the problem i see with that kinda approach is not giving the kids who are maybe more likely to take advantage of an environment where they are isolated from the kinda bullshit kids do to each other. yah, sure, those kids would then have a much better chance to do what they want with their lives. what about the other kids, though? just because li'l Bobby is a young urban black thug or whatthefuckever does not validate leaving him by the academic wayside. when li'l Bobby the Thug gets a higher quality of education he will be more able to see the value thereof and will then be less likely to molest, trouble and generally fuck with the more scholarly little dude.
we are best able to measure ourselves by the LCD.
look at MTv.
do the math.
actually, i think the MTv thing might be a little hasty on my part; i heard that they are planning to do a bit on hate crimes next week. something like sixteen straight hours of no viddies no real world no ads nothing but a list of the hate crimes that have been committed in the past n years or something. i wonder if they'd touch on the kid that Mike Van Pelt mentioned up there...
Re:A lot of this is a problem blacks will need to
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Racism At Microsoft?
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nononononononoo!
shit!
what do you mean, separate them? SEGREGATING the population into academic and non-academic by personal inclination or whatever you might want to call it still equates to have v. havenot.
think about it.
ok, after an extremely brief perusal of the comments up in this mofo... hmmm...
i shoulda guessed i'd see some "he's a rasict, she's saying racist things, you're a racist goddamn nazi, my mom's a nazi" and other crap of that general nature. i just didn't think i'd see this much of it.
come ON, people, this is just silly... look at it this way (or at least try to... the theorem that intelligence = open-mindedness, geek = intelligent... geek = open-minded, while one that i'd like to subscribe to, don't seem to hold up too well... oh, well)
we're all guilty of racism. all of us. everyone, at some point or another has had a thought that could be qualified as being racist. sometimes, we're lucky enough to vent this shite in an environment where we are with folks who recognize the questionable statement as being racist, and who are also in tune with us enough to realize that it's not an overt racism, just an effect of the subtext of our society. provided, of course, that the latter is actually the case. for the purposes of my little argument here, let's just presume that we're all non-nazi, non-idjit, and non-racist. i know this is untrue, but it's _my_ comment, dammit!
crap. where was i?... in the above half-assed scenario, the speaker will (possibly) benefit from the perspective of her friends or family, and will learn, and then she may even expunge the idea from her world-view that the Jews eat babies.
now, if this seems a bit far-fetched, that those around us will assist in meme-editing, it's probably because it it. and, it's also less likely to be effective. i have yet to "convert" a racist to a state of non-racism. part of this would seem to be because folks just don't like changing. part of it is probably that i am just plain bad at this kind of stuff. it don't mean that i don't try, though. who knows, maybe some day i'll actually have a minor positive impact on someone's view of things.
what seems more important to me, tho, is the self-editing end of things... it's like the alcoholic who does not admit to alcoholism. once he sees he has this trouble with booze, he can work on it.
so, when i used to live in the city and ride the subway all over the goddamn place, and would get that (extremely) asinine skinny-white-boy made nervous by urban-gang-banger-lookin'-BLACK-kids thing, i sort of confronted the idea internally. i though about what scared me about these guys, i thought about what they might see me as being about, and i decided to tackle the fucker head on. years of public transit, many, many drunken nights riding home unconcious or nearly so, and i wasn't stabbed to death once. nor robbed. not even called honkey. which was disappointing; it would have been an ideal way to cut to the chase of the issue.
anyway, i'm not white, but i am a racist sometimes anyhow, and you are too. keep it in mind and keep fighting the good fight. just remember that the good fight is fought in the realm of ideas, not fists or guns or some barbarian shit like that.
You can bet that if another company was violating one of compaq's licenses, compaq's lawyers would be in jihad mode before you could blink.
because another party's sub-optimal behaviors validate our own, right?
look, we, as a community, are viewed as 'Hackers' (press/non-geek meaning), whackos and such, often with fairly good cause (i like to think of myself as a hacker from time to time:)
if we do not create our own set of distinctions between us and the people-with-vitamin-d, it will be made for us.
