I just spent an ejoyable half hour or so reading Business 2.0's "minable database" of 101 Dumbest Moments in Business, and then I had a look at their even-more-hilarious 100 Dumbest moments in e-Business. This article really does have that weird flavor of megalomaniacal Internet-hype gibberish that we all came to know so well during the boom years. In a way, it's a pleasant little nostalgia trip to see the same old idiocy presented with the same old mindless confidence, but in another way it's just depressing.
Reality Check: Slashdot is a BBS for bored IT workers taking a break while installing nine hundred copies of Word on nine hundred 266 MHz beige boxes at the local credit union. It is not a minable database of ideas (or at least not of ideas worth mining). At its best, it's an undergraduate bull session.
This article is a sad indication of the decline of Slashdot. Here we have a wholly closed and proprietary product, designed to work most effectively with Windows. I see not a word about a source release.
It is an outrage and an affront that Slashdot should help market such a product. That Slashdot should do so without questioning or even mentioning the proprietary nature of the product is well beyond mere "outrage".
Proprietary products are of no interest. They are unstable, unreliable, and unmodifiable. Geeks don't need them, don't want them, and don't use them. This product is entirely irrelevant to Slashdot's tech-savvy readership.
The Air Force is free to buy a better operating system, if they can find one. And, yes, it's right and proper for a customer to make requests known to vendors. However, the threatening posture of the Air Force in this matter, in the context of ongoing government harrassment of the vendor, is very ominous. The federal government is in the habit of enforcing its "preferences" with deadly force at times, and their reservations about the worth of free competition are well known.
Let's let free enterprise do its job. Political pressure has no role here. The private sector must remain free and independent so that it can provide the solutions that the marketplace wants.
WITHOUT the ability to reverse engineer... You wouldn't have two chipmakers competing in the x86 market
I'm all in favor of competition, naturally. I applaud IBM's continuing effort to market the obsolete and discredited PowerPC architecture. That, however, has nothing to do with, for example, AMD's ongoing criminal violation of intellectual property rights. Intel has made a massive investment in research and development. They have advanced the state of the art by decades, and all computer users benefit. It is right that Intel should reap the rewards for their work. It is not right that AMD should traipse in late in the game, with no R&D department of their own, manufacture cheap knockoffs in Taiwan, and make a fortune exploiting somebody else's innovations. This is called "dumping" and it is, under the wise and just laws of our nation, a criminal act.
As for "open source", there again we have poorly-paid (or entirely unpaid!) workers producing cheap imitative knockoffs of innovative products. This serves only to reduce the market value of real software, thereby snatching food from the stomachs of those who create real software. The avowed intent of the "free software" pirates is to reduce the market value of software.
...WINE is wrong, Bleem is wrong, hell, VMware is wrong.
That is correct. All of those are, in effect, criminal conspiracies to damage the economy by reducing or eliminating the natural rewards given by the free market to innovative and effective competitors.
...reverse engineering is legal...
WRONG. Intellectual property law has reached maturity in this country. Those who create valuable ideas are now guaranteed their right to retain full ownership and control of their own property under the terms of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
Blizzard has put a lot of money into creating a valuable commercial property. Why is it valuable? Because customers want it. Any service that people are willing to pay for is, by definition, valuable. In creating value, Blizzard has created jobs. This is the equation of capitalism: Value begets value. Creation begets creation. A free capitalist system rewards those who create value.
BNETD belongs to a competing model, the parasite system (called by some a "gift economy", meaning that creative members of society are coerced into providing the fruits of their labor as a "gift" to those unable or unwilling to create value). Their aim is to siphon off the value created by Blizzard, thereby, in effect, punishing Blizzard for creating value.
You can make any excuses you like, but that's what they're doing. I understand that people don't like to pay for things. Who does? Everybody likes to get something for nothing. If somebody wants to give away a service for free, that's just fine, too: It's their service. In a free society they may do as they please with it. However: Doing as you please with somebody else's service is a different matter.
It is perfectly appropriate for Blizzard to see legal redress when they are victimized by criminals.
It appears that "jamie" (not his real name, we hope) is trying to tell us something. Maybe CmdrTaco fell down the old well at the Wilson place across the creek?
Or maybe not.
Oh, wait, okay, I forced myself to wade through a bit more of it. "jamie" is trying to write in a hip, breezy sort of way. Plain English is a lot easier to read, and it communicates more actual information too. Then again, "jamie" has nothing to say. It's just a big ol' wad of platitudes and commonplaces. ("Firefly failed because nobody went there" -- WHAT A DEEP INSIGHT!) Yeah, people want to fit in and be liked. This is news? Come on! You don't need several hundred words of babble to say that.
The halfassed notion of tracking trend-hopping behavior is on the level of "Duuuude, wouldn't it, like, be, like, cool if, like, you know what I mean?" undergraduate bong-session bullshit. It's even worse than the platitudes.
they wander through life uncaringly, completely unaffected by their adventures . . . [much snipped] . . . the same material could have been more rewarding in the hands of a writer less afraid to get his hands dirty.
By chance, I've been re-reading a log of old Vance recently (this week: The Faceless Man novels, Night Lamp, and a couple of the Alastor ones), and I'd have to say that you've missed a few important things here.
