"The company is targeting applications for workers in four vertical markets -- industrial, aerospace, medical, and military -- that enable customers to keep information in front of people engaged in manual tasks or on the move, noted Rick Rutkowski, Microvision CEO.
The first shipments reflect the diverse applications for the Nomad system that Microvision is developing with customers and partners:
Stryker Leibinger (a division of Stryker Corporation) will
couple the Nomad system with a surgical workstation. The
display will provide surgeons with a see-through display so
they can visualize the surgical field while viewing targeting
and guidance information provided by the workstation. The
system has the potential to improve accuracy and decrease
operative time."
Think kudzu, zebra mussels, farm raised salmon, etc etc etc.
Those problems are all about natural species in unnatural settings. Throw in GMO and you _really_ ask for a nasty "butterfly effect"**
You could possibly destroy an entire ecosystem by slightly changing (accidentally or on purpose) the weight/stickiness/healthiness of pollen one kind of key plant produces. Bees can't pollinate as well, less seeds for the birds that spread them, less birds for mosquitoes to suck, less mosquitoes for..etc, etc, a chain reaction in the food chain. That's one simplified example of a billion possible screw ups. GMO has the potential for tiny hidden mistakes to have huge earth-shaking consequences over time.
It doesn't matter one whit whether or not the crops are healthy to eat, disease resistant, etc. What matters is the unknowable new minutiae
that is introduced into the ecosystem. What if we discover after the fact that a prodigious new GM crop is making aphids inedible to aphid-eaters?
That would be a hoard of huge butterflies flapping their wings ferociously in China.
**Chaos 101 primer:
Butterfly effect- Chaos theory attempts to explain the fact that complex and unpredictable results can and will occur in systems that are sensitive to their initial conditions.
The butterfly effect occurs under two conditions:
1. The system is nonlinear.
2. Each state of the system is determined by the previous state. In other words, the output at each moment is repeatedly entered back into the system for another cycle through the mathematical functions that determine the system.
Weather Systems, Ecological "Food Chains", the life cycle of stars and matter, all provide perfect examples of both conditions.
"Canola oil comes from canola seed. Canola is the name given to a very healthy oil that was developed from rapeseed. But it is not rapeseed oil and has vastly different fatty acid and other properties than rapeseed oil. Canola was developed using traditional plant breeding methods to remove undesirable qualities in rapeseed. In terms of their properties, canola oil is as different from rapeseed oil as olive oil is as different from corn oil."
It's not even close to soy, and it's no more genetically engineered than your average garden tomato or friendly neighborhood Cocker Spaniel.
Strider is a Ranger. Rangers roam the north fighting bad stuff. (insert 4000 words of lineages, history, the rise and fall of kingdoms, self imposed exile, etc.) Most villagers are ignorant of this and frown on them as vagabonds. He just popped up in the book also. Later we learn that he had been working with Gandalf pretty closely. The reader, and the hobbits, find out he is Isildur's heir through much reading - dropped hints, foreshadowing, a cryptic poem, etc. The fact of an heir had to be kept secret from the enemy. Jackson couldn't really do that.
Legolas represents the Elves, he is there on behalf of Elrond. All races are represented in the fellowship, as the fate of all races rest on it's outcome. Also he very much wanted to see Lothlorien/ Galadriel.. although that was left out of the movie.
For Galadriel's temptation, I refer you back to the rhyme of the rings, and remind you that the story isn't over yet.
Yes (for the movie)you mostly answered that one for yourself, but in the book he also decides that it's a suicide mission, and there is no need to drag his friends along for the suicide. He has a long complex debate with himself. At this point the orcs (and wolves) attack and essentially make his choice for him. He runs from orcs (and wolves) with the ring on his finger and gets in the boat. Sam sees an "empty" boat and swims out to him. They are long gone before the battle is over. So in the book he ran from the orc battle, never talking to Aragorn. In the movie, he had to talk to Aragorn, or do a cheesy soliloquy, somehow he had to let the audience hear his thoughts. I prefer small liberties being taken with the plot over voiced narration or lame "inner monologues".
All in all it was the best 170 pages per hour I could have hoped for.
Other than Gandalf, the fellowship made it to Minis Tirith (sp?) where the big statues of kings were along the river. There was the betrayal of Boromir, the attack of Saruman's army, and the Breaking of the Fellowship...simply because they broke apart and went different ways.
Maybe you found it boring because Jackson couldn't afford to slowly draw you into 540 pages of deep subtle plot. Either that or you're a paratrooping wizard spaceman secret-agent who is hard to excite. "Dune" was just David Lynch in space? "The Matrix" sucked because it had a two line plot? "Crouching Tiger.." was just a Chinese Batman?