Perhaps, we can make ourselves into the 'better men' in arguments like this one, winning ourselves more respect from the rest of society, as well as a very nice indication that the OS mentality can work even in the realm of wetware networking.
i, for one, think it'd be pretty darn groovy to see our community mature a bit. you know, start setting standards for behavior, not just filetypes and the like. not that those standards are even noticed by anyone. oh, well. ok, let's burn them then...
kids they really don't care about seeing advertisments. You don't really look at the ones at the top of the Slashdot page do you?... the students can't help but see it.
you contradict yourself, friend.
i would say that the exact problem is that ads are in fact everywhere. and, you don't see them. but, then again, you do.
subconciously or something like that. like that f*ckin' yellow-screen-of-mental-death that ABC (i think) has become so fond of, you don't notice anything there, but you sure as hell see it.
if you didn't see it, why, you'd be downright unAmerican, ya pinko commie longhair fnord subversive liberal, ya!
Love,
A pinko commie longhair liberal subversive... or something.
i guess you've never seen 'The Pirates of Penzance'?
hmmm... at least, i think that's where i first heard of it... i think the [Bobbies, or Coppers, or Constables, or whatever the heck it is you call those cops with the funny phallic hats] were doing a line dance to a song entitled 'Tarentella'
now then, i feel it is pretty clear that this fellow knoweth not of what he speaketh. obviously a M$ Sales/Marketdroid.
in all seriousness, though, why bitch about this kind of silliness? i could expend x Joules of precious, precious caffeine whining, bitching, moaning, complaining, posting (oops!:)
or, i could pick a bug and fixor it. y'know, prove them all wrong. nice irony to it
nuff said
BTW, what the hell does "now then" mean?
Re:Spamming Offshore Anonymously = EASY.
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MAPS vs. ORBS
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let it be Understood that i agree with the general idea here.
that said,
We don't want to legalize DDoS attacks agains Yahoo, etc.... Well why not? If Yahoo goes and does some SOP corporate stuff that screws over the little guy, they would be a fair target under the Texan legal precedent of "He wars askinfrit!" 'Askinfrit' as in 'asking for it' as in etoys.com, amongst others. my only problem there was that etoys survived. oh, well...
They're probably not even circumcised. Savages.... Uh, all i got to say on this one is if i had been the 6'1", 215lbs that i am now, that goddamn doctor woulda thunk twice.. yup.
i know it ain't good old fashioned Anarchy, but it's better than Gore:
Great. Just great... i would presume this to be the same US Supreme Court that recently decided that states couldn't decide how to spend their own money, huh?
I'm no environmentalist, but holding the entire contents of this over-sized box in the palm of my hand almost makes me sick.
Well, i am an environmentalist; just think how this kind of crap makes me feel, eh?
The way i see it, we could draw a neat parallel between the Libertarian bent of many of us/.ers, as well as the pro-Open Source angle, and a pro-environment viewpoint.
Libertarians want to have their rights un-trodden-upon, Open Sourcers want to have the right to view/mod/whatever the source code of their stuff... I, as an environmentalist, want to have the right to clean air, water, etc...
FWIW, i am unsure as to how anyone could not be an environmentalist. the way i see it, non-environmentalism is like non-spleenism (someone will correct me, i'm sure, if the spleen is not in fact required for the normal functioning of the human body).
We (all of us, environmentalists,/.ers, Libertarians, dogs, Republicans, M$ies, everyone) are a part of the environment. We do not so much depend on it as we are in fact a subset of it. "Dependance", to me, seems to imply a separation between the dependant and depended. i like the image of the subset better. The Earth's biosphere's viability does not require ours, rather the opposite.
So, if the continued viability of the environment is a prerequisite for our (read: MY) existance, it is only logical that we should, each and every one of us, do what we can to prevent the further degradation of our life-support system.
That, and i think if i had previewed this sucker, i probably would have used less < b >'s
I was transfixed by the idea of a democratic country whose response to social problems was to create an entire new tradition of informing. It had been happening for some time, he told me.
Hmmm... i dunno, Jon... where do you see a democratic country?
JK, i gotta say, i like your angle on many things, but you appear to have fallen into the old snare of belief that ours is a democratic nation. It is not. i offer the following def's for comparison:
democracy (d-mkr-s) n., pl. democracies.
1.Government by the people, exercised either directly or through elected representatives. 2.A political or social unit that has such a government. 3.The common people, considered as the primary source of political power. 4.Majority rule. 5.The principles of social equality and respect for the individual within a community.