Vance didn't write the same book over and over. The Dying Earth stories are like what "demo coders" do: Brief exercises in virtuosity for its own sake, just for the sheer joy of it. Vance's other forty-odd books go in different directions. Generalizing about Vance from just one or a few of his books is a silly business. Even if you say "Vance writes lovely prose", you'd still be wrong in a few cases -- and that's just about as close as you can get to a meaningful generalization about Vance. You might also say he's not often very interested in plotting. But is he interested in character development? Yes. Obsessively so, at times.
As for Wolfe, he's a drab fake, entirely beneath contempt. I waded through half of one of the "Long Sun" things and I have, literally, no recollection of any of it. There was nothing interesting, compelling, or memorable in that book.
Wolfe's a hack in the Guy Gavriel Kay mode: He goes through some of the motions of pretendint to be a real writer like Vance, but he'll never fool anybody who knows the difference. Orson Scott Card's a big Wolfe fan, if I recall correctly, and that says it all -- except Card makes up for his inadequate technique by telling compelling stories about memorable characters. Wolfe is just a blank.
Fritz Leiber, now: There's a real writer. He's in Vance's league, and that's rarefied company indeed. Lord Dunsany, anybody?
As frightening as this prospect is, it may allow us some glimpse of what it really DOES take to give an organism true sentience, and weather [sic] or not a 'soul' is inherint [sic] in that.
I'll forgive your spelling, because you've so shrewdly zeroed in on the most important point here: "Science" hasn't yet accounted for intelligence. They haven't explained what it is, nor how it works, nor where it came from -- and they've most certainly given up on even asking"why?"
Don't get me wrong: Science is fine for engineering and suchlike. Science has provided us with many valuable conveniences and useful machines. I'll never deny the worth of what they've done. Nevertheless, I won't be such a fool as to put some clever tinkerers in charge of my destiny. They have their place, but it's got nothing to do with any of the big questions facing us as a nation, nor as individuals. Only religion can take on the real issues, the ones that require faith, an open mind, and honest recognition of the fact of God's unmistakable Hand in His own Creation. Clever mechanical tricks won't cut it.
Let the engineers do engineering, let the thinkers think, and let the rulers rule. This is how it must be.
A half-human creature with the body of a machine is a sort of "unholy Grail" for the left, because such a creature would have the intellect of a human being without the soul. It would be a "born" sociopath, lacking the inborn moral sense that sets humanity apart from the animals.
Such an "entity" would be invaluable in enforcing totalitarian laws. It would have none of what the leftists snidely call "human weakness" -- what those of us still proud to be human call "mercy" or "justice", or even (dare I engage in crimethink?!) "fear of God".
The Clintons and Janet Reno must be rubbing their hands in glee. Some crude "version 1.0" of their new "enforcers" may even be ready in time for their next attempt to seize power.
. . . the FSF sided with Microsoft and put a ban down on porting GNU to Apple OSes.
This comes as no surprise.
Richard Stallman is a man of firm principle and unshakable conviction. Some of his convictions are clearly insane, but others -- such as his belief in the Free Market -- are not. In any case, I feel a great kinship with a man who will not under any circumstances compromise his principles.
The "Open Source" movement, by contrast, is purely pragmatic. Pragmatism is dangerous: By definition, the pragmatist believes that the end justifies the means. This is the moral and intellectual pit that the "Open Source" "movement" has fallen into. This is why they support Apple and IBM: It's convenient. It seems momentarily advantageous.
THEY ARE COMPLETELY AMORAL.
You can't trust amoral people. A man with his eye only on the main chance will sell out his supporters in a heartbeat.
I am always surprised at how much/.'ers like apple and shun m$ when apple always seems to like so much control over their systems.
Odd, isn't it? Most Slashbots claim to support the free market, but when the rubber hits the road, they'll always break bread with its enemies.
Microsoft clobbered Apple -- and the rest of the industry -- with openness. They were always open to developers writing for their platforms, and they always relied on open commodity hardware, in sharp contrast to Apple's obsession with closed proprietary hardware.
Linux itself exists only because Microsoft created the modern microcomputer industry, where standardized, fully-documented hardware was available at reasonable prices dictated by a competitive marketplace. It's no coincidence that Linux was first developed for the same hardware platform as DOS.
Microsoft has always been open and competitive. They encourage competition and thrive on it. They have always traded freely in the marketplace of ideas. Apple never did, and never will.
The "open-source" "community"'s affection for Apple is indicative of its real motives and underlying beliefs. If they really cared about freedom -- real freedom, the freedom to do as one chooses with one's own property -- they'd have been supporting Microsoft all along.
I seem to have it more and more these days: A sudden instant of strange clarity as I try to figure out what Zope is, or as I download a.wav file of Guido van Rossum squawking about "Vooty Vootpecker".
It's brief, but highly concentrated: The scales fall from my eyes, and I say to myself: "I don't give a rat's ass about this bullshit. Hooray for those that do, but I just don't." So, I close the browser window and find something interesting to spend my time on.
They had all the evidence, but J. Edgar Hoover was a generous man, and he offered Grissom an honorable way out. If you ask me, it was a mistake: That's more mercy than the Red Grissom would ever have offered Hoover if the shoe had been on the other foot.
Still, Hoover was a Conservative -- a gentleman. He wanted to leave Grissom's kids with something to be proud of. He thought it was better for them to believe a shining lie about their father than the truth of his espioniage and treason. Those kids grew up straight and strong, fine young Americans: So maybe Hoover was right.
