Theoretically the Australian Consitution was written so that New Zealand could become a member state of Australia at any time, on equal footing with the other 6 (plus a few territories).
IMHO, this is utterly arse-backwards. Given New Zealand's continual and consistant common-sense, thoughtfulness and ethics, and contrasted with Little Johnny 'Arse-licker' Howard, not to mention NZ's relationship between native, colonial and immigrant populations, and its generally progressive and humane social policies, I would like to make a suggestion:
Please, please, please, could Australia become the West Island of New Zealand? We'll provide the army, if you show us how to maintain a universal public health system! We'll help get rid of your possum problem if you can heal the rift between the Aboriginals and the government!
The best Sci-Fi takes an absurd premise and says, 'well -- assume that Kansas has an Atlantic Seafront. How did it get that way and what are the ramifications?' You would probably come up with a quite interesting story to explain why the Eastern half of the USA is missing and what results from this.
Check out the David Brin novel The Practice Effect. In it he takes the laws of Thermodynamics and says 'what if...', in this case what if things got better with use? (ie., reversed entropy.) The mechanics of how it works are sketchy at the best of times (and amount to a hand-wave), but that is irrelevant because the story serves as a gedankenexperiment (sp?). The more outlandish the premises the better the explanation has to be, and (hopefully) the better the story.
Hey, even the Lensman series by E.E. Doc. Smith make good stories, even if they are boy's own tales of superhumanly competent demi-gods. And the Inertialess Drive... it could never work, but let us assume that it does, what would its operating parameters be? How would you use it? What would its failings and flaws be?
Because, hey, everyone knows that all history teachers are seasoned propagandists, and none of them have any political concerns of their own. Heaven forfend that they might on a personal level disagree with me.
And, by the Gods, if someone dares to comment personally on a subject which they feel strongly enough about to get involved with other organisations to support it... And not even for pay! The perfidy!
By comparison, the tendancy of large or fanatic organisations to write a single letter and send it via ten thousand drones in the hope of astro-turfing the debate... merely a pecadillo, almost beneath comment!
... Which is, of course, exactly what Christopher Tolkien has been doing.
(The Silmarillion was a huge collection of half-finished manuscripts dating over sixty years when J.R.R. passed to the West. While the stories and writing are purely his (and the basis and foudation of the LotR), it took Christopher a lot of work to edit it into something publishable. Then there is the History of Middle Earth...)
Christopher Tolkien is not just sitting back and taking the checks. He takes his responsibilities as J.R.R's Literary Executor seriously, and works for it. See, for example, here.
Sure, some might say his writings are all derivitive of the works of one person, but no more so than many other academics.
Which is correct? Sky-la-rov, with its ease of pronunciation for english speakers, or Sklya-rov, with its more-likely-for-Russian combination of consonants, including a palatalised 'l'.
I couldn't guess, not knowing enough (read 'any') Russian, and the usage seems to be 50-50 on/.
It is even shown both ways in the parent story!
Re:How to totally screw up Win2k in less than 1 mi
on
Gnarly Error Messages
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· Score: 1, Offtopic
Patient: Doctor, whenever I do this [incredibly stupid thing] it really really hurts.
Doctor: Don't do it, then!
Duh!
This, and similar anecdotes, remind me of logical processes such as: "Hey, it is physically possible to put this pistol to my head and pull the trigger, therefore it must be OK to do so! I wonder what will happen?"
Will all people who actually believe that generationalist crap please go stick their head in a bucket and go away!
Everything which is said about the so-called 'Gen-X' is said by the media -- first advertising slime, then editorial slime, followed by stereotyping lazy journalist slime -- not by the members of this nebulous and meaningless 'group'.
What is this article saying? That it looks like younger people are going to have a really crappy time for the forseeable future, probably the rest of their lives. And that despite the crapulous stereotype fostered upon a generation by fiat, "This time they have reason to whine." (think about that byline. It means that according to them 1: all Gen-Xers whine and complain, and 2: at all times except for this one, any complaints are trivial and meaningless and can be ignored safely. Who decides?)
Why is this bullshit continuing? Why are 'Gen-Xers' going to do so badly? (A question which is not even asked on the Fortune article, and is answered by "because they are all whining shits" here on/. by people who should know better). Let's try to answer it, shall we?
For a start, lets use the term 'Gen-X' merely as a reference to the people who happened to be born in that time period, and not say anything about their personal habits, merely the opportunities they (...'we', I should say) have).
Gen-Xers have been around to take up and ride the greatest explosion in technology since the Industrial Revolution. A few have even managed to become senior programmers and sysadmins. Where to from there? The people who run the companies are still from generation older -- lets label them 'Baby Boomers'. As generations, we -- Gen-X -- have watched them -- Baby Boomers -- profit from wealth and progressive social policies from the sixties to the late seventies -- and then systematically dismantle those things behind them. Here in Australia we used to have free (government-funded) Universities. Student fees were introduced in the early eighties. They have been increasing steadily since, and it now costs between tens- and hundreds-of-thousands of dollars for a degree. And the people who are most shrilly declaiming that fees are still too low and students don't know how good they have it are precisely those who recieved most benefit from free education.
And then there is the Reagan/Thatcher economic model, which says that selling off your country and renting it back from whoever could afford to buy it somehow makes good economic sense. Gee, that does work! Just ask anyone with a privatised Electricity Company! or Water. or Prison System. Governments now have the same or higher debt than they used to have, but there is nothing left to sell off. Except maybe the citizenry as slave labour.
The Baby Boomers, as a group, are statistically the greediest and most selfish for a hundred years prior, and certainly since. They (that is, those members of that group who have had unfettered access to the pension funds) have squandered the pension money, but do you think there will be any willingness to forego the best care in their dotage? And what will be left after the largest retired population -- by proportion, and absolutely -- in the history of mankind has gone? SFA is my bet. It will be up to us to fund our own retirements, if we get any.