[French démocratie, from Late Latin dmocratia, from Greek dmokratia: dmos, people; see d- in Indo-European Roots + -kratia, -cracy.]
plutocracy (pl-tkr-s) n., pl. plutocracies.
1.Government by the wealthy. 2.A wealthy class that controls a government. 3.A government or state in which the wealthy rule.
[Greek ploutokratia: ploutos, wealth; see pleu- in Indo-European Roots + -kratia, -cracy.]
"Outside of the official left-right spectrum, the nonpeople have other values and commitments, and a quite different understanding of responsibility to somehting other than themselves and of the cause of democracy and freedom. They should also understand that solidarity work is now becoming even more critically important than before. Every effort will be made to de-educate the general population so that they sink to the intellectual and moral level of the cultural and social managers. Those who do not succumb have a historic mission, and should not forget that." -Noam Chomsky, Deterring Democracy (emphasis mine -j)
I disagree with Katz's assertion that this thing is specifically about anti-corporatism. While i agree with that agenda, and do not deny its place in the incidents in Seattle, this is much, much bigger than that one idea, bigger than you or me. It's about solidarity, about me watching your back and you mine. It's about Community. It's about time.
"Cogito ergo es... I think, therefore you is." -The King of the Moon's Head,
Like, gahd, this is just so wicked queeah... like, i was drivin' my cah down ta Hahvahd, like, to hang out at the Hahvahd Yahd, which is just, like, so wicked cool... and i heard some wicked gay geek tawkin about callin the state the "Daht Cawmmanwealth" like, oh, my, gawd! that is just soo gay! /flashback
(i do not, in fact, talk anything like that at all, nor do i think "gay" or "queer" are appropriate derogatory terms regardless of pronounciation, so please save the abuse for someone who deserves it:)
johnny lives in Ma, but for how much longer?
PS... what the hell do i have to do to put a phony html tag in here without it interpreting it as a real html tag? \'s and such did not seem to work %'}
"Cogito ergo es... I think, therefore you is." -The King of the Moon's Head,
In addition to th'.TAXachusetts one (which someone else already pointed out...) you appear to have forgotten the obvious domain name choice for all the young Hahvahd Squayah punks... .grassachusetts - if i need to explain this, you need help:)
"Cogito ergo es... I think, therefore you is." -The King of the Moon's Head,
As society becomes increasingly competitive, humans may have virtually thrown the key out the window on natural selection but artificially we still have [an] ethical responsibility to our race and the planet not to further weaken the gene pool.
Disclaimer: Although i personally find the idea of abortion, et al, somewhat distasteful, i find the idea of imposing one's personal beliefs on others more distasteful. I guess this qualifies me as a pro-choicer, but i don't much care for labels yadda yadda yadda
That being said, i am unsure as to how artificially bolstering an individual's particular traits will somehow prevent the "further weakening" of the gene pool. It would seem to me that this would do quite the opposite.
I am not a geneticist, a biologist or much of anything else with -ist at the end of it, but it still appears fairly obvious to me that artificial selection would be a poor substitute for the natural variety. As a part of our environment, indeed a function of it, we are ill-equipped to understand all of the subtleties of that environment, much less presume that we can do away with a system that has developed over countless millennia on a scale that we are simply unable to grasp effectively. The potential ramifications of this approach to the continuance of our race are staggering to me.
I am not even going to touch the moral/ethical aspects of this, i'd just drop into blowhard mode, and that wouldn't be pretty. I have to say, however, that from a purely pragmatic point of view, the artifical selection as substitute for natural selection will doom us as a race. It's just not a good idea.
We should concentrate not on our physical evolution and traits, they're just fine. For example, i am myopic, i cannot hear particularly well, and i am not very strong, fast or handsome, but i can survive, and i can think, and i can do what i think we should really be focusing on: the mental and spiritual evolution of our race. It's our best bet for long-term survival, would probably be much more satisfying, and i don't think we are as far away from the realization of our potential as some might argue.
Which is cooler, babies that are pre-programmed genetically, with a particular color, intelligence, sexual preference, height, and so on, or transcendence of the physical plane of existence entirely, like some frickin' Star Trek Q bullshit? Think about it.