But the fact remains that Conservatives have always refused to go for the cheap shot, always refused to dig dirt and engage in smear tactics and political "dirty tricks" -- but the Left has no shame at all. They'll do anything.
If we'd been willing to go after Clinton with everything we had, we'd have restored Democracy to the USA several years earlier. Instead, we played the game clean, we refused to manipulate the law to our advantage, we refused to sling mud -- and you know what? We won in the end, so maybe we were right all along.
Mr. Bush is doing the right thing. He knows that he's doing the right thing. He is supported by all Americans who still believe in personally responsibility, honesty, and hard work.
To hell with the majority. Even if the majority doesn't want democracy, I'm damned if I'll abandon it. We'll hold it in trust for them until they come to their senses and learn to vote for people who do genuinely want a true American democracy as the Founding Fathers intended.
Anyway, what are they going to do about it? We have the Presidency and the Supreme Court. We've got an effective majority in the Senate. We're in charge and we intended to stay that way. You don't like it? Tough shit. You lose.
Given the position of strength that we're in, we're certainly not going to make any concessions, much less share power with Quislings. It's ours and we'll do with it as we see fit. We are not responsible to you. Get that through your thick head. You're out in the cold and you'll stay there.
You can't exactly 'sneak' a launch from the Kennedy Space Center.
Uhh, yeah, whatever.
I suppose you can look at a rocket from ten miles away, as it launches, and tell just by looking at it whether it's an "unmanned test" or not?
You have X-Ray Eyes, perhaps, like Superman? Have you been taking a few too many drugs, me lad?
During the period in question (1961-1966), dozens of rockets were launched at Cape Canaveral, in the broad light of day. A few were well-publicized manned fligths; the rest were billed as "unmanned test shots".
The US did most of its space work in the open . ..
No, no, no.
The US did all of its space work that they told you about in the open. Get it? Everything you know about is in the category of "things you know about", yeah, sure -- but so what?!
In the early and mid 1960's, the liberal Kennedy and Johnson regimes are known to have conducted numerous -- and invariably fatal -- space-related experiments closely linked to MK-ULTRA. Using captured German war rockets, they tested the survival benefits of shielding and insulation made of a number of advanced (for the time) synthetic polymers (e.g. Imipolex-G) obtained from the German IG Farben industrial complex.
Dozens of brave Americans reported "missing in action" in the early days of the Vietnam conflict were, in fact, incinerated somewhere in the skies over Florida, their last moments accompanied only by the sterile beeping of primitive telemetry.
They were, at least, permitted to pray.
The Freedom of Information Act was designed by liberals to harass honest government officials in their attempts to combat subversion -- but in the end, the sword has two edges, and the FOIA has struck a few blows for the Truth as well.
Who'd've expected that the Communists would, after all, turn out to be brutal, inhuman monsters?
We've sat through decades of media whitewash designed by powerful liberals to make the Soviets seem "nice" and harmless -- and now, finally, with G. W. Bush in office, a few small voices are daring to speak the truth.
It's about time, if you ask me.
Of course, the media still won't breathe a word about the leftist-sponsored slaughter going on all around us in our nations abortion mills, but what did you expect? Courage? From the Quislings who left McCarthy twisting in the wind? Ha!
It's pathetic, really, but I suppose you don't know any better.
What you call "strength" is fear: Fear that you don't really know much about anything beyond the bridge of your nose. Fear of taking responsibility for yourself. Fear of God, whether you admit or not.
It takes a far stronger man than you to accept the freedom and responsibility that Christ gives His followers.
If you can't handle it, you can't handle it. Don't feel so bad. You've got a lot of company.
"And out of his mouth goeth a sharp sword, that with it he should smite the nations: and he shall rule them with a rod of iron: and he treadeth the winepress of the fierceness and wrath of Almighty God."
Revelation 19:15
Their time will come.
God loves to see His children prosper and create wealth. God does not love lawsuits.
Lincoln was indeed a member of a party called "Republican". That was about 140 years ago, which is what we call "a long time". By the way, Lincoln was as staunchly opposed to integration as he was to slavery.
The South was so pissed off at Lincoln that they solidly supported the party called "Democratic" for a full century.
Until Brown v. State Board of Education in (IIRC) 1954, nobody in national politics in the US was seriously opposed to segregation.
When people in the Federal government did start getting serious about enforcing the law, it was liberal Democrats like JFK and LBJ who made it happen. As a result, Southern conservatives started fleeing the Democratic party (some big names being Helms, Thurmond, and Wallace). The States' Rights Party was one result. George Wallace was the last powerful right-wing Democrat, and he's long gone, boy. He was part of the old guard, nothing to do with those who are in the party now.
Meanwhile, conservatives in general, then as always, were firmly opposed to integration. Some of them wore little donkeys on their lapels, and some wore little elephants: So what? It's got nothing to do with me.
Nixon finally settled the matter with the "Southern Strategy": Win the reactionary elements of the formerly Democratic South by appealing to isolationism and bigotry.
It worked. The GOP doesn't own the South the way the Demos used to, but they're doing okay.
Your argument is a meaningless word game. If I want to find out what modern Republicans believe, I don't go ask a man who died in 1865. No, I go observe a modern Republican. How's that for a bizarre notion? If you want to learn about a thing, observe it. If I want to learn about my dog, I observe him. I don't observe the neighbors' dog ("Well, shit, they're both named Spot, so they must be the same!"), and I don't look up famous dogs named Spot in Who's Who.