But wait! There's more... those of Gen-X who have managed to find $100,000 pa jobs are statistical freaks. Most have been dumped on the streets after the bubble burst. There used to be a path of promotion to a point where you could set company policy. How many of you are in that position? How many are under 35? How many of your peers are over 40-45? What about superiors?
Or the media -- where are the Gen-X journalists? Don't include MTV, or anyone whose only task seems to be reporting on skateboards and rap music. Where are the Gen-Xers interviewing Rumsfeld or Rice? Where are the Gen-Xers reporting in Afghanistan? Or hosting a talking-head show? (Conan O'Brien Doesn't Count).
When you think about it, this comes down to the powerful members of one generation saying to their children "We will tell you what you are. You are dissapointments to Us. You will never live up to what We were and what We did. We therefore will not give up the world until We cannot hold on with Our palsied hands one moment longer, and We will then expect you to take the best possible care of Us no matter what the cost to your own future."
And you wonder why those children are pissed!
P.S. I am not saying that all Boomers are consciously subduing all Gen-Xers, but I am saying that the social structures dismantled by one generation has amounted to pulling up the ladders set up by their parents before the next generation can make its own way up. Any who have climbed the wall on their own, or slipped into the fortress through a fortuotous (sp?) crack, more power to you. But don't forget the increasing crowd still locked outside the gates.
This is even more difficult, because we don't even know what is a letter, and what are collection of letters.
eg: given your cipher (which is handwritten, BTW), we find a letter which looks like '#'. That could be a meaningful grapheme in its own right. It could be a contraction of 'tt'. It could be a part of the preceeding or following letter, and have no meaning seperately.
Your theory that this is a cypher written in a natural language with phonetic spelling is one which others have already thought of. It is very plausible, especially given that there seem to be two 'dialects' in the Voynich manuscript. Two people's ideas of phonetic, perhaps? That doesn't make the decryption any easier though. There are several questions which must be answered first, such as
I have some little knowledge of the Voynich Manuscript, and I must make some points:
The letters have no relation with any script, from anywhere at any time, let alone any roman or cyrillic hand. Any similarities are the result of it being written with the same sort of pen as was used to write the European scripts, and the constraints a dipped nib pen puts on the pen movements you can make on the writing surface.
The '3' character in roman scripts was a shorthand character, what is sometimes called a Tirolean notation. It has several meanings depending on context. eg., '-b3' == '-bus', '-q3' == '-que'. (ref. Cappelli, Adriano; The elements of abbreviation in medieval Latin paleography, Trans. D. Heimann and R. Kay, pp18ff)
The letters for thorn ( ) and eth (ð ) do indeed stand for the/th/ sound in 'cloth' and 'clothe'.
At the time the Voynich Manuscript was written, William Shakespeare was alive and writing plays. Old English had not been spoken for five hundred years.
The first character which you saw is one of several 'flag' characters. They are found in several forms, but are consistent throughout the manuscript, with varying degrees of ornamentation. There does not appear to be any connection with the 'command' or 'propellor' symbol.
The varying number of letters in the Voynich alphabet is a result of not knowing which symbols are graphemes and which are contractions. It is also unknown (but considered unlikely) if there is an 'Upper Case'. The equivalent would be not knowing that there is no meaningful difference between the symbols 'r' and 'R', but that there is a difference between 'R' and 'P'.
Surely the definition of 'Utopia' is something along the lines of:
Utopia:/you-TOE-pee-ah/ n. A description of a society where everyone else likes the same things you do. First used by Sir Thomas More in the novel of the same name. From the Greek 'eu topos' (lit. 'no place')
Similarly, a Distopia describes a place which is run on lines which you would dislike.
Beyond a cherished few classics (1984, A Brave New World, The Matrix) your choice of [U|Dis]topia says more about you than it does about how human nature is likely to allow circumstances to evolve and develop.
Personal view: Atlas Shrugged... [shudder]. I prefer Robert Anton Wilson's parody 'Telemachus Sneezed' in the Illuminatus! trilogy. Hmm, Illuminatus!... Now there was a [U|Dis]topia! I'm not sure which yet, though. Let me read it a few dozen more times, and I'll get back to you.
It seems that capitalism is wrong in america these days. Nobody is preaching socialism, but everybody is dissing capitalism. Yes, Bill Gates is a capitalist. But come to think of it, so am I. And so are almost all Americans.
With all due respect, no, you're not.
Unless you would prefer all roads to be toll roads to pay back the individual or company which built/bought them, to negitiate 'protection' with whoever decides to be^W^W^W has contracted being the local police force today, to be able to pay whatever your doctor demands to treat you, because hey, like you're going to argue?
You pay your taxes to your government, and you expect at least some social services in return which are not subject to being bought. Like a police force. Like roads. (I'd give more examples, but most of them have already been sold. Health care in the USA, and basic utilities everywhere come to mind.)
The system which most people think of when they think of Capitalism is not the original trading system (really just a description of why it is better to build a new factory than keep your money under your mattress), but a 'devil-take-the-hindmost' system of 'you have the right to screw me, but only if I have the right to screw you back' (which, BTW, people like Adam Smith despised in its pure uncontrolled form, and argued for more govenment controls and restrictions on trade and company business). The vision of everyone in the world screwing each other is one which should give pause.
I had a lot more of a rant ready to go, but I decided to spare you all.
The Osbourne-1 shown does have at least a bell, if not the complement of bells and whistles. That modem in its drive storage slot was not standard issue. And I know... the first computer I ever touched was my father's Osbourne 1.
Ah, the memories. Z80 processor with an 8 bit bus. The OS was CP/M80. The word processing pack age was Wordstar 1 (yes, Wordstar version One). The 'graphics support' was a seperate codepage of characters with block-drawing characters. It was text or block graphics, one mode at a time only!. The computer game of choice was adventur (our copy was corrupted when it gave the description of the mirror over the chasm -- you know, where you look out of the window over the chasm, and see a lit window with a person in it who is trying to get your attention...)