"Cogito ergo es... I think, therefore you is." -The King of the Moon's Head,
Hmmm... this is fairly interesting. Bowie definitely loses a point or two in my book for this one. sigh. someone out there commented that the more likely victim of us bad-ass cracker types is not the label or the BIG-name-annoying-pain-in-the-ass-MTV-heavy-rotati on "artist" (Brittany Spears was one of the named examples. ha! perfect!) rather, the person who we would be harming is the performer who is trying to sell albums in order to _eat_ at least daily. think about it... now, on yonder hand, i would not like to see my fellow/.ers going out and doing whatever nasty stuff MS wants you to do to get at their little secure audio files there, like giving them (more) money, giving over your first-born into indentured cube-slave servitude, or whatever.
i propose a solution! like, if you really really like Bowie, think he's rad, and need to have that music _right now,_ well, go buy (or whatever) it. now if you're more like me, and find that you really really like bowie, but have no desire to fan the flames that are burning down our house, (or, like me, you realize that everything recorded in the last TWENTY YEARS is mindless garbage, with a few notable exceptions that i choose not to note here...) you can do what i shall do: don't buy the shit. just don't buy it. case closed. boycott it. lower sales figures for a service show the seller the level of demand for said service. if noone shows up for your big grand opening sale, it's safe to say noone wants to buy your big grand opening:) now, i am not implying that the entirety of David Bowie fandom either read/. or care what i have to say about the matter, but for those of us who do, it seems a pretty simple matter. go buy the CD when it comes out. you get Bowie's album, Bowie gets (some of) your money. not a perfect transaction by any means, but it's what there.
anyway, there's my two bits...do what you can do to improve things, and at least give a good go at what you can't.
"Respect was invented to fill the space where love should be." - Anna Karenina
i see a lot of silliness here... jokes, people banging on the idea of a 'cyber-yugoslavia', people banging on each other, people banging on each other's jokes... i see in here maybe one actual reference to the situation the yugoslav people find themselves in, and one or two ref's to the fact that this is a statment of dissatisfaction with the status quo. i am quite pleased that at least three of us are actually using our brains here... i happen to live in the USA, and am not particularly proud of the fact. i find i have major ethic and moral issues with the day-to-day activities of "my" government. i quote the 'my' because i do not condone the slaughter of millions of innocent persons across the world, the destruction of their homes, national infrastructure, ways of life, all because they were unwilling to roll over and play the 'good little bitch' (PMF) client state to the (largely) USA-based corporations and the industrial capitalist states who support them. then, of course, there is the abysmal domestic situation in the USA. i live in the Boston, MA area. i read recently that in Roxbury (largely a minority neighborhood, you know) there is something like 50 times higher a rate of infant mortality. within five miles of Roxbury, there are at least 5 hospitals, some of the best in the world from what i hear. if the persons in power in this nation had their priorities straight, this would not be the case. these same persons are well on their way to destroying the environment of which we are a part, and without which we can _not_ exist, all in the name of profit. with all this in mind, i feel that the least we can do as responsible citizens of the world is to oppose this sort of widespread abuse of the peoples of the world, their economies, their right to self-rule and peaceful existence, and just about anything else these bastards are up to.
the fact of the matter is, this is an absolutely fascinating social experiment, nothing less. i really like the idea, and i know i'm in. my first proposition: lose that stupid "C U in CY" slogan there... but, until that happens, i guess i'll C U in CY! or not, either way...
peace, johnny "Respect was invented to fill the space where love should be." - Anna Karenina
Slashdot Mirror
ok, i think i might have mis-represented myself.
the problem i see with that kinda approach is not giving the kids who are maybe more likely to take advantage of an environment where they are isolated from the kinda bullshit kids do to each other. yah, sure, those kids would then have a much better chance to do what they want with their lives. what about the other kids, though? just because li'l Bobby is a young urban black thug or whatthefuckever does not validate leaving him by the academic wayside. when li'l Bobby the Thug gets a higher quality of education he will be more able to see the value thereof and will then be less likely to molest, trouble and generally fuck with the more scholarly little dude.
we are best able to measure ourselves by the LCD.
look at MTv.
do the math.
actually, i think the MTv thing might be a little hasty on my part; i heard that they are planning to do a bit on hate crimes next week. something like sixteen straight hours of no viddies no real world no ads nothing but a list of the hate crimes that have been committed in the past n years or something. i wonder if they'd touch on the kid that Mike Van Pelt mentioned up there...
nononononononoo!
shit!
what do you mean, separate them? SEGREGATING the population into academic and non-academic by personal inclination or whatever you might want to call it still equates to have v. havenot.
think about it.
ok, after an extremely brief perusal of the comments up in this mofo... hmmm...