All this "Lincoln was a Republican" thing is just spin. Propaganda. Meaningless bullshit. It tells us nothing about the thoughts or actions of anybody now living -- with the sole exception of the fools who yammer about it. It tells us one thing about them: They're either dishonest, lazy, or not very bright.
We on the left will call off our Kudzu and our nazi skinheads . . .
It's tempting, but of course you're lying. I make it a point never to strike a bargin with a dishonorable enemy.
. . . the developers ripping whole square miles of trees out of the ground in North Georgia.
Let's look at the facts, shall we? At present rates of use, the United States has enough trees to last for thirty-five thousand years.
Thirty-five thousand years. Yet you would cripple the economy and bring about mass starvation just to satisfy your sentimental "feelings" about "the nice fluffy trees". Waaaaitaminute -- "mass starvation". Oh, yes, there it is, there it is indeed.
Crippling the economy fits right in with your genocidal agenda, doesn't it?
So let's cut the nonsense and try to stay on topic, shall we? If you can come up with a better explanation for the Kudzu than biological warfare, I'd love to hear it -- but you can't, because my conclusion is inescapable. This is the same government which has butchered so many Christian citizens merely for holding fast to their most sacred beliefs and inalienable rights. This is the government that was building massive crematoria eighteen months ago, to handle the influx of bodies from their projected Y2K operations.
Digital records are favored by our corrupt, foreign-dominated Federal tyranny for one very simple reason:
It's terrifyingly easy to alter them, or to dispose of them entirely.
This is frightening, but true: As the well-known conservative George Orwell observed in his great novel 1984, "He who controls the past controls the future." The "Party" in 1984 devoted itself to doing exactly what the Clinton regime did: They went through all historical records, altering, falsifying, modifying, deleting.
No one will ever know what the Clinton death count really was. No one will ever know what really happened. The "records" are malleable. You can trust no information that comes from the government, because it's all been "massaged" and "fixed up".
Will there be historical records? Not in any meaningful sense: There will be something that looks a lot like such material, but it will be a work of pure fiction.
Sorry, but you gave away the whole game right there, Jack.
In addition to their innumerable violations of property rights and their devotion to furthering the cause of Federal power abuse, the Army Corps of Engineers has had some bright ideas (rammed down the throats of an uncooperative public) like introducing Kudzu in the South.
We all know how that ended up, right? It's been worse than the rabbits in Australia.
The Kudzu epidemic is a deliberate act of biological warfare against the people of the United States. It's no accident that it was done in the South, the only remaining Christian area east of the Mississippi.
"Biological warfare" can have only one goal -- one described by another "scare word":
Genocide.
Flawed software imposed by government fiat
on
Agenda VR3 Review
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· Score: 1
If there's one thing we've learned from history, it's the absolutely indefensible, factitious assertion that government is always the LEAST efficient way to get something done.
Like it or not, it's essentially a law of nature.
Yet you abandon logic and defend your bizarre claims with nonsensical sophistry and irrelevant factual trivia. Logic tells us one thing about this issue: XML is the product of government software design. It was created by civil servants, just like the Internet itself. Your claim that it has value is logically insupportable. "Effective government software" is a contradiction in terms, like "dry water". It's gibberish.
I'm sorry, but until you start basing your arguments on sound logic and morally compelling fundamental assertions about the way the world works, I'm not going to take you very seriously.
Last I checked, "Federal stormtroopers" weren't raiding churches, temples, synagogues(sp, I'm an ignorant goyim) etc.
"Goyim" is the plural. I'm no linguist, but my understandiing is that "-im" generally indicates the masculine plural in Hebrew (as with "cherubim", "seraphim", "sephardim", etc. ad inf. -- the feminine plural tends to be "-ot", as in "mikvot" etc. Don't forget that exceptions to the "rule" are legion, as in any natural language). I think the singular is "goy", but I'm not sure. Actually, for all I know, the word may be Yiddish, which (AFAIK) is a dialect of German with a lot of Hebrew thrown in.
Um, anyhow, back to the stormtroopers.
Federal stormtroopers burned an entire congregation in Waco, Texas, eight years ago.
It's a fact. Their religion was considered "unacceptable" and they were exterminated.
The FBI monitors and harasses many churches whose views are considered "politically incorrect". Just a year ago, we narrowly escaped imposition of a brutal military dictatorship which would have outlawed Christianity entirely. This is no joke. Secret documents were leaked and have found their way into the patriotic resistance underground. This material has been widely disseminated. No one is fooled.
If Y2K disruption had not been kept under control by the wisdom and forsight of American business and the patriot community, we would now be under martial law and public worship would be a crime punishable by death or 're-education'.
If you've got a problem with the way the laws are written, write your duly elected representative.
You've missed the point. It is insane and unjust that I am subject to the same laws as a citizen of Massachusetts. Let them have their laws -- but let me have mine. This is called "freedom": We all get to live as we choose.
[me]: As long as we are forced to allow undesired outsiders to buy land in our communities, we are not free.
[you]: Their money's just as green as yours is.
Irrelevant. I choose not to live alongside certain people. They affect my property values and my quality of life. Federal interference in the housing market directly violates my Constitutional right to freedom of association.