[backgroud music starts up quietly, building to a crescendo. The music is Barbera Streisand singing Memories. It is followed by automatic gunfire, then silence...]
Well, I was only 8 years old at the time!
And don't get me started about how we made 5 1/2" SSSD (Single Sided, Single Density) floppies into Double Sided by cutting another notch into the side so we could fit more pirated games on when we copied them on the Apple ][s at primary school (age 9). Or how we...
The context was the success of inventions, and how likely it is for an invention to be taken up if one person only had worked on it, versus the resources of a larger company and the baggage entailed.
I took 'success' to be how much the invention has been used in the real world, and how much influence it has had on people's lives. Tesla's AC generator technology was successful. Everyone who uses electricity from a power plant owes a debt to Tesla -- and to George Westinghouse who financed the development and installation in the first large scale central power plant. Similarly for the electric light bulb, or the Transistor. Other ideas Tesla had, such as wireless transmission of energy, have not been successful; not because they were bad ideas, but because Tesla could not get anyone with enough resources to bring the idea to market to give him enough money.
Babbage and his Difference Engine is another example. His idea was brilliant. Its execution was excellent, given his resources. That you can read this message is proof that the concept was sound. But. It was not until large organisations -- namely governments -- were convinced that they needed computers were enough resources brought into play.
My point is, I suppose, that life is not fair. An invention's brilliance is not the only factor in how much of a difference it makes to the world. For a sufficient impact, there must also be a large enough mechanism to develop, market, produce and ship the finished product. In the example of your piano playing (which isn't really relevant, but what the hey) you are absolutely correct that you do not need a large corporation to write new music, or to enjoy doing so. But if no-one else hears that music then it will die with you. Recording and distributing that music requires more resources than any of us have, unless you are using the net to distribute MP3s, and even then it is you and 1 billion other people. You are not likely to be noticed, and hence you are not likely to make any impact on the world, unless you enlist the help of a large organization or company in some way.
First you must have an idea. This is almost always the result of one person having a brainwave.
Second you must have the manufacture/ marketing/ sales etc. This is the bailiwick of larger corporations.
This has always been the way. Edison made such an impact because with his first small successes he built a corporation which could produce and market other more marginal products. Tesla, on the other hand, had some (literally) world-shattering ideas, but as he didn't have a large corporation of his own, he had to go cap-in-hand to people like Westinghouse and Morgan to get the funding to develop his ideas. (Yes, Tesla did start several companies to develop specific concepts, but they were all small, specific and all failed for one reason or another. If Tesla had had all the resources of Westinghouse at his command, rather than at petition, who knows what toys we would have now?)
This is not to say that Edison was a better inventor than Tesla (many would argue that Tesla left him in the dust as far as raw imagination and engineering skills went), but Edison had the marketing skills and business sense which enabled him to do more with what he had.
You will, I think, find this pattern in all revolutionary inventions over the last two-hundred years. The inventor was
working on his own, and used his great idea to build a company around it, (Edison Electric Lights)
working on his own, and made a deal with an existing company to produce and market it (Tesla, Westinghouse and AC generators), or
working as part of a corporation already, and already had the resources available to do something with the idea (Transistors at Bell Labs, just about anything from PARC, etc.)
You will probably find that the discoverer of the Blue Laser Diode was working with a corporation, and could make a deal with that corporation to produce the diodes. He could not have done it on his own. Similarly with the Clockwork Radio, IIRC the inventor used funds from the UN to start a company to produce these radios.
The ACLU said the first four weeks of testing at the Palm Beach airport showed the technology was "less accurate than a coin toss." The system matched the faces of the volunteers just 455 out of 958 times, or about 47 percent of the time.
Seems to me that this is a controlled environment for the most part, and still they have problems this big? I wonder if this technology will ever be accurate enough to work properly.
WRONG STATISTICAL ANALOGY
If you have a choice between two objects, and the correct one is chosen 50% or so of the time, then you have a random system, and it is roughly equivalent to a coin. If you have a choice of three (one is correct, two are incorrect), and the wrong one is chosen 33.3% of the time, you have a random system. (D6/2 for AD&Ders out there.) ERGO, the probability to chose one correct item randomly from a field of n items is 1/n. Face recognition is one in a practical infinity. A success rate of 1% is therefore a stupendous technical achievement. A success rate of 47% is a marvel of design.
Of course, if it is to be used in any real-world application, then a success rate of 99.9% would be a Good Thing, with an independantly thinking human being to check for false positives or negatives. Maybe the software could show a phot of who it thinks the person is for a human to quickly verify.
If this is used for biometrics in private or secure building access, then it is showing strong possibilities. If it is being used to scan for wanted criminals (putting aside concerns about civil liberties and privacy in public places (if there is any such thing)), then a tightly controlled system of checks is required. A flag to say 'Hey, I think I just saw Osama bin Laden, you might want to check', rather than automatically setting off all the alarms and releasing the hounds.
Also, they say they are testing it at an airport? Doesn't sound like a controlled lab to me! Unless you have a limited set of faces, in a controlled studio environment, you are in an uncontrolled environment. Of course some environments are more controlled than others, but an airport?
Just because the possible (allright, probable) misuses of a technology are disturbing does not diminish the technical achievement of making that technology work. Remember that this tech is also necessary for AI vision systems, etc. (You could say that when this system becomes as good as a human you have effectively built an AI anyway).
Now, your post was pretty reasonably written, as you said, "depends on how much you trust your government". But how much can one trust a government in principle?
Based on history, might I suggest about as far as you could throw one?
Paid overtime? Haaaa hahahahahahhaha! Oh, wait, there used to be this thing we had called time-in-lieu, where you would work 12-hour days 7 days a week for a month, and they let you take a couple of days off (when it isn't busy - ha! - so that you could recuperate -ha!), except now they have said that they officially discourage it.
