The fact that they had to bring in Jerry Ryan for sex appeal is pretty demeaning to science fiction...
Nothing new there -- TOS had Uhura and Yeoman Rand (as well as green-skinned alien babes) while TNG had Counselor Troi and DS9 had Dax and Major Kira... --
A often misquoted Bible verse probably gave you this idea. People say the Bible says, "Money is the root of all evil.", when in fact, it really says, "The LOVE of money is the root of all KINDS of evil."
I think more on point is "render unto Caesar what is Caesar's" , i.e., money.
I think it is funny that Christians jump through hoops to try justify CAPITALISM while renouncing SELFISHNESS and GREED as deadly sins! SELFISHNESS + GREED = CAPITALISM...
If they loved money more then Christ's work, they would not be very effective Christians.
Or very effective capitalists for that matter!!!:->
There are a certain percentage of elitists who sort of cruise through life with a sense of entitlement. eg: Go to the right prep school, get into the right college, land a cushy job at some leading firm, country club... (clip) they're becoming a dying breed... (clip) just going through the motions and resting on your laurels isn't enough.
If the current parties disappear, the government survives quite nicely.
Yes, but other parties will form to take the place of the ones that disappear...
The biggest parties are not cast in stone, neither their number nor their identification. There is nothing special about them, except that they are big and rich. They were not created with the nation, they were late comers.
While the current political parties were not around, there have always been parties in existence. In fact, one of the goals of the founding fathers was to design a system to moderate the passions of factionalism (or what we call partisanship). For more on the history of political parties in the US, see my other post on another thread...
Ok, first off, we Americans do NOT have a two party system. We have always had multiple parties. It's just that most TV brained people can't keep up with more than two. It's thankfully changing though.
I hate to tell you this but this tendency towards a two-party system predates TV. You are partially right when you say that there have always been multiple parties, but the system is set up to encourage two main parties.
Other parties are formed when the two "official" parties lose touch due to the rise of a new political reality. They are usually small, single-issue parties and very often disappear. Sometimes they grow and become one of the two dominant political parties (like the GOP did circa the Civil War when the other parties became paralyzed by the foremost issue of the day: slavery).
If you would like to learn more about the political party system in the U.S., be sure to read Dynamics of the Party System : Alignment and Realignment of Political Parties in the United States by James L. Sundquist. It illustrates how political parties must remain relevant or they will either die out or be absorbed by another party.
And yes, I studied Political Science and History in college...:-)
Your quote is attributed wrong - It was Mark Twain who said that, not Abraham Lincoln.:-)
Do a quote search. You will see that quote attributed to Abe Lincoln. Now seeing that Lincoln died about the time that Sam Clemens began writing as Mark Twain, what are the odds that he stole, umm.. borrowed, it from Honest Abe?
Also apropos: "Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please." -- Mark Twain:->
Comment from Roblimo:... I believe a political orgaization - and that's what political party is; it's certainly not a government agency - should be an ".org", not a ".gov".
In a two-party system like ours, a political party's role depends on whether it is in power or out of power. In power it is the government, out of power it is an organization wanting power. But it should not be two hard to check on whether a party is acting as a government entity (i.e., when it is looking out for the public interest) and when it is acting as a private organization (e.g., when it is looking out for its own interests).
In theory that is; in practice it is not often easy to tell which is which...
Third-World contries are third-world countries for a reason. There's nothing there worth taking. If there was, one of the European countries would've colonized it a long time ago, and who knows, it might have become a superpower.
So if a country did not have the "privilege" of being colonized by a European country its their tough luck, huh? BZZZT - wrong! A lot of the world's problems we have today are the due to the after effects of European colonization...
Maybe I'm cruel, but if a person doesn't contribute to society in some productive way, I think they should be removed from society. The only thing that the panhandler on my street corner contributes to society is fear and disgust.
Define "productive". Define "removed from society". That panhandler you fear is a person too. Maybe they are mentally ill. Or a Viet Nam vet suffering from PTSD. Or maybe they just did not get all the breaks you obviously had when you were growing up.
You say you work 60+ hrs/wk and yet you cannot spare some change for someone who is less well off than you? You assume that they are lazy, instead of talking to them and finding out what their story is? Maybe that person just needs a break or two to make something of their life...