... geek = open-minded, while one that i'd like to subscribe to, don't seem to hold up too well... oh, well)
... in the above half-assed scenario, the speaker will (possibly) benefit from the perspective of her friends or family, and will learn, and then she may even expunge the idea from her world-view that the Jews eat babies.
i shoulda guessed i'd see some "he's a rasict, she's saying racist things, you're a racist goddamn nazi, my mom's a nazi" and other crap of that general nature. i just didn't think i'd see this much of it.
come ON, people, this is just silly... look at it this way (or at least try to... the theorem that intelligence = open-mindedness, geek = intelligent
we're all guilty of racism. all of us. everyone, at some point or another has had a thought that could be qualified as being racist. sometimes, we're lucky enough to vent this shite in an environment where we are with folks who recognize the questionable statement as being racist, and who are also in tune with us enough to realize that it's not an overt racism, just an effect of the subtext of our society. provided, of course, that the latter is actually the case. for the purposes of my little argument here, let's just presume that we're all non-nazi, non-idjit, and non-racist. i know this is untrue, but it's _my_ comment, dammit!
crap. where was i?
now, if this seems a bit far-fetched, that those around us will assist in meme-editing, it's probably because it it. and, it's also less likely to be effective. i have yet to "convert" a racist to a state of non-racism. part of this would seem to be because folks just don't like changing. part of it is probably that i am just plain bad at this kind of stuff. it don't mean that i don't try, though. who knows, maybe some day i'll actually have a minor positive impact on someone's view of things.
what seems more important to me, tho, is the self-editing end of things... it's like the alcoholic who does not admit to alcoholism. once he sees he has this trouble with booze, he can work on it.
so, when i used to live in the city and ride the subway all over the goddamn place, and would get that (extremely) asinine skinny-white-boy made nervous by urban-gang-banger-lookin'-BLACK-kids thing, i sort of confronted the idea internally. i though about what scared me about these guys, i thought about what they might see me as being about, and i decided to tackle the fucker head on. years of public transit, many, many drunken nights riding home unconcious or nearly so, and i wasn't stabbed to death once. nor robbed. not even called honkey. which was disappointing; it would have been an ideal way to cut to the chase of the issue.
anyway, i'm not white, but i am a racist sometimes anyhow, and you are too. keep it in mind and keep fighting the good fight. just remember that the good fight is fought in the realm of ideas, not fists or guns or some barbarian shit like that.
peace
You can bet that if another company was violating one of compaq's licenses, compaq's lawyers would be in jihad mode before you could blink.
:)
because another party's sub-optimal behaviors validate our own, right?
look, we, as a community, are viewed as 'Hackers' (press/non-geek meaning), whackos and such, often with fairly good cause (i like to think of myself as a hacker from time to time
if we do not create our own set of distinctions between us and the people-with-vitamin-d, it will be made for us.
Perhaps, we can make ourselves into the 'better men' in arguments like this one, winning ourselves more respect from the rest of society, as well as a very nice indication that the OS mentality can work even in the realm of wetware networking.
i, for one, think it'd be pretty darn groovy to see our community mature a bit. you know, start setting standards for behavior, not just filetypes and the like. not that those standards are even noticed by anyone. oh, well. ok, let's burn them then...
kids they really don't care about seeing advertisments. You don't really look at the ones at the top of the Slashdot page do you? ... the students can't help but see it.
you contradict yourself, friend.
i would say that the exact problem is that ads are in fact everywhere. and, you don't see them. but, then again, you do.
subconciously or something like that. like that f*ckin' yellow-screen-of-mental-death that ABC (i think) has become so fond of, you don't notice anything there, but you sure as hell see it.
if you didn't see it, why, you'd be downright unAmerican, ya pinko commie longhair fnord subversive liberal, ya!
Love,
A pinko commie longhair liberal subversive... or something.
All is well.
All is well.
All is proceeding according to plan.
Soon, the actor will be completely irrelevant.