Oh, they (PHBs) don't mind it when you get three hours sleep for eight days in a row while in a strange city (occasionally in a strange country as well), but ask for something in return, like, say, I want those hours of my life back you bastards!!!, and suddenly they hum and haw.
But hey! Burnout happens to other companies!
Idiots.
... Sorry. Got a bit excited there. Back to solitare.
I always try for intelligent debate. I see it so rarely, it deserves all the support it can get!
Left them? Ok, now correct me if I'm wrong, but... we're still in Afghanistan. Not only that, but we've helped put the new unified government in place, (even though we didn't set out to build the country again), and helped hammer out agreements for everything from peacekeeping troops, to funraisers, to bringing books to the afghan children so they could actually learn something in school. As for the people killing one another, hey, what can I say? They've been killing one another for hundreds of years, are we to blame for that too? We're being bounced around like a pinball and used in so many ways we lost count when all we want to do is wipe out taliban leaders, and get Al Qaida on the run (or dead, either way). We freed the people, don't blame us for what they choose to do with their freedom. We're like the world's whipping boy. When someone does something to someone else, everyone just yells, "blame the Americans."
Then the reason the Afghanistanis are still terrified is because they are ingrateful? The US forces made a militarily expeditious deal with the Northern Alliance. No-one doubts this, or the reasons for it: the N.A. was the only meaningful opposition to the Taliban/Al Qaeda. This was the most appropriate thing to do under the circumstances. But now, the Taliban is no longer a threat in Afghanistan (its roots in Saudi Arabia are still a problem, but that is a whole other story). The US has, therefore, left the only other force on the ground in charge: the N.A. Trouble is, the N.A. was never a very strong alliance. It was only ever a loose coalition of people whose common factor was that they hated the Taliban (with good reason). That does not ipso facto make them nice people. They control the Opium fields in Northern Afghanistan, and have been making their money from it for at least twenty years. They are the original Warlords who caused so much havoc after the Soviets forced the Afghanistani King out. Their history and proclivities are known. And here is the nub of my argument here: it is now the USA's problem. Once the USA invaded Afghanistan, by its own Monroe Doctrine, it assumed the responsability of helping it become a viable country again. The USA is not punishing the excesses of the N.A. troops all through Afghanistan, but are chasing down the vanishingly small number of Taliban/Al Qaeda left within range. It would be so easy to send a squad or two on a side trip, but it does not appear to be happening. (I could be wrong -- news from Afghanistan seems to be in short supply these days.)
As for the Guantanamo Bay business, even the Nuremburg trials housed their prisoners in better conditions. They had a roof, walls and five minutes of privacy a day, at least. The food is not the problem. The problem is the systematic dehumanisation and degradation of these human beings, whatever they may stand accused of doing. The problem is that the claim that 'we treat them better than they treat us' is irrelevant. Morally and ethically, we should treat them as we would expect to be treated. Or is taking the yardstick for human rights from the most flagrant violations now the norm? Baselining from the World's Worst Practice? Surely the mark of a civilised nation is the ability to deal fairly even with your enemies.
World Court: The USA supports the idea of the International Court of Justice, so long as its citizens are not, and never will be subject to it. It also reserves the right to ignore any adverse ruling (of which there are several, mostly about US dealings in Central and South America). One law for you, one law for us. Imagine this scenario: the European Union sponsors a World Court of Crimes (to which the US is strongly... encouraged to sign up to), but says that it will not be subject to its rulings. Any E.U citizen can only be tried in Europe, no matter what their crime, while anyone else must appear before the World Court on subpoena (including US citizens). Would that not be considered unfair? What if it was the old USSR? or the League of Arab Nations? The problem is not with the Court, it is with the attitudes of those nations who do not think that the rest of the world is relevent.
And about the Death Sentence Point One: Most other nations have long since determined that more than a certain time on Death Row is Cruel and Unusual punishment - effectively torture. In fact, the USA has joined in condemnation of countries in Africa (Nigeria comes to mind) who routinely keep people on Death Row for extended periods. Beyond a certain point, the appeals process becomes torture! Point Two: Juries are easily swayed by evidence which they have no hope of understanding properly because 1] the required knowledge to make sense of the evidence is only gained after years of study and 2] the adversarial system ensures that only one possibility (or two at most) of a whole range of possible explanations is taken. The evidence is not nearly as effective as a good prosecutor/defender. O.J. Simpson -- was he guilty or innocent? With two groups of twelve people each, one said guilty (criminal trial), and one said innocent (civil trial). Like Schroedinger's Cat, he is guilty and innocent at the same time. The available evidence was the same -- it is how it was used that made the difference. My point being that just because twelve, or twenty-four, or thirty-six, or twelve million people think someone is guilty, does not make it so. Sometimes, even with the best of intentions and the best evidence at the time, it is possible to be wrong. And it happens surprisingly often. Yes, there are Charles Mansons (who, by the way, is not on Death Row, but was deemed unfit by reason of insanity), but there are many others who were sentenced to death for lesser crimes, on lesser evidence, and with lesser reason for the ultimate sanction. And recently, I remember a report which said that a survey of Death Row prisoners whose evidence was re-checked using the latest DNA techniques showed that something like 1 in 7 or 8 (I think, I can't find the source) Death Row prisoners were innocent. Obviously the line 'better a dozen guilty men go fre than an innocent is punished' is pie-in-the-sky. I am not saying that all prisoners should be set free. I am not saying that all trials are meaningless. What I am saying is that there is always some doubt, and always a possibility of innocence, and that it is meaningless to apologize to a dead man.
Have I gone too far? I hope not. I like to think that there is hope in the human condition, despite the available evidence. I also like to think that reason can prevail, and the evidence for that is equally slim.
More discussion should probably be taken off-line, if you want to continue.
This has nothing to do with the base story. <rant>
... The US dropped food to the afghan people, and some people bitched. The US freed the afghan people from a totalitarian regime, and still some people bitched. We took prisoners to an American base, fed them, clothed them, gave them a place to sleep, all at cost and risk to us, and still people bitched...