Try "Ocean's 11". It's a very clever heist movie, all twisty plot, very little suspension of disbelief, lots of witty modern dialogue and funny one-liners. That, and it was made to be a movie.
I have not read the books thus the movie was just a bunch of sfx cut together, woven in with some *sniff sniff* scenes and some panoramic view shots.
Did you miss the history of the Ring, Isildur, Gollum, and Bilbo in the beginning? Did you miss Gandalf's quest to uncover the truth of Bilbo's ring? The head of Gandalf's order switching sides? The choice of Arwen? The burden of Aragorn? The temptation of Galadriel? The breaking of the fellowship? My wife has only read The Hobbit, and she thought the movie was a great story. One of the things about having read the book - it allows for lazy movie watching. Not having read the book... maybe you just need to see it again.
Pot advocates are nutty? Did Nancy Reagan tell you to say that? What about beer advocates? I've had 2 fairly well-informed police officers discuss the matter near me on seperate occasions. Even they realize alcohol is worse for you, more dangerous, and more addictive, and the illegality of weed is for economic and political reasons (lots of jobs fighting the war on (some) drugs, political death to say it's not so bad, lots of privatized prisons lobbying to make as many criminals as they can, Dupont lobbying to keep the threat away from their textile and paper industry, the list goes on and on.) "It's ridiculous but we have to arrest you for getting a little high but not for getting blitzed on whiskey."
Just because you don't advocate it doesn't mean we should make criminals of those who do.
I'm not a sheep. I'm educated, I'm a
free-thinker, and I follow politics and world
news regularly. Yet I happen to think that US
policy is, on a whole, pretty good.
Pretty good for whom? Globally speaking your opinion is in the minority. A small minority.
>The simple fact of the matter, that many
radicals on slashdot do not grasp, is that most
Americans are pretty content with the leadership
and abhor the ideas espoused by those fringe
groups such as the Green Party. They're not too
stupid to grasp what is relevant to them.
Simple fact of the matter is the opinion of the lowest common denominator is not usually the most enlightened, especially when it is an opinion molded by smarter people, with vast amounts of money and media power. They are not too stupid to grasp what is relevant to them because what is relevant to them consists mostly of gasoline prices, 'Must See TV', and the emotional drum-beating and heart-string pulling done by our 85% fact-free news broadcasters. Also, the "fringe-groups" wouldn't be so abhored (nor so desperate) if they weren't consistently portrayed as wild-eyed fanatics with granola caught in their hair. Abhoring them is usually a direct reflection of the shallow, biased, dismissive coverage they get from almost every media outlet.
Motivation? You can fit most of the worlds billionaire CEO's and powerful politicians in one big room. They're job is like a combination of Monopoly and Risk. Look at Bin Laden's investments, and those of the Bush families, follow the campaign contributions and cabinet appointments. Look at Afghanistan on a map, or forget the map, look at it on a Risk board. The Public is just another piece on the board. It's still their game.
The only 2 ways you can think US foreign policy is "on a whole, pretty good" is to have an average or lower IQ and believe what you're spoon fed, OR be a US citizen and have very jingoistic beliefs. Oops, and there is also self-delusion.
on the whole there's not much more that can be done systematically.
This seems to be the crux of the argument. Although it's an unimaginative, generalized, non-statement, it still manages to smack of very low expectations.
The money problem you mention is discussed toward the end of the essay. It's not an American problem, it's a world problem. I had to forgive the banners, the text is good. I'd also like to know what you think of it. Peace.
50 years might not be long enough determine "standing the test of time". 3 of us were having this conversation not too long ago using 500 years as our mark. All we tend to remember from 500 years ago are Da Vinci and Colombus. We decided you had to be completely timeless, the hands-down best in your genre, and universally provocative in a deep enough way that humanity is still learning from you 500 years down the road. After much debate we arrived at:
Tolkein - literature
Dylan - poetry/music
Picasso - visual art/painting.
These are the only "Shakespeare's" of the 20th century we could identify. People will remember those 3, Gandhi, the nuclear bomb, and landing on the moon. In 500 years everything else will just be "other 20th century stuff". Most literature will be passe, nonsensical, or just irrelevant by then. Especially humor, there's nothing less funny than an old joke. ...Maybe add Louis Armstrong to the above list?
"THE GLOBAL military reach of the US, with the support of its allies, is the flip side of the power of the multinational corporations that have spread their tentacles across the world. Former US State Department official Francis Fukuyama wrote in the wake of the destruction of the World Trade Center, "Microsoft or Goldman Sachs will not send aircraft carriers to the Gulf to track down Osama Bin Laden-only the US military will."