Slashdot Mirror
Oooookay.
Sir? Please step away from the bong.
I just spent an ejoyable half hour or so reading Business 2.0's "minable database" of 101 Dumbest Moments in Business, and then I had a look at their even-more-hilarious 100 Dumbest moments in e-Business. This article really does have that weird flavor of megalomaniacal Internet-hype gibberish that we all came to know so well during the boom years. In a way, it's a pleasant little nostalgia trip to see the same old idiocy presented with the same old mindless confidence, but in another way it's just depressing.
Reality Check: Slashdot is a BBS for bored IT workers taking a break while installing nine hundred copies of Word on nine hundred 266 MHz beige boxes at the local credit union. It is not a minable database of ideas (or at least not of ideas worth mining). At its best, it's an undergraduate bull session.
What the hell are you people smoking?
This article is a sad indication of the decline of Slashdot. Here we have a wholly closed and proprietary product, designed to work most effectively with Windows. I see not a word about a source release.
It is an outrage and an affront that Slashdot should help market such a product. That Slashdot should do so without questioning or even mentioning the proprietary nature of the product is well beyond mere "outrage".
Proprietary products are of no interest. They are unstable, unreliable, and unmodifiable. Geeks don't need them, don't want them, and don't use them. This product is entirely irrelevant to Slashdot's tech-savvy readership.
So why is it here?
Money changed hands.
The Air Force is free to buy a better operating system, if they can find one. And, yes, it's right and proper for a customer to make requests known to vendors. However, the threatening posture of the Air Force in this matter, in the context of ongoing government harrassment of the vendor, is very ominous. The federal government is in the habit of enforcing its "preferences" with deadly force at times, and their reservations about the worth of free competition are well known.
Let's let free enterprise do its job. Political pressure has no role here. The private sector must remain free and independent so that it can provide the solutions that the marketplace wants.
I'm all in favor of competition, naturally. I applaud IBM's continuing effort to market the obsolete and discredited PowerPC architecture. That, however, has nothing to do with, for example, AMD's ongoing criminal violation of intellectual property rights. Intel has made a massive investment in research and development. They have advanced the state of the art by decades, and all computer users benefit. It is right that Intel should reap the rewards for their work. It is not right that AMD should traipse in late in the game, with no R&D department of their own, manufacture cheap knockoffs in Taiwan, and make a fortune exploiting somebody else's innovations. This is called "dumping" and it is, under the wise and just laws of our nation, a criminal act.
As for "open source", there again we have poorly-paid (or entirely unpaid!) workers producing cheap imitative knockoffs of innovative products. This serves only to reduce the market value of real software, thereby snatching food from the stomachs of those who create real software. The avowed intent of the "free software" pirates is to reduce the market value of software.
That is correct. All of those are, in effect, criminal conspiracies to damage the economy by reducing or eliminating the natural rewards given by the free market to innovative and effective competitors.
WRONG. Intellectual property law has reached maturity in this country. Those who create valuable ideas are now guaranteed their right to retain full ownership and control of their own property under the terms of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
Thanks for playing.
Blizzard has put a lot of money into creating a valuable commercial property. Why is it valuable? Because customers want it. Any service that people are willing to pay for is, by definition, valuable. In creating value, Blizzard has created jobs. This is the equation of capitalism: Value begets value. Creation begets creation. A free capitalist system rewards those who create value.
BNETD belongs to a competing model, the parasite system (called by some a "gift economy", meaning that creative members of society are coerced into providing the fruits of their labor as a "gift" to those unable or unwilling to create value). Their aim is to siphon off the value created by Blizzard, thereby, in effect, punishing Blizzard for creating value.
You can make any excuses you like, but that's what they're doing. I understand that people don't like to pay for things. Who does? Everybody likes to get something for nothing. If somebody wants to give away a service for free, that's just fine, too: It's their service. In a free society they may do as they please with it. However: Doing as you please with somebody else's service is a different matter.
It is perfectly appropriate for Blizzard to see legal redress when they are victimized by criminals.
It appears that "jamie" (not his real name, we hope) is trying to tell us something. Maybe CmdrTaco fell down the old well at the Wilson place across the creek?
Or maybe not.
Oh, wait, okay, I forced myself to wade through a bit more of it. "jamie" is trying to write in a hip, breezy sort of way. Plain English is a lot easier to read, and it communicates more actual information too. Then again, "jamie" has nothing to say. It's just a big ol' wad of platitudes and commonplaces. ("Firefly failed because nobody went there" -- WHAT A DEEP INSIGHT!) Yeah, people want to fit in and be liked. This is news? Come on! You don't need several hundred words of babble to say that.
The halfassed notion of tracking trend-hopping behavior is on the level of "Duuuude, wouldn't it, like, be, like, cool if, like, you know what I mean?" undergraduate bong-session bullshit. It's even worse than the platitudes.
Like, gag me with a spoooon, maaaan.
they wander through life uncaringly, completely unaffected by their adventures . . . [much snipped] . . . the same material could have been more rewarding in the hands of a writer less afraid to get his hands dirty.
By chance, I've been re-reading a log of old Vance recently (this week: The Faceless Man novels, Night Lamp, and a couple of the Alastor ones), and I'd have to say that you've missed a few important things here.