Yes, the US dropped food... and followed up by dropping anti-personnel bombs which looked just like the food packets. (After convincing the Pakistan to close it borders and prevent the UN and Red Cross food shipments which were really feeding Afghanistan.) Yes, the US freed the Afghanistani people from the Taliban... and left them to the tender mercies of the Warlords who were in charge before. Pashtuns, who happen to be the ethnic group the Taliban came from, are being killed in the street because of their accents -- it is assumed that Pashtun=Taliban. Yes, the US is housing prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. In cages most of the rest of the world wouldn't use to house dogs. They have spent the last 4? 5? months in custody without charge, without knowing where on the planet they are, and knowing that they are very likely to be 'tried' in a closed military court with no defence and sentenced to death.
(re Death Penalty)
(no chance for escaping from prison 10 years down the road);
Have you ever bothered to find how long some of these people have been in jail? Some of them have been on Death Row for more than 10 years. How would you deal with ten years of 'maybe next week, they'll kill me'? And let's not mention the number of Death-Row inmates who were convicted on dubious evidence, or the number who have been proved innocent when better evidence came to light... often too late.
We're always the first ones everyone calls when something bad happens, and we're the one everyone complains to when anything happens that they don't like.
Well, maybe an International Police Force and corresponding International Court of Justice would take some of this unwanted pressure off, eh? Such a pity that the number one veto state in the UN Security Council (in charge of that Police Force) is the USA. Such a pity that the main obstacle to the foundation of the Court of Justice was and is... USA. The reason given was that Americans might be tried for War Crimes. Is the USA 'above the Law'? Because that is what your goverment is arguing.
If you want to hug the guy with a bomb strapped to his chest, feel free.
Here's an idea. Ask yourself this: What would someone have to do to make me hate themso much that I would willingly and happily kill myself if it meant they might suffer or die.
Your government has made itself the new Roman Empire, straddling the world. Read a history of the Roman Empire sometime, and find out why so many people around the world are getting scared. </rant>
Slashdot Mirror
s/do for/do to/
Please, Sir, may I have another?
Theoretically the Australian Consitution was written so that New Zealand could become a member state of Australia at any time, on equal footing with the other 6 (plus a few territories).
IMHO, this is utterly arse-backwards. Given New Zealand's continual and consistant common-sense, thoughtfulness and ethics, and contrasted with Little Johnny 'Arse-licker' Howard, not to mention NZ's relationship between native, colonial and immigrant populations, and its generally progressive and humane social policies, I would like to make a suggestion:
Please, please, please, could Australia become the West Island of New Zealand?
We'll provide the army, if you show us how to maintain a universal public health system! We'll help get rid of your possum problem if you can heal the rift between the Aboriginals and the government!
Waiting in hope.
That's the whole point, isn't it?
... it could never work, but let us assume that it does, what would its operating parameters be? How would you use it? What would its failings and flaws be?
The best Sci-Fi takes an absurd premise and says, 'well -- assume that Kansas has an Atlantic Seafront. How did it get that way and what are the ramifications?' You would probably come up with a quite interesting story to explain why the Eastern half of the USA is missing and what results from this.
Check out the David Brin novel The Practice Effect. In it he takes the laws of Thermodynamics and says 'what if...', in this case what if things got better with use? (ie., reversed entropy.) The mechanics of how it works are sketchy at the best of times (and amount to a hand-wave), but that is irrelevant because the story serves as a gedankenexperiment (sp?). The more outlandish the premises the better the explanation has to be, and (hopefully) the better the story.
Hey, even the Lensman series by E.E. Doc. Smith make good stories, even if they are boy's own tales of superhumanly competent demi-gods. And the Inertialess Drive
http://www.robocup.org/
Because, hey, everyone knows that all history teachers are seasoned propagandists, and none of them have any political concerns of their own. Heaven forfend that they might on a personal level disagree with me.
And, by the Gods, if someone dares to comment personally on a subject which they feel strongly enough about to get involved with other organisations to support it...
And not even for pay! The perfidy!
By comparison, the tendancy of large or fanatic organisations to write a single letter and send it via ten thousand drones in the hope of astro-turfing the debate... merely a pecadillo, almost beneath comment!
(The Silmarillion was a huge collection of half-finished manuscripts dating over sixty years when J.R.R. passed to the West. While the stories and writing are purely his (and the basis and foudation of the LotR), it took Christopher a lot of work to edit it into something publishable. Then there is the History of Middle Earth...)
Christopher Tolkien is not just sitting back and taking the checks. He takes his responsibilities as J.R.R's Literary Executor seriously, and works for it. See, for example, here.
Sure, some might say his writings are all derivitive of the works of one person, but no more so than many other academics.
Which is correct? Sky-la-rov, with its ease of pronunciation for english speakers, or Sklya-rov, with its more-likely-for-Russian combination of consonants, including a palatalised 'l'.
/.
I couldn't guess, not knowing enough (read 'any') Russian, and the usage seems to be 50-50 on
It is even shown both ways in the parent story!
Patient: Doctor, whenever I do this [incredibly stupid thing] it really really hurts.
Doctor: Don't do it, then!
Duh!
This, and similar anecdotes, remind me of logical processes such as: "Hey, it is physically possible to put this pistol to my head and pull the trigger, therefore it must be OK to do so! I wonder what will happen?"
The horror! The Horror!
Will all people who actually believe that generationalist crap please go stick their head in a bucket and go away!
/. by people who should know better). Let's try to answer it, shall we?
Everything which is said about the so-called 'Gen-X' is said by the media -- first advertising slime, then editorial slime, followed by stereotyping lazy journalist slime -- not by the members of this nebulous and meaningless 'group'.