The multinationals, powerful states and international bodies such as the International Monetary Fund and World Bank are locked together in maintaining the capitalist system. That system means that every day 19,000 children die in the Third World from undernourishment and disease caused by debt repayments to the bankers. Their deaths are no more accidental than were the deaths in Manhattan.
Presiding over the system that kills them are a few hundred multinationals and a few hundred billionaires. The business magazine Forbes published a list of 482 billionaires. It shows that the top 200 of them have $1.1 trillion of assets. The top three have the equivalent wealth of the 48 poorest countries.
The wealth of these individuals depends on their ownership of shares in the great corporations. Today some 200 multinationals, run by a few hundred super-rich people and a few thousand more rich hangers-on, have a combined turnover equal to more than a quarter of the world's output. The five biggest multinationals, run by perhaps 40 people, have greater output than the Middle East and Africa combined, and twice the output of all of South Asia. The few individuals at the top make decisions about what is produced, who has jobs, where money moves and who is consigned to poverty. That affects the lives of hundreds of millions, perhaps billions, of people.
Most of the billionaires and most of the biggest multinationals are based in the US. They are not typical of people in the US as a whole. Some 60 percent of families in the US have seen no increase in their real incomes since the mid-1970s, despite a rise in the number of family members working and an increase in the average working year of over 160 hours. One in eight Americans now live below the poverty line, and nearly 45 million are without health insurance.
By contrast the CEOs (top bosses) of large companies have seen their wealth rocket. They got 42 times as much as the average factory worker in 1980. According to Business Week, by 1990 they were getting 85 times as much, and by 1998 it was 419 times as much.
It is these people who determine the polices of US governments, whether Republican or Democrat. They financed the bulk of the $3 billion spent on the last presidential election campaign. The links run deeper. They provide most of the members of US government cabinets. Through them they determine both US military policy and the behaviour of bodies such as the IMF, World Bank and World Trade Organisation.
That's why we have seen the monstrous growth of US military power alongside the widening grip of the multinationals and the imposition of neo-liberal policies, which in the Third World especially have brought so much destruction. Forty percent of sub-Saharan Africa's population-that's 290 million people-live in absolute poverty, on less than $1 (70p) a day.
Bush's "crusade" is designed to increase still further the power of those who are responsible for such obscenities. It will make it easier for the IMF and World Bank to impose Structural Adjustment Programs on weaker countries, which will face US military might if they refuse to comply. It will strengthen the hand of the multinationals. As Thomas Friedman, a journalist close to the US State Department, said a decade ago, "The hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley's technologies to flourish is called the US army, air force, navy and marine corps."
This system which kills even when it is supposedly at peace and constantly generates war is not new. A century ago it became known as imperialism. That word fits today. The drive for global economic and military dominance plunged the world into two world wars last century. It lay behind the countless interventions by great powers, protecting the interests of their corporations, in weaker countries.
That is why the struggle to oppose wars has always been linked to the struggle against the capitalist system that has now brought us a new imperialism - bigger corporations, more obscene weapons, more wars, and greater inequality across the globe....
The protests outside summit meetings of the G8 or the IMF are what most people think of as the anti-capitalist movement. But those demonstrations are linked to another movement - the series of mass strikes against the IMF and its policies. Here the list is as long as it is for the demonstrations. It includes Argentina, Brazil, Zambia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Nigeria, South Africa, Honduras, Paraguay, Bolivia, Mexico and more.
What unites all these movements is hatred of the present murderous setup and a signpost towards something better. It is a protest against the people who will stop at nothing to maintain the flow of profit, the people who are comfortable with a world where 19,000 children die every day because of the debt system. It is a cry of rage against the fact that 900 million people are malnourished while the world's richest 200 people have doubled their wealth in the last five years. It is a defiant insistence that another world is possible, and necessary. We can have cooperation, peace and wealth enough for everyone's needs if there is genuine democratic control from below of global wealth and resources."
I totally agree. I was exactly "Wesley's" age and I kept waiting for him to blossom. Come into his birthright so to speak like Tad Williams' "Simon" character, David Eddings' "Garion", Robert Jordan's "Rand", or "Luke Skywalker". G*ddamned writers kept "Wes" on uncle Owen's farm saying "golly" until they finally wrote him off the "farm" and he was gone! Bastards! I was very disappointed.
Now he's off roaming the universe kicking ass w/o even a spin-off series. What a let down.
Another thing, which we tend to forget, is how much effect we can have on others on a daily basis. How many people look up to you for your knowledge? Can you influence them? How often do you ask "guiding" questions, play devil's advocate, mention news stories, etc? Do you take time and make the effort to explain things like Dmitri and the DMCA in terms that non-tech folks can easily understand and relate to?