Vance didn't write the same book over and over. The Dying Earth stories are like what "demo coders" do: Brief exercises in virtuosity for its own sake, just for the sheer joy of it. Vance's other forty-odd books go in different directions. Generalizing about Vance from just one or a few of his books is a silly business. Even if you say "Vance writes lovely prose", you'd still be wrong in a few cases -- and that's just about as close as you can get to a meaningful generalization about Vance. You might also say he's not often very interested in plotting. But is he interested in character development? Yes. Obsessively so, at times.
As for Wolfe, he's a drab fake, entirely beneath contempt. I waded through half of one of the "Long Sun" things and I have, literally, no recollection of any of it. There was nothing interesting, compelling, or memorable in that book.
Wolfe's a hack in the Guy Gavriel Kay mode: He goes through some of the motions of pretendint to be a real writer like Vance, but he'll never fool anybody who knows the difference. Orson Scott Card's a big Wolfe fan, if I recall correctly, and that says it all -- except Card makes up for his inadequate technique by telling compelling stories about memorable characters. Wolfe is just a blank.
Fritz Leiber, now: There's a real writer. He's in Vance's league, and that's rarefied company indeed. Lord Dunsany, anybody?
As frightening as this prospect is, it may allow us some glimpse of what it really DOES take to give an organism true sentience, and weather [sic] or not a 'soul' is inherint [sic] in that.
I'll forgive your spelling, because you've so shrewdly zeroed in on the most important point here: "Science" hasn't yet accounted for intelligence. They haven't explained what it is, nor how it works, nor where it came from -- and they've most certainly given up on even asking "why?"
Don't get me wrong: Science is fine for engineering and suchlike. Science has provided us with many valuable conveniences and useful machines. I'll never deny the worth of what they've done. Nevertheless, I won't be such a fool as to put some clever tinkerers in charge of my destiny. They have their place, but it's got nothing to do with any of the big questions facing us as a nation, nor as individuals. Only religion can take on the real issues, the ones that require faith, an open mind, and honest recognition of the fact of God's unmistakable Hand in His own Creation. Clever mechanical tricks won't cut it.
Let the engineers do engineering, let the thinkers think, and let the rulers rule. This is how it must be.
Eels today, humans tomorrow.
A half-human creature with the body of a machine is a sort of "unholy Grail" for the left, because such a creature would have the intellect of a human being without the soul. It would be a "born" sociopath, lacking the inborn moral sense that sets humanity apart from the animals.
Such an "entity" would be invaluable in enforcing totalitarian laws. It would have none of what the leftists snidely call "human weakness" -- what those of us still proud to be human call "mercy" or "justice", or even (dare I engage in crimethink?!) "fear of God".
The Clintons and Janet Reno must be rubbing their hands in glee. Some crude "version 1.0" of their new "enforcers" may even be ready in time for their next attempt to seize power.
. . . the FSF sided with Microsoft and put a ban down on porting GNU to Apple OSes.
This comes as no surprise.
Richard Stallman is a man of firm principle and unshakable conviction. Some of his convictions are clearly insane, but others -- such as his belief in the Free Market -- are not. In any case, I feel a great kinship with a man who will not under any circumstances compromise his principles.
The "Open Source" movement, by contrast, is purely pragmatic. Pragmatism is dangerous: By definition, the pragmatist believes that the end justifies the means. This is the moral and intellectual pit that the "Open Source" "movement" has fallen into. This is why they support Apple and IBM: It's convenient. It seems momentarily advantageous.
You can't trust amoral people. A man with his eye only on the main chance will sell out his supporters in a heartbeat.
Don't say I didn't warn you.
I am always surprised at how much /.'ers like apple and shun m$ when apple always seems to like so much control over their systems.
Odd, isn't it? Most Slashbots claim to support the free market, but when the rubber hits the road, they'll always break bread with its enemies.
Microsoft clobbered Apple -- and the rest of the industry -- with openness. They were always open to developers writing for their platforms, and they always relied on open commodity hardware, in sharp contrast to Apple's obsession with closed proprietary hardware.
Linux itself exists only because Microsoft created the modern microcomputer industry, where standardized, fully-documented hardware was available at reasonable prices dictated by a competitive marketplace. It's no coincidence that Linux was first developed for the same hardware platform as DOS.
Microsoft has always been open and competitive. They encourage competition and thrive on it. They have always traded freely in the marketplace of ideas. Apple never did, and never will.
The "open-source" "community"'s affection for Apple is indicative of its real motives and underlying beliefs. If they really cared about freedom -- real freedom, the freedom to do as one chooses with one's own property -- they'd have been supporting Microsoft all along.
I seem to have it more and more these days: A sudden instant of strange clarity as I try to figure out what Zope is, or as I download a .wav file of Guido van Rossum squawking about "Vooty Vootpecker".
It's brief, but highly concentrated: The scales fall from my eyes, and I say to myself: "I don't give a rat's ass about this bullshit. Hooray for those that do, but I just don't." So, I close the browser window and find something interesting to spend my time on.
You know what? It just happened again.
They had all the evidence, but J. Edgar Hoover was a generous man, and he offered Grissom an honorable way out. If you ask me, it was a mistake: That's more mercy than the Red Grissom would ever have offered Hoover if the shoe had been on the other foot.
Still, Hoover was a Conservative -- a gentleman. He wanted to leave Grissom's kids with something to be proud of. He thought it was better for them to believe a shining lie about their father than the truth of his espioniage and treason. Those kids grew up straight and strong, fine young Americans: So maybe Hoover was right.