What is this article saying? That it looks like younger people are going to have a really crappy time for the forseeable future, probably the rest of their lives. And that despite the crapulous stereotype fostered upon a generation by fiat, "This time they have reason to whine." (think about that byline. It means that according to them 1: all Gen-Xers whine and complain, and 2: at all times except for this one, any complaints are trivial and meaningless and can be ignored safely. Who decides?)
Why is this bullshit continuing? Why are 'Gen-Xers' going to do so badly? (A question which is not even asked on the Fortune article, and is answered by "because they are all whining shits" here on
For a start, lets use the term 'Gen-X' merely as a reference to the people who happened to be born in that time period, and not say anything about their personal habits, merely the opportunities they (...'we', I should say) have).
Gen-Xers have been around to take up and ride the greatest explosion in technology since the Industrial Revolution. A few have even managed to become senior programmers and sysadmins. Where to from there? The people who run the companies are still from generation older -- lets label them 'Baby Boomers'. As generations, we -- Gen-X -- have watched them -- Baby Boomers -- profit from wealth and progressive social policies from the sixties to the late seventies -- and then systematically dismantle those things behind them. Here in Australia we used to have free (government-funded) Universities. Student fees were introduced in the early eighties. They have been increasing steadily since, and it now costs between tens- and hundreds-of-thousands of dollars for a degree. And the people who are most shrilly declaiming that fees are still too low and students don't know how good they have it are precisely those who recieved most benefit from free education.
And then there is the Reagan/Thatcher economic model, which says that selling off your country and renting it back from whoever could afford to buy it somehow makes good economic sense. Gee, that does work! Just ask anyone with a privatised Electricity Company! or Water. or Prison System.
Governments now have the same or higher debt than they used to have, but there is nothing left to sell off. Except maybe the citizenry as slave labour.
The Baby Boomers, as a group, are statistically the greediest and most selfish for a hundred years prior, and certainly since. They (that is, those members of that group who have had unfettered access to the pension funds) have squandered the pension money, but do you think there will be any willingness to forego the best care in their dotage? And what will be left after the largest retired population -- by proportion, and absolutely -- in the history of mankind has gone? SFA is my bet. It will be up to us to fund our own retirements, if we get any.
But wait! There's more... those of Gen-X who have managed to find $100,000 pa jobs are statistical freaks. Most have been dumped on the streets after the bubble burst. There used to be a path of promotion to a point where you could set company policy. How many of you are in that position? How many are under 35? How many of your peers are over 40-45? What about superiors?
Or the media -- where are the Gen-X journalists? Don't include MTV, or anyone whose only task seems to be reporting on skateboards and rap music. Where are the Gen-Xers interviewing Rumsfeld or Rice? Where are the Gen-Xers reporting in Afghanistan? Or hosting a talking-head show? (Conan O'Brien Doesn't Count).
When you think about it, this comes down to the powerful members of one generation saying to their children "We will tell you what you are. You are dissapointments to Us. You will never live up to what We were and what We did. We therefore will not give up the world until We cannot hold on with Our palsied hands one moment longer, and We will then expect you to take the best possible care of Us no matter what the cost to your own future."
And you wonder why those children are pissed!
P.S. I am not saying that all Boomers are consciously subduing all Gen-Xers, but I am saying that the social structures dismantled by one generation has amounted to pulling up the ladders set up by their parents before the next generation can make its own way up. Any who have climbed the wall on their own, or slipped into the fortress through a fortuotous (sp?) crack, more power to you. But don't forget the increasing crowd still locked outside the gates.
eg: given your cipher (which is handwritten, BTW), we find a letter which looks like '#'. That could be a meaningful grapheme in its own right. It could be a contraction of 'tt'. It could be a part of the preceeding or following letter, and have no meaning seperately.
Your theory that this is a cypher written in a natural language with phonetic spelling is one which others have already thought of. It is very plausible, especially given that there seem to be two 'dialects' in the Voynich manuscript. Two people's ideas of phonetic, perhaps? That doesn't make the decryption any easier though. There are several questions which must be answered first, such as
Similarly, a Distopia describes a place which is run on lines which you would dislike.
Beyond a cherished few classics (1984, A Brave New World, The Matrix) your choice of [U|Dis]topia says more about you than it does about how human nature is likely to allow circumstances to evolve and develop.
Personal view: Atlas Shrugged... [shudder]. I prefer Robert Anton Wilson's parody 'Telemachus Sneezed' in the Illuminatus! trilogy.
Hmm, Illuminatus!... Now there was a [U|Dis]topia! I'm not sure which yet, though. Let me read it a few dozen more times, and I'll get back to you.
With all due respect, no, you're not.
Unless you would prefer all roads to be toll roads to pay back the individual or company which built/bought them, to negitiate 'protection' with whoever decides to be^W^W^W has contracted being the local police force today, to be able to pay whatever your doctor demands to treat you, because hey, like you're going to argue?
You pay your taxes to your government, and you expect at least some social services in return which are not subject to being bought. Like a police force. Like roads. (I'd give more examples, but most of them have already been sold. Health care in the USA, and basic utilities everywhere come to mind.)
The system which most people think of when they think of Capitalism is not the original trading system (really just a description of why it is better to build a new factory than keep your money under your mattress), but a 'devil-take-the-hindmost' system of 'you have the right to screw me, but only if I have the right to screw you back' (which, BTW, people like Adam Smith despised in its pure uncontrolled form, and argued for more govenment controls and restrictions on trade and company business). The vision of everyone in the world screwing each other is one which should give pause.
I had a lot more of a rant ready to go, but I decided to spare you all.
And while we're at it, I'd like a pony.
The Osbourne-1 shown does have at least a bell, if not the complement of bells and whistles. That modem in its drive storage slot was not standard issue. And I know ... the first computer I ever touched was my father's Osbourne 1.
