the fact remains that he was the leader of Umkhonto we Sizwe, which carried out bombings of civilian targets and which was therefore a terrorist organisation.
If bombing civilians makes an organization terrorist, then any government which has engaged in mass aerial bombardment or artillery strikes is a terrorist.
Not that I disagree with that conclusion. It's all about who writes the history.
Your organic crops are no less the result of genetic modification than mine are; simply the result of different methods of manipulation.
Incorrect. Selection is not modification. It's one thing to play draw poker with a regulation deck, selecting cards for your hand; it's quite another to mix in cards from a tarot deck.
My corn is a "biohazard." Your corn is "wholesome." The bias is pretty apparent.
When dealing with our spaceship's life support system, unknown quantities must be treated as hazards until proven otherwise.
Because you have an irrational bias against GMO's and towards organic farming, despite the facts.
The irrational bias here is the one favoring unrestricted use of GMOs, the belief in some techno-romantic notion of "big science" conquering unruly nature.
(Don't think irrational positive bias towards a technology is possible? Look at any story here involving Apple.)
Butterflies weren't exposed to the bT toxin in corn pollen because they don't eat corn pollen, it's well-known that milkweed is the food source for monarchs.
And of course corn pollen conveniently stays on corn plants, and never blows through the air to land milkweed.
Does it do so often enough to present a hazard to monarchs? I don't know. But your contention that it "doesn't even make ecological sense" is unwarranted.
Right - as a safety protocol.
A "safety" protocol that threatens to wipe out neighboring crops. Here I am growing organic corn, saving seed, doing things the wholesome old-fashioned way, when a bunch of Terminator pollen blows from your field across mine. Next season all those seeds I saved, don't sprout.
Yeah, that's safety.
GM crops should simply not be grown in the open air. You want to grow 'em, fine, so long as you manage to keep the pollen contained under biohazard protocols in a greenhouse
And so were the meso-American farmers who originally created corn, 7500 years ago
Completely different. Selective breeding does not introduce new information into a species' genome.
And I'll note that all that selective breeding took place without patents.
The mendacity of Monsanto, et. al. is evident from their differing stories about how unique GM crops are. When safety concerns come up, it's "hey, this is just corn! Nothing special, shouldn't even be specially labeled. We produced it by means not significantly different than the selective breeding used for all of history."
But when it's time to apply for patents, it's "this is our invention! Nothing like it has ever existed before! It it so unique and precious that the federal government should use force to prevent anyone else from using it without our permission!"
How about feeding people?
Great idea. Best way to do that is to let developing nations grow native crops for local consumption. The solution to hunger requires food sovereignty, not patented GM crops of questionable safety grown for the profit of agribusiness giants.
MORTAL: Wait a minute now, do I have free will or don't I?
GOD: I already told you you do. But that does not mean that determinism is incorrect.
MORTAL: Well, are my acts determined by the laws of nature or aren't they?
GOD: The word "determined" here is subtly but powerfully misleading and has contributed so much to the confusions of the free will versus determinism controversies. Your acts are certainly in accordance with the laws of nature, but to say they are determined by the laws of nature creates a totally misleading psychological image which is that your will could somehow be in conflict with the laws of nature and that the latter is somehow more powerful than you, and could "determine" your acts whether you liked it or not. But it is simply impossible for your will to ever conflict with natural law. You and natural law are really one and the same.
I remember from psychology class that certain reactions are processed in the spinal cord and executed before the information has even made it to the brain.
Yes, but spinal reflexes are extremely simple - "hot! drop it!" or "muscle tearing! contract!". IIRC, they're usually just a three neuron circuit - input, one interneuron, and output. The sort of complex behaviors exhibited when we perform a trained athletic feat can only be coordinated by the brain.
Ethnic cleansing is one form that the nationalism, elitism, and aggression of fascism can take.
Fascism can be pretty much defined as state control of everything.
That's only part of it. Extreme nationalism is also key, along with a militaristic "will to power", a mystical faith in elite "natural leaders", and economic corporatism. Authoritarianism by itself does not make fascism.
None of these other traits are evidenced in federal funding of pre-schools. (But are disturbingly evident in other trends in contemporary America.) And by the standards of modern civilization it's a hard sell that government-funded education is authoritarian; the question of federalism, of whether the funding takes place at the federal or state level, is irrelevant to this question.
That could require a larger US military presence in the Middle East than we currently have especially if Iran obtains nuclear weapons.
Growing power from Iran would not require any U.S. military presence in the Middle East. In fact, nothing that happens in the Middle East requires any U.S. military presence there. The job of U.S. military is supposed to be to protect the U.S. from attack. No one in the Middle East can launch an invasion of the U.S.
The irony here is that the US has little trouble in Afghanistan.