I'm not talking about being a relentless annoyance but about being conscientious in our daily words and actions.
The famous 6 degrees of separation can reach a long way. Sure many people will never care a whit, but many more just need to have things pointed out. Efforts don't have to stop with a few letters, we can all do our best to influence our little communities outside of/.
And hey, before we know it, someone could be calling it a grassroots effort. It's not impossible.
Re:What we must NOT do
on
More WTC News
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· Score: 1
Agreed.
In conjunction with that we must stop using the word "terrorist". It is uninformative, emotional, and manipulative. It allows for generalizations, it dehumanizes our enemies and does nothing to help us understand. It is Newspeak. One groups "terrorist" is anothers "freedom fighter". "Anti-American" would even be better. Please post suggestions.
The comment about enslavement misses the point and is misleading.
From the article: "...prevent human intelligence being
overtaken by that of computers."
If "artificial" intelligence surpasses human intelligence our situation could resemble that of the carrier pigeon, or maybe just pesty cockroaches. Not because of malevolence. It's just Not Good to give up the #1 spot on the food/resource chain.
I wouldn't really worry about being enslaved, I'd worry about my electricity being diverted, food farms being replaced by data farms, the earth being terraformed to a drier more mech-friendly place, not having humans in charge anymore, etc.
AI-Bob: "Solar energy is free and abundant, what do we need all these clouds for?"
"The calcite microlenses expertly compensate for birefringence and spherical aberration - physical effects common in lenses that distort light - and scientists hope to mimic nature's success and design microlenses based on the brittlestar model. Such biomimetic lenses may prove useful as components of optical networks, and in chip design, where they could potentially improve optical lithography techniques."
I always want to ask dogmatic creationists; What makes you so sure you know the extent of the creation? What I mean is, if God created weather systems, why not evolutionary systems, the expanding universe, and elusive little wood sprites? Who are you to determine the extent and complexity of creation?
Did God create me or did my parents? Maybe the answer is both. God created the reproductive cycle. Same with rain clouds, homo sapiens sapiens, and electromagnetism. I don't beliieve in faith in the unknowable, but I do believe it's conceivable that some Higher Power created the universe and everything in it, including evolution, electromagnetism, solar eclipses, and nervous small minded fundamentalists.
stolen sig- "If the Bible verifies the existence of God, then Superman comics verify the existence of Superman."
Re:Idea: maybe Jon needs a wider forum?
on
Seanbaby.com
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· Score: 2, Funny
That's a terrific idea! My Mom loves to read Jon.
He doesn't talk over her head and he always makes her think about things from a very different perspective than her own. I send her most of his stuff. She reads it and Googles around learning about what he's writing about. The people in her tennis club think she's becoming "a real brainiac". I was damn proud when I heard about her discussions with her younger PTA friends about Columbine. I'd love to see Jon on the MSN or AOL "home page".
I can't wait to have another 'me' in a cold locker somewhere, or the ability to create one very quickly. Grow it without most brain functions. Make it a piece of living meat with no "soul" from the start. If it has a hollow head so to speak, I don't think it counts as really even alive, much less human. I fully expect to have some kind of spare part arrangment. I do hope and think it will eventually lead to being able to regenerate parts autonomously. There is nothing funny about it.
When you sit on a Jury, you have more power than as almost under any other capacity as a citizen, 1000 times more power than when you vote. You have more power than the judge, than the legislators, than the police. You have a
right and a duty to judge the facts according to the law, AND TO JUDGE THE LAW ITSELF!
Jury Nullification is when a jury nullifies bad law. A jury can say "not guilty" for ANY reason, especially if the jury thinks the person violated a law, but finds that the law was a bad one.
Research what happened to Edward Bushnell, who sat on the
jury of William Penn, accused of practicing an illegal
religion.
Also research how Jury Nullification helped eliminate prohibition. (Well, of course I mean *alcohol prohibition*. we still have prohibition today, just a different kind!)
-end quote.
Image what a fully informed jury could do for cases like Pavlovish's, Dmitry's, 2600's, etc, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Microvision ships first Nomad Personal Display Systems
"The company is targeting applications for workers in four vertical markets -- industrial, aerospace, medical, and military -- that enable customers to keep information in front of people engaged in manual tasks or on the move, noted Rick Rutkowski, Microvision CEO. The first shipments reflect the diverse applications for the Nomad system that Microvision is developing with customers and partners:
Stryker Leibinger (a division of Stryker Corporation) will couple the Nomad system with a surgical workstation. The display will provide surgeons with a see-through display so they can visualize the surgical field while viewing targeting and guidance information provided by the workstation. The system has the potential to improve accuracy and decrease operative time."