Ah, the memories. Z80 processor with an 8 bit bus. The OS was CP/M80. The word processing pack
age was Wordstar 1 (yes, Wordstar version One). The 'graphics support' was a seperate codepage of characters with block-drawing characters. It was text or block graphics, one mode at a time only!. The computer game of choice was adventur (our copy was corrupted when it gave the description of the mirror over the chasm -- you know, where you look out of the window over the chasm, and see a lit window with a person in it who is trying to get your attention...)
[backgroud music starts up quietly, building to a crescendo. The music is Barbera Streisand singing Memories. It is followed by automatic gunfire, then silence...]
Well, I was only 8 years old at the time!
And don't get me started about how we made 5 1/2" SSSD (Single Sided, Single Density) floppies into Double Sided by cutting another notch into the side so we could fit more pirated games on when we copied them on the Apple ][s at primary school (age 9).
Or how we...
sorry. I'll stop now.
The context was the success of inventions, and how likely it is for an invention to be taken up if one person only had worked on it, versus the resources of a larger company and the baggage entailed.
I took 'success' to be how much the invention has been used in the real world, and how much influence it has had on people's lives. Tesla's AC generator technology was successful. Everyone who uses electricity from a power plant owes a debt to Tesla -- and to George Westinghouse who financed the development and installation in the first large scale central power plant. Similarly for the electric light bulb, or the Transistor. Other ideas Tesla had, such as wireless transmission of energy, have not been successful; not because they were bad ideas, but because Tesla could not get anyone with enough resources to bring the idea to market to give him enough money.
Babbage and his Difference Engine is another example. His idea was brilliant. Its execution was excellent, given his resources. That you can read this message is proof that the concept was sound. But. It was not until large organisations -- namely governments -- were convinced that they needed computers were enough resources brought into play.
My point is, I suppose, that life is not fair. An invention's brilliance is not the only factor in how much of a difference it makes to the world. For a sufficient impact, there must also be a large enough mechanism to develop, market, produce and ship the finished product. In the example of your piano playing (which isn't really relevant, but what the hey) you are absolutely correct that you do not need a large corporation to write new music, or to enjoy doing so. But if no-one else hears that music then it will die with you. Recording and distributing that music requires more resources than any of us have, unless you are using the net to distribute MP3s, and even then it is you and 1 billion other people. You are not likely to be noticed, and hence you are not likely to make any impact on the world, unless you enlist the help of a large organization or company in some way.
It's not fair, but it's how it is.
Second you must have the manufacture/ marketing/ sales etc. This is the bailiwick of larger corporations.
This has always been the way. Edison made such an impact because with his first small successes he built a corporation which could produce and market other more marginal products. Tesla, on the other hand, had some (literally) world-shattering ideas, but as he didn't have a large corporation of his own, he had to go cap-in-hand to people like Westinghouse and Morgan to get the funding to develop his ideas. (Yes, Tesla did start several companies to develop specific concepts, but they were all small, specific and all failed for one reason or another. If Tesla had had all the resources of Westinghouse at his command, rather than at petition, who knows what toys we would have now?)
This is not to say that Edison was a better inventor than Tesla (many would argue that Tesla left him in the dust as far as raw imagination and engineering skills went), but Edison had the marketing skills and business sense which enabled him to do more with what he had.
You will, I think, find this pattern in all revolutionary inventions over the last two-hundred years. The inventor was
You will probably find that the discoverer of the Blue Laser Diode was working with a corporation, and could make a deal with that corporation to produce the diodes. He could not have done it on his own. Similarly with the Clockwork Radio, IIRC the inventor used funds from the UN to start a company to produce these radios.
Actually, the Klingon word for human is tera'ngan, or something similar.
...oh god, did I just say that? Did I really just admit to knowing some tlhIngan Hol?
My life is so sad and empty.
WRONG STATISTICAL ANALOGY
If you have a choice between two objects, and the correct one is chosen 50% or so of the time, then you have a random system, and it is roughly equivalent to a coin. If you have a choice of three (one is correct, two are incorrect), and the wrong one is chosen 33.3% of the time, you have a random system. (D6/2 for AD&Ders out there.)
ERGO, the probability to chose one correct item randomly from a field of n items is 1/n. Face recognition is one in a practical infinity. A success rate of 1% is therefore a stupendous technical achievement. A success rate of 47% is a marvel of design.
Of course, if it is to be used in any real-world application, then a success rate of 99.9% would be a Good Thing, with an independantly thinking human being to check for false positives or negatives. Maybe the software could show a phot of who it thinks the person is for a human to quickly verify.
If this is used for biometrics in private or secure building access, then it is showing strong possibilities. If it is being used to scan for wanted criminals (putting aside concerns about civil liberties and privacy in public places (if there is any such thing)), then a tightly controlled system of checks is required. A flag to say 'Hey, I think I just saw Osama bin Laden, you might want to check', rather than automatically setting off all the alarms and releasing the hounds.
Also, they say they are testing it at an airport? Doesn't sound like a controlled lab to me! Unless you have a limited set of faces, in a controlled studio environment, you are in an uncontrolled environment. Of course some environments are more controlled than others, but an airport?
Just because the possible (allright, probable) misuses of a technology are disturbing does not diminish the technical achievement of making that technology work. Remember that this tech is also necessary for AI vision systems, etc. (You could say that when this system becomes as good as a human you have effectively built an AI anyway).
Paid overtime? Haaaa hahahahahahhaha!
Oh, wait, there used to be this thing we had called time-in-lieu, where you would work 12-hour days 7 days a week for a month, and they let you take a couple of days off (when it isn't busy - ha! - so that you could recuperate -ha!), except now they have said that they officially discourage it.
Oh, they (PHBs) don't mind it when you get three hours sleep for eight days in a row while in a strange city (occasionally in a strange country as well), but ask for something in return, like, say, I want those hours of my life back you bastards!!!, and suddenly they hum and haw.
But hey! Burnout happens to other companies!
Idiots.
... Sorry. Got a bit excited there.
Back to solitare.