Coward indeed. If you had any bollocks you would put your name to your rants instead of hiding behind anonymnity. As it is we can only draw two conclusions: 1) you are a tightwad, and 2) while everyone is issued a brain, not everyone is taught how to use it!
The drug war only exists because the powers that be (i.e., government) is trying to "solve" what is a medical problem by using police and soldiers. If you give the doctors and scientists a chance to work on the problem MAYBE it can be solved.
I am an atheist but I don't understand why the majority of sheep, I mean people that believe in God, are so dead set against drugs. Let's see... God created the world in seven days, including the opium poppy, the coca plant and the hemp plant. God created receptors for those drugs in our brains. Did God make a mistake or something?
And since when is it the government's role to tell me what I can and cannot put in my body? As long as I am not hurting anyone else, it should be no one's business but my own...
Does anyone else find quoting a slave owner (Jefferson) about liberty to really,really ironic?
Well yes, but as one of the foremost political theorists of his day he was hugely responsible for Constitution ver 1.0, which has served us pretty well (albeit with a few bugs) for over 200 years. Besides IIRC he freed his slaves when he died...
Lawrence Person is right on the dot with this. (no pun in tended.) This third wave of SF is very integrated with all facets of society, which has been always been quite rare.
I agree with your assessment, because classic SF usually dealt with the gee-whiz facets of the future (i.e., rocket ships, time machines, etc.). I did questions one of Person's assertions though, where he says the postcyberpunk heroes are from "the middle class. (And we do need a better term; here in the United States, economic mobility has rendered the concept of "class" nearly obsolete.)"
Economic mobility has not eliminated class, it only enables one to cross classes. As a poor Chicano comp sci student who lives in a barrio, I am considered part of the "lower class", but the minute I start making in excess of $50K/yr I will probably move to a better neighborhood and will be accepted by my new neighbors as part of the middle class.
As long as this is a capitalistic country discrimination (in the economic sense) will still exist. In fact, even the most utopian SF (Star Trek comes to mind) still has classes (warrior, technical, merchant, etc.). People being people, the tendency to organize people and society into classes will always exist... --
Hmm, and whose ethics and definition of right and wrong are to be taught? Yours? The government's?
You are talking about MORALITY, not ETHICS. It should be easy to come up with a common set of ethical rules, as most people can agree on things are right (the Golden Rule) and wrong (killing other people). Morality, on the other hand, comes in many different flavors and it is not as easy to come up with a set of common moral rules...
The drug war is just a political and propaganda tool that the government uses to further the enslavement of the middle class and the dehumanization of the lower class.
Not to mention turning neighborhoods where racial and ethnic minorities live into battlegrounds. Between gang wars over turf and police swat raids on suspected drug houses, the smart ones who live there tend to keep their heads down and hope they don't get hit by a stray bullet.
What burns me up is that a white stockbroker caught with ounces of powder cocaine will usually get probation while minorities caught with a few grams of crack usually get hard time. If the government insists on prosecuting the drug war, it should do it FAIRLY, or not at all!
Do we really want the govt threatening little kids?
"If you do this, people like me will track you down and throw you in jail."
The government does not even have to send the kids to jail right away, as it seems what they really want to do is to get mugshots and fingerprints (and soon DNA samples) of the little buggers. That way they will have a police record, giving the D.A. another tool to use against them the next time they get into the least bit of trouble...
We blow millions of dollars on the DARE program to get kids off drugs, so that they can get older and use them anyway.
If millions of dollars of propaganda doesn't make a dent on the level of drug use by America's teens, does anyone really think that a lousy $300K will make anyone think twice before they try to crack into government computers? I personally don't think it will make one iota of difference...
Lone gunmen is a reference to the individual convicted of JF Kennedy's assasination (and the possible conspiracies surrounding that). There maybe a few other iterations there I've missed.
One iteration that stands out in my mind is that "lone gunmen" refers to the three computer geeks that occasionally appear on the X-Files. They were first seen ~20 years ago when they helped Mulder by cracking into top-secret government computers, and more recently helped Mulder and Scully crack the black box recovered from the plane utilizing alien technology which crashed at Area 51.
I laughed when I first heard the ULG's name and immediately made the connection to the conspiracy theories that are a prominent part of the X-Files...
"Created by a Finnish graduate student named Linus Torvalls in 1991, Linux's open code is relentlessly scrutinized and tested by tens of thousands of systems analysts worldwide, who constantly recommend improvements, Klosowski said."