Think kudzu, zebra mussels, farm raised salmon, etc etc etc.
Those problems are all about natural species in unnatural settings. Throw in GMO and you _really_ ask for a nasty "butterfly effect"**
You could possibly destroy an entire ecosystem by slightly changing (accidentally or on purpose) the weight/stickiness/healthiness of pollen one kind of key plant produces. Bees can't pollinate as well, less seeds for the birds that spread them, less birds for mosquitoes to suck, less mosquitoes for..etc, etc, a chain reaction in the food chain. That's one simplified example of a billion possible screw ups. GMO has the potential for tiny hidden mistakes to have huge earth-shaking consequences over time.
It doesn't matter one whit whether or not the crops are healthy to eat, disease resistant, etc. What matters is the unknowable new minutiae that is introduced into the ecosystem. What if we discover after the fact that a prodigious new GM crop is making aphids inedible to aphid-eaters? That would be a hoard of huge butterflies flapping their wings ferociously in China.
**Chaos 101 primer:
Butterfly effect- Chaos theory attempts to explain the fact that complex and unpredictable results can and will occur in systems that are sensitive to their initial conditions. The butterfly effect occurs under two conditions: 1. The system is nonlinear. 2. Each state of the system is determined by the previous state. In other words, the output at each moment is repeatedly entered back into the system for another cycle through the mathematical functions that determine the system.
Weather Systems, Ecological "Food Chains", the life cycle of stars and matter, all provide perfect examples of both conditions.
Not very responsible (even for an AC) to be spreading patently false information.
From the Canola Council of Canada:
"Canola oil comes from canola seed. Canola is the name given to a very healthy oil that was developed from rapeseed. But it is not rapeseed oil and has vastly different fatty acid and other properties than rapeseed oil. Canola was developed using traditional plant breeding methods to remove undesirable qualities in rapeseed. In terms of their properties, canola oil is as different from rapeseed oil as olive oil is as different from corn oil."
It's not even close to soy, and it's no more genetically engineered than your average garden tomato or friendly neighborhood Cocker Spaniel.
Strider is a Ranger. Rangers roam the north fighting bad stuff. (insert 4000 words of lineages, history, the rise and fall of kingdoms, self imposed exile, etc.) Most villagers are ignorant of this and frown on them as vagabonds. He just popped up in the book also. Later we learn that he had been working with Gandalf pretty closely. The reader, and the hobbits, find out he is Isildur's heir through much reading - dropped hints, foreshadowing, a cryptic poem, etc. The fact of an heir had to be kept secret from the enemy. Jackson couldn't really do that.
Legolas represents the Elves, he is there on behalf of Elrond. All races are represented in the fellowship, as the fate of all races rest on it's outcome. Also he very much wanted to see Lothlorien/ Galadriel.. although that was left out of the movie.
For Galadriel's temptation, I refer you back to the rhyme of the rings, and remind you that the story isn't over yet.
Yes (for the movie)you mostly answered that one for yourself, but in the book he also decides that it's a suicide mission, and there is no need to drag his friends along for the suicide. He has a long complex debate with himself. At this point the orcs (and wolves) attack and essentially make his choice for him. He runs from orcs (and wolves) with the ring on his finger and gets in the boat. Sam sees an "empty" boat and swims out to him. They are long gone before the battle is over. So in the book he ran from the orc battle, never talking to Aragorn. In the movie, he had to talk to Aragorn, or do a cheesy soliloquy, somehow he had to let the audience hear his thoughts. I prefer small liberties being taken with the plot over voiced narration or lame "inner monologues".
All in all it was the best 170 pages per hour I could have hoped for.
Other than Gandalf, the fellowship made it to Minis Tirith (sp?) where the big statues of kings were along the river. There was the betrayal of Boromir, the attack of Saruman's army, and the Breaking of the Fellowship...simply because they broke apart and went different ways.
Maybe you found it boring because Jackson couldn't afford to slowly draw you into 540 pages of deep subtle plot. Either that or you're a paratrooping wizard spaceman secret-agent who is hard to excite. "Dune" was just David Lynch in space? "The Matrix" sucked because it had a two line plot? "Crouching Tiger.." was just a Chinese Batman?
Try "Ocean's 11". It's a very clever heist movie, all twisty plot, very little suspension of disbelief, lots of witty modern dialogue and funny one-liners. That, and it was made to be a movie.
I have not read the books thus the movie was just a bunch of sfx cut together, woven in with some *sniff sniff* scenes and some panoramic view shots.