Then, the audience. (they're pretty irrelevant now, anyway)
We won't even need to be there to be entertained anymore! Isn't that nice?
Then, we can fill our proper role as drones, and work twenty, maybe twenty-two hours a day, and die happy, fulfilled and content.
END TRANSMISSION
... "Tarantella" is obscure enough ...
i guess you've never seen 'The Pirates of Penzance'?
hmmm... at least, i think that's where i first heard of it... i think the [Bobbies, or Coppers, or Constables, or whatever the heck it is you call those cops with the funny phallic hats] were doing a line dance to a song entitled 'Tarentella'
anyway... Vote for
these don't really "represent my lifestyle" but, i think they're both great shows, very, very entertaining and quite interesting.
SHHHH! TV!
ads bugging you?
:)
use junkbuster
oh, geez, i just read your last line. sorry.
now then, i feel it is pretty clear that this fellow knoweth not of what he speaketh. obviously a M$ Sales/Marketdroid.
in all seriousness, though, why bitch about this kind of silliness? i could expend x Joules of precious, precious caffeine whining, bitching, moaning, complaining, posting (oops!
or, i could pick a bug and fixor it. y'know, prove them all wrong. nice irony to it
nuff said
BTW, what the hell does "now then" mean?
let it be Understood that i agree with the general idea here.
... Well why not? If Yahoo goes and does some SOP corporate stuff that screws over the little guy, they would be a fair target under the Texan legal precedent of "He wars askinfrit!" 'Askinfrit' as in 'asking for it' as in etoys.com, amongst others. my only problem there was that etoys survived. oh, well...
... Uh, all i got to say on this one is if i had been the 6'1", 215lbs that i am now, that goddamn doctor woulda thunk twice.. yup.
that said,
We don't want to legalize DDoS attacks agains Yahoo, etc.
They're probably not even circumcised. Savages.
i know it ain't good old fashioned Anarchy, but it's better than Gore:
Great. Just great... i would presume this to be the same US Supreme Court that recently decided that states couldn't decide how to spend their own money, huh?
Just great... we're f*cked...
I'm no environmentalist, but holding the entire contents of this over-sized box in the palm of my hand almost makes me sick.
/.ers, as well as the pro-Open Source angle, and a pro-environment viewpoint.
/.ers, Libertarians, dogs, Republicans, M$ies, everyone) are a part of the environment. We do not so much depend on it as we are in fact a subset of it. "Dependance", to me, seems to imply a separation between the dependant and depended. i like the image of the subset better. The Earth's biosphere's viability does not require ours, rather the opposite.
Well, i am an environmentalist; just think how this kind of crap makes me feel, eh?
The way i see it, we could draw a neat parallel between the Libertarian bent of many of us
Libertarians want to have their rights un-trodden-upon, Open Sourcers want to have the right to view/mod/whatever the source code of their stuff... I, as an environmentalist, want to have the right to clean air, water, etc...
FWIW, i am unsure as to how anyone could not be an environmentalist. the way i see it, non-environmentalism is like non-spleenism (someone will correct me, i'm sure, if the spleen is not in fact required for the normal functioning of the human body).
We (all of us, environmentalists,
So, if the continued viability of the environment is a prerequisite for our (read: MY) existance, it is only logical that we should, each and every one of us, do what we can to prevent the further degradation of our life-support system.
That, and i think if i had previewed this sucker, i probably would have used less < b >'s
I was transfixed by the idea of a democratic country whose response to social problems was to create an entire new tradition of informing. It had been happening for some time, he told me.
Hmmm... i dunno, Jon... where do you see a democratic country?
JK, i gotta say, i like your angle on many things, but you appear to have fallen into the old snare of belief that ours is a democratic nation. It is not. i offer the following def's for comparison:
democracy (d-mkr-s)
n., pl. democracies.
1.Government by the people, exercised either directly or through elected representatives.
2.A political or social unit that has such a government.
3.The common people, considered as the primary source of political power.
4.Majority rule.
5.The principles of social equality and respect for the individual within a community.
[French démocratie, from Late Latin dmocratia, from Greek dmokratia: dmos, people; see d- in
Indo-European Roots + -kratia, -cracy.]
plutocracy (pl-tkr-s)
n., pl. plutocracies.
1.Government by the wealthy.
2.A wealthy class that controls a government.