I noticed that line too. I guess it sounds better to say "systems analyst" instead of hacker. I have an great idea -- instead of going round and round on hacker vs. cracker we can just call everyone a "systems analyst"!!!
This is simply an unfortunate name. The NSA performs the technical review for all US cryptographic export requests. The keys in question are the ones that allow us to ensure compliance with the NSA's technical review. Therefore, they came to known within Microsoft as the NSA keys, and this name was included in the symbol information for one of the keys. However, Microsoft holds these keys and does not share them with anyone, including the NSA.
Sounds like Orwellian double-speak to me. Up is down. In is out. NSA key is not for the NSA. Maybe Bill Gates' minions are taking disinformation lessons from the MIB of the NSA?
Where are Mulder and Sculley when you really need them...
And the people complaining are not Mac users, they are Mac haters.
True, I don't use a Mac but I actually kinda of like them (except for the stupid one mouse button). I keep hearing good things about PPC Linux, which makes me wish I could afford one!
They're two different OSs (assuming you're comparing Mac OS with Linux or *BSD).
Oh, so you are saying that the Mac is not technologically superior?!?:->
It seemed like he was bragging about no crashes in a month. I have a dual boot Linux-Win98 system. I am usually in Linux for long periods so I too can say that my Win98 system hasn't crashed in a month. Of course I haven't used it in a month, so it would be an overt lie to say that Win98 is crash-proof!!!
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The fact that they had to bring in Jerry Ryan for sex appeal is pretty demeaning to science fiction...
Nothing new there -- TOS had Uhura and Yeoman Rand (as well as green-skinned alien babes) while TNG had Counselor Troi and DS9 had Dax and Major Kira...
--
I will give the latter series credit for the whole Borg thing, which was a very cool concept.
;-)
:->
Good point. While Voyager tends to be hit and miss, I thought the recent two-hour Borg Queen episode was pretty good.
At this point, though, about the only thing that will get me tuning in is some good old fashioned lesbian action.
Seven and B'Elanna in zero G...
--
A often misquoted Bible verse probably gave you this idea. People say the Bible says, "Money is the root of all evil.", when in fact, it really says, "The LOVE of money is the root of all KINDS of evil."
:->
I think more on point is "render unto Caesar what is Caesar's" , i.e., money.
I think it is funny that Christians jump through hoops to try justify CAPITALISM while renouncing SELFISHNESS and GREED as deadly sins! SELFISHNESS + GREED = CAPITALISM...
If they loved money more then Christ's work, they would not be very effective Christians.
Or very effective capitalists for that matter!!!
--
I did not find any quotes by Twain in the online version of Bartlett's ninth edition (1901), but Michael Moncur attributes it to both Lincoln and Twain. Search Michael Moncur's quotes here.
--
There are a certain percentage of elitists who sort of cruise through life with a sense of entitlement. eg: Go to the right prep school, get into the right college, land a cushy job at some leading firm, country club... (clip) they're becoming a dying breed... (clip) just going through the motions and resting on your laurels isn't enough.
:->
Hmmm... Tell that to George W. Bush!!!
--
If the current parties disappear, the government survives quite nicely.
Yes, but other parties will form to take the place of the ones that disappear...
The biggest parties are not cast in stone, neither their number nor their identification. There is nothing special about them, except that they are big and rich. They were not created with the nation, they were late comers.
While the current political parties were not around, there have always been parties in existence. In fact, one of the goals of the founding fathers was to design a system to moderate the passions of factionalism (or what we call partisanship). For more on the history of political parties in the US, see my other post on another thread...
--
Ok, first off, we Americans do NOT have a two party system. We have always had multiple parties. It's just that most TV brained people can't keep up with more than two. It's thankfully changing though.
:-)
I hate to tell you this but this tendency towards a two-party system predates TV. You are partially right when you say that there have always been multiple parties, but the system is set up to encourage two main parties.
Other parties are formed when the two "official" parties lose touch due to the rise of a new political reality. They are usually small, single-issue parties and very often disappear. Sometimes they grow and become one of the two dominant political parties (like the GOP did circa the Civil War when the other parties became paralyzed by the foremost issue of the day: slavery).