Did you miss the history of the Ring, Isildur, Gollum, and Bilbo in the beginning? Did you miss Gandalf's quest to uncover the truth of Bilbo's ring? The head of Gandalf's order switching sides? The choice of Arwen? The burden of Aragorn? The temptation of Galadriel? The breaking of the fellowship? My wife has only read The Hobbit, and she thought the movie was a great story. One of the things about having read the book - it allows for lazy movie watching. Not having read the book... maybe you just need to see it again.
^ Better than the 'Review'. Mod that up.
Heinlein's work answers "Why be a soldier?"
Haldeman's work answers why "Once a soldier always a soldier"?
The Martian Race and other writings of Gregory Benford
It's Hard SF. Much less socio-political exploring than in Kim Stanley Robinson's series.
Google search results
Probably the most powerful force obliterating free communication is neither fundamentalism nor jack-booting: it's obscurity."
Cliff, Katz steal your password again?
Pot advocates are nutty? Did Nancy Reagan tell you to say that? What about beer advocates? I've had 2 fairly well-informed police officers discuss the matter near me on seperate occasions. Even they realize alcohol is worse for you, more dangerous, and more addictive, and the illegality of weed is for economic and political reasons (lots of jobs fighting the war on (some) drugs, political death to say it's not so bad, lots of privatized prisons lobbying to make as many criminals as they can, Dupont lobbying to keep the threat away from their textile and paper industry, the list goes on and on.) "It's ridiculous but we have to arrest you for getting a little high but not for getting blitzed on whiskey."
Just because you don't advocate it doesn't mean we should make criminals of those who do.
I'm not a sheep. I'm educated, I'm a free-thinker, and I follow politics and world news regularly. Yet I happen to think that US policy is, on a whole, pretty good.
Pretty good for whom? Globally speaking your opinion is in the minority. A small minority.
>The simple fact of the matter, that many radicals on slashdot do not grasp, is that most Americans are pretty content with the leadership and abhor the ideas espoused by those fringe groups such as the Green Party. They're not too stupid to grasp what is relevant to them.
Simple fact of the matter is the opinion of the lowest common denominator is not usually the most enlightened, especially when it is an opinion molded by smarter people, with vast amounts of money and media power. They are not too stupid to grasp what is relevant to them because what is relevant to them consists mostly of gasoline prices, 'Must See TV', and the emotional drum-beating and heart-string pulling done by our 85% fact-free news broadcasters. Also, the "fringe-groups" wouldn't be so abhored (nor so desperate) if they weren't consistently portrayed as wild-eyed fanatics with granola caught in their hair. Abhoring them is usually a direct reflection of the shallow, biased, dismissive coverage they get from almost every media outlet.
Motivation? You can fit most of the worlds billionaire CEO's and powerful politicians in one big room. They're job is like a combination of Monopoly and Risk. Look at Bin Laden's investments, and those of the Bush families, follow the campaign contributions and cabinet appointments. Look at Afghanistan on a map, or forget the map, look at it on a Risk board. The Public is just another piece on the board. It's still their game.
The only 2 ways you can think US foreign policy is "on a whole, pretty good" is to have an average or lower IQ and believe what you're spoon fed, OR be a US citizen and have very jingoistic beliefs. Oops, and there is also self-delusion.
on the whole there's not much more that can be done systematically.
This seems to be the crux of the argument. Although it's an unimaginative, generalized, non-statement, it still manages to smack of very low expectations.
We can do much better.
Serious reply: Worth reading
The money problem you mention is discussed toward the end of the essay. It's not an American problem, it's a world problem. I had to forgive the banners, the text is good. I'd also like to know what you think of it.
Peace.
50 years might not be long enough determine "standing the test of time". 3 of us were having this conversation not too long ago using 500 years as our mark. All we tend to remember from 500 years ago are Da Vinci and Colombus. We decided you had to be completely timeless, the hands-down best in your genre, and universally provocative in a deep enough way that humanity is still learning from you 500 years down the road. After much debate we arrived at:
Tolkein - literature
Dylan - poetry/music
Picasso - visual art/painting.
These are the only "Shakespeare's" of the 20th century we could identify. People will remember those 3, Gandhi, the nuclear bomb, and landing on the moon. In 500 years everything else will just be "other 20th century stuff". Most literature will be passe, nonsensical, or just irrelevant by then. Especially humor, there's nothing less funny than an old joke.
...Maybe add Louis Armstrong to the above list?
Of course we're probably way off.
"THE GLOBAL military reach of the US, with the support of its allies, is the flip side of the power of the multinational corporations that have spread their tentacles across the world. Former US State Department official Francis Fukuyama wrote in the wake of the destruction of the World Trade Center, "Microsoft or Goldman Sachs will not send aircraft carriers to the Gulf to track down Osama Bin Laden-only the US military will."