3.A government or state in which the wealthy rule.
[Greek ploutokratia: ploutos, wealth; see pleu- in Indo-European Roots + -kratia, -cracy.]
"Outside of the official left-right spectrum, the nonpeople have other values and commitments, and a quite different understanding of responsibility to somehting other than themselves and of the cause of democracy and freedom. They should also understand that solidarity work is now becoming even more critically important than before. Every effort will be made to de-educate the general population so that they sink to the intellectual and moral level of the cultural and social managers. Those who do not succumb have a historic mission, and should not forget that."
-Noam Chomsky, Deterring Democracy (emphasis mine -j)
I disagree with Katz's assertion that this thing is specifically about anti-corporatism. While i agree with that agenda, and do not deny its place in the incidents in Seattle, this is much, much bigger than that one idea, bigger than you or me. It's about solidarity, about me watching your back and you mine. It's about Community. It's about time.
"Cogito ergo es... I think, therefore you is." -The King of the Moon's Head,
flashback to high school...
:)
Like, gahd, this is just so wicked queeah...
like, i was drivin' my cah down ta Hahvahd, like, to hang out at the Hahvahd Yahd, which is just, like, so wicked cool... and i heard some wicked gay geek tawkin about callin the state the "Daht Cawmmanwealth"
like, oh, my, gawd! that is just soo gay!
/flashback
(i do not, in fact, talk anything like that at all, nor do i think "gay" or "queer" are appropriate derogatory terms regardless of pronounciation, so please save the abuse for someone who deserves it
johnny lives in Ma, but for how much longer?
PS... what the hell do i have to do to put a phony html tag in here without it interpreting it as a real html tag? \'s and such did not seem to work %'}
"Cogito ergo es... I think, therefore you is." -The King of the Moon's Head,
In addition to th' .TAXachusetts one (which someone else already pointed out...) you appear to have forgotten the obvious domain name choice for all the young Hahvahd Squayah punks ... :)
.grassachusetts - if i need to explain this, you need help
"Cogito ergo es... I think, therefore you is." -The King of the Moon's Head,
As society becomes increasingly competitive, humans may have virtually thrown the key out the window on natural selection but artificially we still have [an] ethical responsibility to our race and the planet not to further weaken the gene pool.
Disclaimer: Although i personally find the idea of abortion, et al, somewhat distasteful, i find the idea of imposing one's personal beliefs on others more distasteful. I guess this qualifies me as a pro-choicer, but i don't much care for labels yadda yadda yadda
That being said, i am unsure as to how artificially bolstering an individual's particular traits will somehow prevent the "further weakening" of the gene pool. It would seem to me that this would do quite the opposite.
I am not a geneticist, a biologist or much of anything else with -ist at the end of it, but it still appears fairly obvious to me that artificial selection would be a poor substitute for the natural variety. As a part of our environment, indeed a function of it, we are ill-equipped to understand all of the subtleties of that environment, much less presume that we can do away with a system that has developed over countless millennia on a scale that we are simply unable to grasp effectively. The potential ramifications of this approach to the continuance of our race are staggering to me.
I am not even going to touch the moral/ethical aspects of this, i'd just drop into blowhard mode, and that wouldn't be pretty. I have to say, however, that from a purely pragmatic point of view, the artifical selection as substitute for natural selection will doom us as a race. It's just not a good idea.
We should concentrate not on our physical evolution and traits, they're just fine. For example, i am myopic, i cannot hear particularly well, and i am not very strong, fast or handsome, but i can survive, and i can think, and i can do what i think we should really be focusing on: the mental and spiritual evolution of our race. It's our best bet for long-term survival, would probably be much more satisfying, and i don't think we are as far away from the realization of our potential as some might argue.
Which is cooler, babies that are pre-programmed genetically, with a particular color, intelligence, sexual preference, height, and so on, or transcendence of the physical plane of existence entirely, like some frickin' Star Trek Q bullshit?
Think about it.
"Cogito ergo es... I think, therefore you is." -The King of the Moon's Head,
Instead, what seperates the US from some other societies is a tolerance for individualism.
Fascinating closer, given the context of this discussion. Think about it!
"Respect was invented to fill the space where love should be." - Anna Karenina
Another must have toy/gadget for us computer/cultural literate.