If you would like to learn more about the political party system in the U.S., be sure to read Dynamics of the Party System : Alignment and Realignment of Political Parties in the United States by James L. Sundquist. It illustrates how political parties must remain relevant or they will either die out or be absorbed by another party.
And yes, I studied Political Science and History in college...
--
Your quote is attributed wrong - It was Mark Twain who said that, not Abraham Lincoln. :-)
:->
Do a quote search. You will see that quote attributed to Abe Lincoln. Now seeing that Lincoln died about the time that Sam Clemens began writing as Mark Twain, what are the odds that he stole, umm.. borrowed, it from Honest Abe?
Also apropos: "Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please." -- Mark Twain
--
Comment from Roblimo: ... I believe a political orgaization - and that's what political party is; it's certainly not a government agency - should be an ".org", not a ".gov".
In a two-party system like ours, a political party's role depends on whether it is in power or out of power. In power it is the government, out of power it is an organization wanting power. But it should not be two hard to check on whether a party is acting as a government entity (i.e., when it is looking out for the public interest) and when it is acting as a private organization (e.g., when it is looking out for its own interests).
In theory that is; in practice it is not often easy to tell which is which...
--
Third-World contries are third-world countries for a reason. There's nothing there worth taking. If there was, one of the European countries would've colonized it a long time ago, and who knows, it might have become a superpower.
So if a country did not have the "privilege" of being colonized by a European country its their tough luck, huh? BZZZT - wrong! A lot of the world's problems we have today are the due to the after effects of European colonization...
Maybe I'm cruel, but if a person doesn't contribute to society in some productive way, I think they should be removed from society. The only thing that the panhandler on my street corner contributes to society is fear and disgust.
Define "productive". Define "removed from society". That panhandler you fear is a person too. Maybe they are mentally ill. Or a Viet Nam vet suffering from PTSD. Or maybe they just did not get all the breaks you obviously had when you were growing up.
You say you work 60+ hrs/wk and yet you cannot spare some change for someone who is less well off than you? You assume that they are lazy, instead of talking to them and finding out what their story is? Maybe that person just needs a break or two to make something of their life...
Coward indeed. If you had any bollocks you would put your name to your rants instead of hiding behind anonymnity. As it is we can only draw two conclusions: 1) you are a tightwad, and 2) while everyone is issued a brain, not everyone is taught how to use it!
--
The drug war is far from solved.
The drug war only exists because the powers that be (i.e., government) is trying to "solve" what is a medical problem by using police and soldiers. If you give the doctors and scientists a chance to work on the problem MAYBE it can be solved.
I am an atheist but I don't understand why the majority of sheep, I mean people that believe in God, are so dead set against drugs. Let's see... God created the world in seven days, including the opium poppy, the coca plant and the hemp plant. God created receptors for those drugs in our brains. Did God make a mistake or something?
And since when is it the government's role to tell me what I can and cannot put in my body? As long as I am not hurting anyone else, it should be no one's business but my own...
--
Does anyone else find quoting a slave owner (Jefferson) about liberty to really,really ironic?
Well yes, but as one of the foremost political theorists of his day he was hugely responsible for Constitution ver 1.0, which has served us pretty well (albeit with a few bugs) for over 200 years. Besides IIRC he freed his slaves when he died...
--
Was it Abaham Lincoln or a contemporary of his who stated that the US must have a civil war in every generation to keep the country a true democracy.
:-> Let me try again...
Close but no cigar
A little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.-- Thomas Jefferson
--
Was it Abaham Lincoln or a contemporary of his who stated that the US must have a civil war in every generation to keep the country a true democracy.
The tree of liberty must be watered periodically with the blood of tyrants and patriots alike. It is its natural manure. -- Thomas Jefferson
--
Lawrence Person is right on the dot with this. (no pun in tended.) This third wave of SF is very integrated with all facets of society, which has been always been quite rare.
I agree with your assessment, because classic SF usually dealt with the gee-whiz facets of the future (i.e., rocket ships, time machines, etc.). I did questions one of Person's assertions though, where he says the postcyberpunk heroes are from "the middle class. (And we do need a better term; here in the United States, economic mobility has rendered the concept of "class" nearly obsolete.)"
Economic mobility has not eliminated class, it only enables one to cross classes. As a poor Chicano comp sci student who lives in a barrio, I am considered part of the "lower class", but the minute I start making in excess of $50K/yr I will probably move to a better neighborhood and will be accepted by my new neighbors as part of the middle class.