The multinationals, powerful states and international bodies such as the International Monetary Fund and World Bank are locked together in maintaining the capitalist system. That system means that every day 19,000 children die in the Third World from undernourishment and disease caused by debt repayments to the bankers. Their deaths are no more accidental than were the deaths in Manhattan.
Presiding over the system that kills them are a few hundred multinationals and a few hundred billionaires. The business magazine Forbes published a list of 482 billionaires. It shows that the top 200 of them have $1.1 trillion of assets. The top three have the equivalent wealth of the 48 poorest countries.
The wealth of these individuals depends on their ownership of shares in the great corporations. Today some 200 multinationals, run by a few hundred super-rich people and a few thousand more rich hangers-on, have a combined turnover equal to more than a quarter of the world's output. The five biggest multinationals, run by perhaps 40 people, have greater output than the Middle East and Africa combined, and twice the output of all of South Asia. The few individuals at the top make decisions about what is produced, who has jobs, where money moves and who is consigned to poverty. That affects the lives of hundreds of millions, perhaps billions, of people.
Most of the billionaires and most of the biggest multinationals are based in the US. They are not typical of people in the US as a whole. Some 60 percent of families in the US have seen no increase in their real incomes since the mid-1970s, despite a rise in the number of family members working and an increase in the average working year of over 160 hours. One in eight Americans now live below the poverty line, and nearly 45 million are without health insurance.
By contrast the CEOs (top bosses) of large companies have seen their wealth rocket. They got 42 times as much as the average factory worker in 1980. According to Business Week, by 1990 they were getting 85 times as much, and by 1998 it was 419 times as much.
It is these people who determine the polices of US governments, whether Republican or Democrat. They financed the bulk of the $3 billion spent on the last presidential election campaign. The links run deeper. They provide most of the members of US government cabinets. Through them they determine both US military policy and the behaviour of bodies such as the IMF, World Bank and World Trade Organisation.
That's why we have seen the monstrous growth of US military power alongside the widening grip of the multinationals and the imposition of neo-liberal policies, which in the Third World especially have brought so much destruction. Forty percent of sub-Saharan Africa's population-that's 290 million people-live in absolute poverty, on less than $1 (70p) a day.
Bush's "crusade" is designed to increase still further the power of those who are responsible for such obscenities. It will make it easier for the IMF and World Bank to impose Structural Adjustment Programs on weaker countries, which will face US military might if they refuse to comply. It will strengthen the hand of the multinationals. As Thomas Friedman, a journalist close to the US State Department, said a decade ago, "The hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley's technologies to flourish is called the US army, air force, navy and marine corps."
This system which kills even when it is supposedly at peace and constantly generates war is not new. A century ago it became known as imperialism. That word fits today. The drive for global economic and military dominance plunged the world into two world wars last century. It lay behind the countless interventions by great powers, protecting the interests of their corporations, in weaker countries.
That is why the struggle to oppose wars has always been linked to the struggle against the capitalist system that has now brought us a new imperialism - bigger corporations, more obscene weapons, more wars, and greater inequality across the globe.
The protests outside summit meetings of the G8 or the IMF are what most people think of as the anti-capitalist movement. But those demonstrations are linked to another movement - the series of mass strikes against the IMF and its policies. Here the list is as long as it is for the demonstrations. It includes Argentina, Brazil, Zambia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Nigeria, South Africa, Honduras, Paraguay, Bolivia, Mexico and more.
What unites all these movements is hatred of the present murderous setup and a signpost towards something better. It is a protest against the people who will stop at nothing to maintain the flow of profit, the people who are comfortable with a world where 19,000 children die every day because of the debt system. It is a cry of rage against the fact that 900 million people are malnourished while the world's richest 200 people have doubled their wealth in the last five years. It is a defiant insistence that another world is possible, and necessary. We can have cooperation, peace and wealth enough for everyone's needs if there is genuine democratic control from below of global wealth and resources."
Excerpted from here.
I totally agree. I was exactly "Wesley's" age and I kept waiting for him to blossom. Come into his birthright so to speak like Tad Williams' "Simon" character, David Eddings' "Garion", Robert Jordan's "Rand", or "Luke Skywalker". G*ddamned writers kept "Wes" on uncle Owen's farm saying "golly" until they finally wrote him off the "farm" and he was gone! Bastards! I was very disappointed.
Now he's off roaming the universe kicking ass w/o even a spin-off series. What a let down.