But the fact remains that Conservatives have always refused to go for the cheap shot, always refused to dig dirt and engage in smear tactics and political "dirty tricks" -- but the Left has no shame at all. They'll do anything.
If we'd been willing to go after Clinton with everything we had, we'd have restored Democracy to the USA several years earlier. Instead, we played the game clean, we refused to manipulate the law to our advantage, we refused to sling mud -- and you know what? We won in the end, so maybe we were right all along.
Mr. Bush is doing the right thing. He knows that he's doing the right thing. He is supported by all Americans who still believe in personally responsibility, honesty, and hard work.
To hell with the majority. Even if the majority doesn't want democracy, I'm damned if I'll abandon it. We'll hold it in trust for them until they come to their senses and learn to vote for people who do genuinely want a true American democracy as the Founding Fathers intended.
Anyway, what are they going to do about it? We have the Presidency and the Supreme Court. We've got an effective majority in the Senate. We're in charge and we intended to stay that way. You don't like it? Tough shit. You lose.
Given the position of strength that we're in, we're certainly not going to make any concessions, much less share power with Quislings. It's ours and we'll do with it as we see fit. We are not responsible to you. Get that through your thick head. You're out in the cold and you'll stay there.
You can't exactly 'sneak' a launch from the Kennedy Space Center.
Uhh, yeah, whatever.
I suppose you can look at a rocket from ten miles away, as it launches, and tell just by looking at it whether it's an "unmanned test" or not?
You have X-Ray Eyes, perhaps, like Superman? Have you been taking a few too many drugs, me lad?
During the period in question (1961-1966), dozens of rockets were launched at Cape Canaveral, in the broad light of day. A few were well-publicized manned fligths; the rest were billed as "unmanned test shots".
Some of those "unmanned tests" were not unmanned.
Is that simple enough for you?
The US did most of its space work in the open . . .
No, no, no.
The US did all of its space work that they told you about in the open. Get it? Everything you know about is in the category of "things you know about", yeah, sure -- but so what?!
In the early and mid 1960's, the liberal Kennedy and Johnson regimes are known to have conducted numerous -- and invariably fatal -- space-related experiments closely linked to MK-ULTRA. Using captured German war rockets, they tested the survival benefits of shielding and insulation made of a number of advanced (for the time) synthetic polymers (e.g. Imipolex-G) obtained from the German IG Farben industrial complex.
Dozens of brave Americans reported "missing in action" in the early days of the Vietnam conflict were, in fact, incinerated somewhere in the skies over Florida, their last moments accompanied only by the sterile beeping of primitive telemetry.
They were, at least, permitted to pray.
The Freedom of Information Act was designed by liberals to harass honest government officials in their attempts to combat subversion -- but in the end, the sword has two edges, and the FOIA has struck a few blows for the Truth as well.
Ironic, no?
Gee.
Who'd've expected that?!
Who'd've expected that the Communists would, after all, turn out to be brutal, inhuman monsters?
We've sat through decades of media whitewash designed by powerful liberals to make the Soviets seem "nice" and harmless -- and now, finally, with G. W. Bush in office, a few small voices are daring to speak the truth.
It's about time, if you ask me.
Of course, the media still won't breathe a word about the leftist-sponsored slaughter going on all around us in our nations abortion mills, but what did you expect? Courage? From the Quislings who left McCarthy twisting in the wind? Ha!
It's pathetic, really, but I suppose you don't know any better.
What you call "strength" is fear: Fear that you don't really know much about anything beyond the bridge of your nose. Fear of taking responsibility for yourself. Fear of God, whether you admit or not.
It takes a far stronger man than you to accept the freedom and responsibility that Christ gives His followers.
If you can't handle it, you can't handle it. Don't feel so bad. You've got a lot of company.
Their time will come.
God loves to see His children prosper and create wealth. God does not love lawsuits.
I fear for my nation.
Lincoln was indeed a member of a party called "Republican". That was about 140 years ago, which is what we call "a long time". By the way, Lincoln was as staunchly opposed to integration as he was to slavery.
The South was so pissed off at Lincoln that they solidly supported the party called "Democratic" for a full century.
Until Brown v. State Board of Education in (IIRC) 1954, nobody in national politics in the US was seriously opposed to segregation.
When people in the Federal government did start getting serious about enforcing the law, it was liberal Democrats like JFK and LBJ who made it happen. As a result, Southern conservatives started fleeing the Democratic party (some big names being Helms, Thurmond, and Wallace). The States' Rights Party was one result. George Wallace was the last powerful right-wing Democrat, and he's long gone, boy. He was part of the old guard, nothing to do with those who are in the party now.
Meanwhile, conservatives in general, then as always, were firmly opposed to integration. Some of them wore little donkeys on their lapels, and some wore little elephants: So what? It's got nothing to do with me.
Nixon finally settled the matter with the "Southern Strategy": Win the reactionary elements of the formerly Democratic South by appealing to isolationism and bigotry.
It worked. The GOP doesn't own the South the way the Demos used to, but they're doing okay.
Your argument is a meaningless word game. If I want to find out what modern Republicans believe, I don't go ask a man who died in 1865. No, I go observe a modern Republican. How's that for a bizarre notion? If you want to learn about a thing, observe it. If I want to learn about my dog, I observe him. I don't observe the neighbors' dog ("Well, shit, they're both named Spot, so they must be the same!"), and I don't look up famous dogs named Spot in Who's Who.