As long as this is a capitalistic country discrimination (in the economic sense) will still exist. In fact, even the most utopian SF (Star Trek comes to mind) still has classes (warrior, technical, merchant, etc.). People being people, the tendency to organize people and society into classes will always exist...
--
Hmm, and whose ethics and definition of right and wrong are to be taught? Yours? The government's?
You are talking about MORALITY, not ETHICS. It should be easy to come up with a common set of ethical rules, as most people can agree on things are right (the Golden Rule) and wrong (killing other people). Morality, on the other hand, comes in many different flavors and it is not as easy to come up with a set of common moral rules...
--
The drug war is just a political and propaganda tool that the government uses to further the enslavement of the middle class and the dehumanization of the lower class.
Not to mention turning neighborhoods where racial and ethnic minorities live into battlegrounds. Between gang wars over turf and police swat raids on suspected drug houses, the smart ones who live there tend to keep their heads down and hope they don't get hit by a stray bullet.
What burns me up is that a white stockbroker caught with ounces of powder cocaine will usually get probation while minorities caught with a few grams of crack usually get hard time. If the government insists on prosecuting the drug war, it should do it FAIRLY, or not at all!
--
Do we really want the govt threatening little kids?
"If you do this, people like me will track you down and throw you in jail."
The government does not even have to send the kids to jail right away, as it seems what they really want to do is to get mugshots and fingerprints (and soon DNA samples) of the little buggers. That way they will have a police record, giving the D.A. another tool to use against them the next time they get into the least bit of trouble...
--
We blow millions of dollars on the DARE program to get kids off drugs, so that they can get older and use them anyway.
If millions of dollars of propaganda doesn't make a dent on the level of drug use by America's teens, does anyone really think that a lousy $300K will make anyone think twice before they try to crack into government computers? I personally don't think it will make one iota of difference...
--
Lone gunmen is a reference to the individual convicted of JF Kennedy's assasination (and the possible conspiracies surrounding that). There maybe a few other iterations there I've missed.
One iteration that stands out in my mind is that "lone gunmen" refers to the three computer geeks that occasionally appear on the X-Files. They were first seen ~20 years ago when they helped Mulder by cracking into top-secret government computers, and more recently helped Mulder and Scully crack the black box recovered from the plane utilizing alien technology which crashed at Area 51.
I laughed when I first heard the ULG's name and immediately made the connection to the conspiracy theories that are a prominent part of the X-Files...
"Created by a Finnish graduate student named Linus Torvalls in 1991, Linux's open code is relentlessly scrutinized and tested by tens of thousands of systems analysts worldwide, who constantly recommend improvements, Klosowski said."
I noticed that line too. I guess it sounds better to say "systems analyst" instead of hacker. I have an great idea -- instead of going round and round on hacker vs. cracker we can just call everyone a "systems analyst"!!!
But its nice to see a splashy PR piece to calm Y2K fears.
I second that motion. It sure is nice to see an occasional island of sanity in this (mostly) insane world...
Why the backup key labeled NSA key?
This is simply an unfortunate name. The NSA performs the technical review for all US cryptographic export requests. The keys in question are the ones that allow us to ensure compliance with the NSA's technical review. Therefore, they came to known within Microsoft as the NSA keys, and this name was included in the symbol information for one of the keys. However, Microsoft holds these keys and does not share them with anyone, including the NSA.
Sounds like Orwellian double-speak to me. Up is down. In is out. NSA key is not for the NSA. Maybe Bill Gates' minions are taking disinformation lessons from the MIB of the NSA?
Where are Mulder and Sculley when you really need them...
And the people complaining are not Mac users, they are Mac haters.
True, I don't use a Mac but I actually kinda of like them (except for the stupid one mouse button). I keep hearing good things about PPC Linux, which makes me wish I could afford one!
They're two different OSs (assuming you're comparing Mac OS with Linux or *BSD).
:->
Oh, so you are saying that the Mac is not technologically superior?!?
It seemed like he was bragging about no crashes in a month. I have a dual boot Linux-Win98 system. I am usually in Linux for long periods so I too can say that my Win98 system hasn't crashed in a month. Of course I haven't used it in a month, so it would be an overt lie to say that Win98 is crash-proof!!!