong and how your alternate theory improves upon theirs. So, when people who study weather and people who make plans both disavow the theory, I go with them over someone whose credentials largely come down to paranoia and obsession.
I met once (and from thorough discussion would admit) a lady over in Orange city of California that has Morgellon's Disease. She even has video on YouTube. She is not delusional and has accepted that her health difficulties are just an autoimmune response to her cells having incorporated new functions directly from environmental influences not in her comfort or favor.
Sorry, but "accepting" something that has no basis in reality is being delusional. Just where does she get his whole "cells having incorporated new functions" nonsense from in the first place? I'm glad she's losing her tactile hallucinations, but she's not doing it through genuine medicine. If the placebo effect does it for her, then I wish her well.
But she's still crazy. Watch her first video. She goes to a doctor, they tell her what's going on, and she (like every other supposed "Morgellons" sufferer) rejects the diagnosis under the belief that she simply has the ability to tell tactile delusion from reality as if she's an objective observer on the whole situation. Instead, she turns to any solution that involves her body and not her mind, eventually spiraling into pushing quack medicines.
Look at her solution in the video! "NutraSilver?" It's just colloidal silver, a common quack cure for diseases popular in the conspiracy theory community -- gaining popularity during the Y2K scare.
But get this -- the manufacturers claim that their brand of colloidal silver is special because it uses "clustered water" (whatever kind of homeopathic / polywater / physics-defying BS that's supposed to be!) to "vector silver particles to the pathogens" without even once identifying what the pathogen behind Morgellons is supposed to be! Never mind that there's never been evidence of colloidal silver doing anything to bacteria in vivo. Never mind that in vitro studies are inconclusive. Never mind that even the few studies that have suggested an effect only showed an effect to bacteria in a petri dish (and not viruses, protozoans, fungi, or macroparasites). Forget all that -- just how the hell is silver supposed to do anything to an "autoimmune disease" as she calls her disease?
Oh, but even better is the claim that it's totally safe and causes no agyria "because it's pure silver and not a compound." The interesting thing about that is that tests on silver products that showed anti-bacterial effect in a petri dish is that the only ones that did have an effect were the ones that had ionic compounds -- the very compounds that lead to the worst agyria. So, even if silver was as awesome as they said it was, their product is designed to get the least effect out of it. (If you ignore the insane "clustered water" claims. "P-Chem? What's that? Hydrogen bonding? That's stable, right?")
So, what we have is a quack disease with a quack cure. What NutraSilver is claiming is frankly morally horrifying -- a fake cure for a fake disease. Pure con artistry at its finest, selling a potentially dangerous product to a vulnerable population, discouraging them from getting the help they actually need. Disgusting. And she's helping spread the lies.
Does cloud seeding explain all of the paranoid "chemtrail" chatter found in the seedy underbelly of the internets?
No. Crazy doesn't need an explanation. Witness "Morgellons Syndrome," people who think the moon landing was faked, and alien abductees. Some delusions just go viral on their own.
That said, sometimes I wonder if there *is* an explanation. Is there a way to predict what kinds of delusions will go mass delusion and which will stay localized to a few crazies (like Time Cube)? I mean, we know that trans-cranial magnetic stimulation can recreate the paralysis, terror, and hallucinations of an "alien abduction," so there's an underlying biological explanation for this. "Morgellons" (and delusional parasitosis in general) is more common among women over 40. Does that indicate a biological root? On the other hand, I feel skeptical about suggesting a strong biological link behind "the moon landing was faked" crazies; that's probably more the result of cultural influences, but is there any biological reason why that one resonates with some people still in a way that "9/11 was faked" no longer really does for nearly as many people after only 8 years?
Is "chemtrail" chatter the work of one inventive crazy whose explanations got popular among the crowd of paranoids who are easily influenced in that direction, or is there some deeper reason why that pattern of delusion resonates with some people. Is it biological? The result of deep-seated assumptions of our culture and way of life? Just the shallow zeitgeist of the day?
I dunno, but I like to think about this sort of thing. People are just the funniest creatures in creation some days.
PDF is not intended as a format for editing. It is an electronic form of paper.
Two points.
1) You're simply wrong. There have been PDF editing tools long before the format became ubiquitous as a "read everywhere" standard -- Adobe Acrobat. (What "Abode Acrobat Reader" reads.)
2) I wasn't aware that paper could not be edited. Then again, I use pencil instead of pens.
At one place I worked, the firewall was a machine named Cerberus. Although, as someone else mentioned, machines have a tendency to get repurposed without ever having their names changed.
You mean how over time they start out shiny and amusing and eventually get plodding and depressing? Or have I got the names confused?
Currently my home machine is Ghostwheel.
If it doesn't have a tablet or at least a very large image collection on it, something's wrong.
Gotta love the ref, though. I'm surprised that I've never named a machine that given that I name my machines after AIs and that Zelazny was my favorite author. I should fix that with my next machine.
You would probably know them better as 1134879253.jpg and jigglyjiggly.avi.
You're the new guy they just hired to replace him. Who cares about CNAMEs when you're on the server looking at the hostname? Someone tells you 'daffy' and 'kirk' are down. What are they? What do they do?
If you don't know CNAMEs, you probably shouldn't have been hired to manage the network since it's a big part of how things work there. Just like you shouldn't have been hired if they used NIS and you didn't know that. Or WINS. Or whatever. Maybe that's not your fault; I doubt the people hiring you might know that.
But if you're frankly too damned uninformed to try nslookup or even just try pinging or remote logging into the frakkin' machine, maybe you shouldn't have lied on your resume and your experience managing systems and should go back to working at Kinkos.
We've had free (and Free) PDF readers covered for years.
But what about PDF editors? And I don't mean things like OpenOffice that can output its native format into PDF outputs (but can't open the PDFs and edit them) or any similar program on Mac OS X able to print anything to PDF. I mean something that can open and edit a PDF file generated by some other tool where you don't have the original source (or there is none in the case of a scanner scanning to PDF). I mean Adobe Acrobat replacements. Not Acrobat Reader replacements.
Where is that?
There are a few. They're just all several version out of date feature-wise and crash-prone as hell, AFAIK. (e.g. Gnash.)
Not that uncommon of a belief in Nigeria. You really underestimate the level of superstition in some African countries. Not only a "witch hunts" and killings a regular enough thing, but so are ritual killings to cut off body parts for sale to traditional animistic shamans.
You didn't think the whole world has adopted modern, Western sensibilities about the presence of supernatural monsters and black sorcerers behind every rock and tree? Take away the use of human body parts in tribal rituals, we weren't all that different 400 years ago or even 200 years ago. We all get a good laugh about it, but it's a real cultural problem there.
Well, I hope your comments aren't directed at me.
Not, not really. I'll openly admit that I was just piggy-backing off of the post closest to the top most relevant to the little dig I wanted to make at Slashdot's collective "video game violence studies are always hogwash" position. I regretted using the word "everyone" as soon as I posted because I think I came off as accusing you too. My bad.
I do, however, absolutely believe that I am better equipped to choose what media I consume than any politician.
Oh, yeah. I totally agree there. I don't honestly think that video game violence causes any increase in crime levels -- I just think they increase aggression, and adults are more than capable of dealing with that responsibly unless they're mentally disturbed, and I also think that that risk is no grounds for restraining sane people's entertainment.