:) but, i don't really see how a (very, very funny) geek SF standard is "cultural"
:)
.sig goes here V
Uh...
a) i iz not a eenglish perfesser or anything... but, shouldn't it be "culturally"?
b) i am not particularly cultural literate
anyhoo... there's my two bits. i think i got overcharged...
ps. i am not trying to start anything here. i absolutely _loved_ HHGG, i just don't see it on a par with the Iliad or Hamlet and such...
pps. i will most likely be first in line to buy one
V
"Respect was invented to fill the space where love should be." - Anna Karenina
Uh, i think you forgot Major Kira there... :)
(she never was as cute as Jadzia Dax anyhoo... mmm... spots
at any rate, i think that a new Trek series is a Good Thing, my criteria basically being, uh, well, that it is Trek.
huh. go figure.
"Respect was invented to fill the space where love should be." - Anna Karenina
Hmmm... this is fairly interesting. Bowie definitely loses a point or two in my book for this one. sigh.i on "artist" (Brittany Spears was one of the named examples. ha! perfect!) rather, the person who we would be harming is the performer who is trying to sell albums in order to _eat_ at least daily. think about it... /.ers going out and doing whatever nasty stuff MS wants you to do to get at their little secure audio files there, like giving them (more) money, giving over your first-born into indentured cube-slave servitude, or whatever.
:) /. or care what i have to say about the matter, but for those of us who do, it seems a pretty simple matter. go buy the CD when it comes out. you get Bowie's album, Bowie gets (some of) your money. not a perfect transaction by any means, but it's what there.
someone out there commented that the more likely victim of us bad-ass cracker types is not the label or the BIG-name-annoying-pain-in-the-ass-MTV-heavy-rotat
now, on yonder hand, i would not like to see my fellow
i propose a solution!
like, if you really really like Bowie, think he's rad, and need to have that music _right now,_ well, go buy (or whatever) it.
now if you're more like me, and find that you really really like bowie, but have no desire to fan the flames that are burning down our house, (or, like me, you realize that everything recorded in the last TWENTY YEARS is mindless garbage, with a few notable exceptions that i choose not to note here...) you can do what i shall do:
don't buy the shit.
just don't buy it. case closed. boycott it.
lower sales figures for a service show the seller the level of demand for said service. if noone shows up for your big grand opening sale, it's safe to say noone wants to buy your big grand opening
now, i am not implying that the entirety of David Bowie fandom either read
anyway, there's my two bits...do what you can do to improve things, and at least give a good go at what you can't.
"Respect was invented to fill the space where love should be." - Anna Karenina
i see a lot of silliness here... jokes, people banging on the idea of a 'cyber-yugoslavia', people banging on each other, people banging on each other's jokes...
i see in here maybe one actual reference to the situation the yugoslav people find themselves in, and one or two ref's to the fact that this is a statment of dissatisfaction with the status quo. i am quite pleased that at least three of us are actually using our brains here...
i happen to live in the USA, and am not particularly proud of the fact. i find i have major ethic and moral issues with the day-to-day activities of "my" government. i quote the 'my' because i do not condone the slaughter of millions of innocent persons across the world, the destruction of their homes, national infrastructure, ways of life, all because they were unwilling to roll over and play the 'good little bitch' (PMF) client state to the (largely) USA-based corporations and the industrial capitalist states who support them.
then, of course, there is the abysmal domestic situation in the USA. i live in the Boston, MA area. i read recently that in Roxbury (largely a minority neighborhood, you know) there is something like 50 times higher a rate of infant mortality. within five miles of Roxbury, there are at least 5 hospitals, some of the best in the world from what i hear. if the persons in power in this nation had their priorities straight, this would not be the case. these same persons are well on their way to destroying the environment of which we are a part, and without which we can _not_ exist, all in the name of profit.
with all this in mind, i feel that the least we can do as responsible citizens of the world is to oppose this sort of widespread abuse of the peoples of the world, their economies, their right to self-rule and peaceful existence, and just about anything else these bastards are up to.
the fact of the matter is, this is an absolutely fascinating social experiment, nothing less. i really like the idea, and i know i'm in.
my first proposition: lose that stupid "C U in CY" slogan there... but, until that happens, i guess i'll C U in CY! or not, either way...
peace,
johnny
"Respect was invented to fill the space where love should be." - Anna Karenina