Another thing, which we tend to forget, is how much effect we can have on others on a daily basis. How many people look up to you for your knowledge? Can you influence them? How often do you ask "guiding" questions, play devil's advocate, mention news stories, etc? Do you take time and make the effort to explain things like Dmitri and the DMCA in terms that non-tech folks can easily understand and relate to?
/.
I'm not talking about being a relentless annoyance but about being conscientious in our daily words and actions.
The famous 6 degrees of separation can reach a long way. Sure many people will never care a whit, but many more just need to have things pointed out. Efforts don't have to stop with a few letters, we can all do our best to influence our little communities outside of
And hey, before we know it, someone could be calling it a grassroots effort. It's not impossible.
Agreed.
In conjunction with that we must stop using the word "terrorist". It is uninformative, emotional, and manipulative. It allows for generalizations, it dehumanizes our enemies and does nothing to help us understand. It is Newspeak. One groups "terrorist" is anothers "freedom fighter". "Anti-American" would even be better.
Please post suggestions.
The comment about enslavement misses the point and is misleading.
From the article: "...prevent human intelligence being overtaken by that of computers."
If "artificial" intelligence surpasses human intelligence our situation could resemble that of the carrier pigeon, or maybe just pesty cockroaches. Not because of malevolence. It's just Not Good to give up the #1 spot on the food/resource chain.
I wouldn't really worry about being enslaved, I'd worry about my electricity being diverted, food farms being replaced by data farms, the earth being terraformed to a drier more mech-friendly place, not having humans in charge anymore, etc.
AI-Bob: "Solar energy is free and abundant, what do we need all these clouds for?"
to bring us insightful comments involving Hulk Hogan. The fans must be much different where you're from.
Thanks for visiting!
At Bell Labs here.
"The calcite microlenses expertly compensate for birefringence and spherical aberration - physical effects common in lenses that distort light - and scientists hope to mimic nature's success and design microlenses based on the brittlestar model. Such biomimetic lenses may prove useful as components of optical networks, and in chip design, where they could potentially improve optical lithography techniques."
I always want to ask dogmatic creationists; What makes you so sure you know the extent of the creation? What I mean is, if God created weather systems, why not evolutionary systems, the expanding universe, and elusive little wood sprites? Who are you to determine the extent and complexity of creation?
Did God create me or did my parents? Maybe the answer is both. God created the reproductive cycle. Same with rain clouds, homo sapiens sapiens, and electromagnetism. I don't beliieve in faith in the unknowable, but I do believe it's conceivable that some Higher Power created the universe and everything in it, including evolution, electromagnetism, solar eclipses, and nervous small minded fundamentalists.
stolen sig- "If the Bible verifies the existence of God, then Superman comics verify the existence of Superman."
That's a terrific idea! My Mom loves to read Jon.
He doesn't talk over her head and he always makes her think about things from a very different perspective than her own. I send her most of his stuff. She reads it and Googles around learning about what he's writing about. The people in her tennis club think she's becoming "a real brainiac". I was damn proud when I heard about her discussions with her younger PTA friends about Columbine. I'd love to see Jon on the MSN or AOL "home page".
[Score -1, insightful but outside our little box]
I can't wait to have another 'me' in a cold locker somewhere, or the ability to create one very quickly. Grow it without most brain functions. Make it a piece of living meat with no "soul" from the start. If it has a hollow head so to speak, I don't think it counts as really even alive, much less human. I fully expect to have some kind of spare part arrangment. I do hope and think it will eventually lead to being able to regenerate parts autonomously. There is nothing funny about it.
Karma, shmarma.
KITT's had this technology since the 80's.
Figures, Devon got screwed at Patent Office.
More people need to know this:
The jury has the right to judge the law.
Quoted from here.
Fully Informed Jury Association's 'Jury Power Page'.
Also, Whitten's _Citizen Rule Book_ has good info on your rights and responsibilites as a juror.
When you sit on a Jury, you have more power than as almost under any other capacity as a citizen, 1000 times more power than when you vote. You have more power than the judge, than the legislators, than the police. You have a right and a duty to judge the facts according to the law, AND TO JUDGE THE LAW ITSELF!
Jury Nullification is when a jury nullifies bad law. A jury can say "not guilty" for ANY reason, especially if the jury thinks the person violated a law, but finds that the law was a bad one.
Research what happened to Edward Bushnell, who sat on the jury of William Penn, accused of practicing an illegal religion.
Also research how Jury Nullification helped eliminate prohibition. (Well, of course I mean *alcohol prohibition*. we still have prohibition today, just a different kind!)
-end quote.
Image what a fully informed jury could do for cases like Pavlovish's, Dmitry's, 2600's, etc, etc.