All this "Lincoln was a Republican" thing is just spin. Propaganda. Meaningless bullshit. It tells us nothing about the thoughts or actions of anybody now living -- with the sole exception of the fools who yammer about it. It tells us one thing about them: They're either dishonest, lazy, or not very bright.
We on the left will call off our Kudzu and our nazi skinheads . . .
It's tempting, but of course you're lying. I make it a point never to strike a bargin with a dishonorable enemy.
. . . the developers ripping whole square miles of trees out of the ground in North Georgia.
Let's look at the facts, shall we? At present rates of use, the United States has enough trees to last for thirty-five thousand years.
Thirty-five thousand years. Yet you would cripple the economy and bring about mass starvation just to satisfy your sentimental "feelings" about "the nice fluffy trees". Waaaaitaminute -- "mass starvation". Oh, yes, there it is, there it is indeed.
Crippling the economy fits right in with your genocidal agenda, doesn't it?
So let's cut the nonsense and try to stay on topic, shall we? If you can come up with a better explanation for the Kudzu than biological warfare, I'd love to hear it -- but you can't, because my conclusion is inescapable. This is the same government which has butchered so many Christian citizens merely for holding fast to their most sacred beliefs and inalienable rights. This is the government that was building massive crematoria eighteen months ago, to handle the influx of bodies from their projected Y2K operations.
Biological warfare is the inevitable next step.
Digital records are favored by our corrupt, foreign-dominated Federal tyranny for one very simple reason:
It's terrifyingly easy to alter them, or to dispose of them entirely.
This is frightening, but true: As the well-known conservative George Orwell observed in his great novel 1984, "He who controls the past controls the future." The "Party" in 1984 devoted itself to doing exactly what the Clinton regime did: They went through all historical records, altering, falsifying, modifying, deleting.
No one will ever know what the Clinton death count really was. No one will ever know what really happened. The "records" are malleable. You can trust no information that comes from the government, because it's all been "massaged" and "fixed up".
Will there be historical records? Not in any meaningful sense: There will be something that looks a lot like such material, but it will be a work of pure fiction.
Goodbye, America. We were great while we lasted.
Sorry, but you gave away the whole game right there, Jack.
In addition to their innumerable violations of property rights and their devotion to furthering the cause of Federal power abuse, the Army Corps of Engineers has had some bright ideas (rammed down the throats of an uncooperative public) like introducing Kudzu in the South.
We all know how that ended up, right? It's been worse than the rabbits in Australia.
The Kudzu epidemic is a deliberate act of biological warfare against the people of the United States. It's no accident that it was done in the South, the only remaining Christian area east of the Mississippi.
"Biological warfare" can have only one goal -- one described by another "scare word":
Genocide.
If there's one thing we've learned from history, it's the absolutely indefensible, factitious assertion that government is always the LEAST efficient way to get something done.
Like it or not, it's essentially a law of nature.
Yet you abandon logic and defend your bizarre claims with nonsensical sophistry and irrelevant factual trivia. Logic tells us one thing about this issue: XML is the product of government software design. It was created by civil servants, just like the Internet itself. Your claim that it has value is logically insupportable. "Effective government software" is a contradiction in terms, like "dry water". It's gibberish.
I'm sorry, but until you start basing your arguments on sound logic and morally compelling fundamental assertions about the way the world works, I'm not going to take you very seriously.
Last I checked, "Federal stormtroopers" weren't raiding churches, temples, synagogues(sp, I'm an ignorant goyim) etc.
"Goyim" is the plural. I'm no linguist, but my understandiing is that "-im" generally indicates the masculine plural in Hebrew (as with "cherubim", "seraphim", "sephardim", etc. ad inf. -- the feminine plural tends to be "-ot", as in "mikvot" etc. Don't forget that exceptions to the "rule" are legion, as in any natural language). I think the singular is "goy", but I'm not sure. Actually, for all I know, the word may be Yiddish, which (AFAIK) is a dialect of German with a lot of Hebrew thrown in.
Um, anyhow, back to the stormtroopers.
Federal stormtroopers burned an entire congregation in Waco, Texas, eight years ago.It's a fact. Their religion was considered "unacceptable" and they were exterminated.
The FBI monitors and harasses many churches whose views are considered "politically incorrect". Just a year ago, we narrowly escaped imposition of a brutal military dictatorship which would have outlawed Christianity entirely. This is no joke. Secret documents were leaked and have found their way into the patriotic resistance underground. This material has been widely disseminated. No one is fooled.
If Y2K disruption had not been kept under control by the wisdom and forsight of American business and the patriot community, we would now be under martial law and public worship would be a crime punishable by death or 're-education'.
If you've got a problem with the way the laws are written, write your duly elected representative.
You've missed the point. It is insane and unjust that I am subject to the same laws as a citizen of Massachusetts. Let them have their laws -- but let me have mine. This is called "freedom": We all get to live as we choose.
[me]: As long as we are forced to allow undesired outsiders to buy land in our communities, we are not free.
[you]: Their money's just as green as yours is.
Irrelevant. I choose not to live alongside certain people. They affect my property values and my quality of life. Federal interference in the housing market directly violates my Constitutional right to freedom of association.