Then the reason the Afghanistanis are still terrified is because they are ingrateful? The US forces made a militarily expeditious deal with the Northern Alliance. No-one doubts this, or the reasons for it: the N.A. was the only meaningful opposition to the Taliban/Al Qaeda. This was the most appropriate thing to do under the circumstances. But now, the Taliban is no longer a threat in Afghanistan (its roots in Saudi Arabia are still a problem, but that is a whole other story). The US has, therefore, left the only other force on the ground in charge: the N.A. Trouble is, the N.A. was never a very strong alliance. It was only ever a loose coalition of people whose common factor was that they hated the Taliban (with good reason). That does not ipso facto make them nice people. They control the Opium fields in Northern Afghanistan, and have been making their money from it for at least twenty years. They are the original Warlords who caused so much havoc after the Soviets forced the Afghanistani King out. Their history and proclivities are known. And here is the nub of my argument here: it is now the USA's problem. Once the USA invaded Afghanistan, by its own Monroe Doctrine, it assumed the responsability of helping it become a viable country again. The USA is not punishing the excesses of the N.A. troops all through Afghanistan, but are chasing down the vanishingly small number of Taliban/Al Qaeda left within range. It would be so easy to send a squad or two on a side trip, but it does not appear to be happening. (I could be wrong -- news from Afghanistan seems to be in short supply these days.)
As for the Guantanamo Bay business, even the Nuremburg trials housed their prisoners in better conditions. They had a roof, walls and five minutes of privacy a day, at least. The food is not the problem. The problem is the systematic dehumanisation and degradation of these human beings, whatever they may stand accused of doing. The problem is that the claim that 'we treat them better than they treat us' is irrelevant. Morally and ethically, we should treat them as we would expect to be treated. Or is taking the yardstick for human rights from the most flagrant violations now the norm? Baselining from the World's Worst Practice? Surely the mark of a civilised nation is the ability to deal fairly even with your enemies.
World Court:
The USA supports the idea of the International Court of Justice, so long as its citizens are not, and never will be subject to it. It also reserves the right to ignore any adverse ruling (of which there are several, mostly about US dealings in Central and South America). One law for you, one law for us. Imagine this scenario: the European Union sponsors a World Court of Crimes (to which the US is strongly... encouraged to sign up to), but says that it will not be subject to its rulings. Any E.U citizen can only be tried in Europe, no matter what their crime, while anyone else must appear before the World Court on subpoena (including US citizens). Would that not be considered unfair? What if it was the old USSR? or the League of Arab Nations? The problem is not with the Court, it is with the attitudes of those nations who do not think that the rest of the world is relevent.
And about the Death Sentence
Point One: Most other nations have long since determined that more than a certain time on Death Row is Cruel and Unusual punishment - effectively torture. In fact, the USA has joined in condemnation of countries in Africa (Nigeria comes to mind) who routinely keep people on Death Row for extended periods. Beyond a certain point, the appeals process becomes torture!
Point Two: Juries are easily swayed by evidence which they have no hope of understanding properly because 1] the required knowledge to make sense of the evidence is only gained after years of study and 2] the adversarial system ensures that only one possibility (or two at most) of a whole range of possible explanations is taken. The evidence is not nearly as effective as a good prosecutor/defender. O.J. Simpson -- was he guilty or innocent? With two groups of twelve people each, one said guilty (criminal trial), and one said innocent (civil trial). Like Schroedinger's Cat, he is guilty and innocent at the same time. The available evidence was the same -- it is how it was used that made the difference. My point being that just because twelve, or twenty-four, or thirty-six, or twelve million people think someone is guilty, does not make it so. Sometimes, even with the best of intentions and the best evidence at the time, it is possible to be wrong. And it happens surprisingly often. Yes, there are Charles Mansons (who, by the way, is not on Death Row, but was deemed unfit by reason of insanity), but there are many others who were sentenced to death for lesser crimes, on lesser evidence, and with lesser reason for the ultimate sanction. And recently, I remember a report which said that a survey of Death Row prisoners whose evidence was re-checked using the latest DNA techniques showed that something like 1 in 7 or 8 (I think, I can't find the source) Death Row prisoners were innocent. Obviously the line 'better a dozen guilty men go fre than an innocent is punished' is pie-in-the-sky. I am not saying that all prisoners should be set free. I am not saying that all trials are meaningless. What I am saying is that there is always some doubt, and always a possibility of innocence, and that it is meaningless to apologize to a dead man.
Have I gone too far? I hope not. I like to think that there is hope in the human condition, despite the available evidence. I also like to think that reason can prevail, and the evidence for that is equally slim.
More discussion should probably be taken off-line,
if you want to continue.
<rant>
Yes, the US dropped food
Yes, the US freed the Afghanistani people from the Taliban
Yes, the US is housing prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. In cages most of the rest of the world wouldn't use to house dogs. They have spent the last 4? 5? months in custody without charge, without knowing where on the planet they are, and knowing that they are very likely to be 'tried' in a closed military court with no defence and sentenced to death.
Have you ever bothered to find how long some of these people have been in jail? Some of them have been on Death Row for more than 10 years. How would you deal with ten years of 'maybe next week, they'll kill me'? And let's not mention the number of Death-Row inmates who were convicted on dubious evidence, or the number who have been proved innocent when better evidence came to light
Well, maybe an International Police Force and corresponding International Court of Justice would take some of this unwanted pressure off, eh? Such a pity that the number one veto state in the UN Security Council (in charge of that Police Force) is the USA. Such a pity that the main obstacle to the foundation of the Court of Justice was and is
Here's an idea. Ask yourself this: What would someone have to do to make me hate them so much that I would willingly and happily kill myself if it meant they might suffer or die.
Your government has made itself the new Roman Empire, straddling the world. Read a history of the Roman Empire sometime, and find out why so many people around the world are getting scared.
</rant>
Sorry, but this Troll got a response.
Quoting Ambrose Bierce, "with respect to Mr. Johnson, I submit that it is the first."