The Iraq war is paid for almost exclusively with special funding initiatives, it is not part of the budget. So ending the war won't suddenly free up trillions of dollars for other uses
Do these "special funding initiatives" somehow not have to be paid for? If so, let's just declare "special funding initiatives" for universal health care, a trip to Mars, and a pony for every American.
Of course ending the war would free up funds. The fact that war spending isn't accounted for in the regular budget is just accounting mendacity.
It doesn't get much more fascist than this: "nationalize early-education for children under five years"
Really? You honestly have a hard time thinking of things more fascist than federal funding and oversight for early education? C'mon. Wars of aggression, torture of suspects, the world's largest prison population...there are plenty of things happening right here in the U.S. that are much more fascist than that. Not to mention how fascist actual fscking fascists were with their, you know, ethnic cleansing and complete and total repression and all.
Federal funding for pre-school programs may be a bad idea. It may even be unconstitutional. There are rational debates to be had about it. But to claim that such a program is fascist is simply absurd.
No, it's called a non sequitur. Neutrinos, from man-made reactions or from natural ones, have not been seen to exist traveling at any velocity besides a whisker away from c. All neutrinos are equal.
The question here is not just whether weird dangerous particles could form, but with what velocity relative to the earth. If they can exist at all (and I'm not saying that they can) a non-evaporating micro black hole or a stranglet or a monopole at rest with respect to the earth is a different beast than one moving with a relativistic velocity, in terms of the probability that it could interact with the planet in a way hazardous to our health. The LHC would create the former, cosmic ray interactions the later (again, if they were created at all).
Hasn't happened to Earth, nor Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.
Five planets out of the entire damn cosmos is certainly an impressive sample size...
If neutrinos can and do interact with particles...
Uh, yes. So what? No one was talking about neutrinos.
in the 4.5 billion years or so...there has yet to have been an "evil particle" that has interacted with terrestrial matter or atmosphere.
In 4.5 billion years or so, I suspect there have been few if any collisions between particles with high but opposite velocities. How often does one high energy cosmic ray particle knock into another going the opposite direction?
Yes, lots of collisions between high velocity particles with (roughly) stationary particles near the surface of the earth have happened, and nothing bad enough to destroy the Earth has happened. That is not proof about the results of collisions between particles with opposing high velocities.
Imagine shooting pool with balls that stick together. Imagine further that there's a possibility that the chemical process that makes them stick together is corrosive to the felt of the table. If the eight is sitting stationary right by the pocket and you shoot the cue ball into it, they stick together and go into the pocket together[*], and don't get a chance to eat into the table. You could shoot all day and the table would be safe, and you'd know nothing about whether the stickiness is corrosive or not.
But now I propose a new game. We'll stand at opposite ends of the table and shoot balls toward each other. Now when two hit, their momentum cancels out and this lump is left sitting on the table, maybe burning a hole in the felt.
([*]Yeah, there's the whole rolling versus sliding friction thing, conveniently ignored here. We're also assuming that the pockets take up the entire side of the table, so you never miss.)
It seems to me that a significant fraction of the collisions would produce particle showers pointed towards the ground.
Sure. But the idea is that the particles so produced would be zipping along rapidly due to the momentum imparted by the collision, and would go right through the planet with a small chance of reacting with anything.
You DO know that particles with much higher velocities and energy levels than the LHC could ever produce interact with other particles every second in the upper atmosphere of Earth
You DO know that such collisions involve one particle with high velocity impacting a particle at rest (relatively speaking) with respect to the earth, making the collision products scatter like billiard balls after a good break and thus taking them away from the planet in short order? As opposed to colliding two streams with opposite and equal momentums, creating whatever they create at rest (relatively speaking) with respect to the earth?
Am I expecting the earth to get eaten up by strangelets or mini black holes? No. But the "oh, hush, collisions like this happen all the time" apology has a big leak in it that I haven't yet heard addressed. If evil bits get created in natural collisions, they go scooting off into space at high velocities before they have a chance to do damage here; while if evil bits where to get created in the LHC, they'd have little momentum and would hang around.
So how many orders of magnitude smarter than the guys who told us that the Space Shuttle would was safe to one mission in 100,000, are the guys telling us this is perfectly safe?
True anti-aliasing is when you take the high-resolution vector information and use it to produce pixel samples that would be more consistent with what a photograph would show. (e.g. alpha'ed pixels around the edges where the actual resolution of the letter protrudes slightly into certain pixels) This gives a much higher apparent resolution.
You've just managed to describe "blurring" in a very round-about way.:-)
Crisp text on a video display has pixels on or off. When I xmag over an xterm or emacs window using the lovely lucidatypewriter font, I see that each pixel is either foreground color or background color, none of this "alpha" blending guff.
A screen is not a photograph, and for the best ergonomics you shouldn't try to make it act like one.
Still want to punish companies for "windfall profits?" I'm just sayin'.
So high oil prices make it profitable for entrenched interests to maintain the status quo, with all of its ecological devastation...your "Woo capitalism!" was ironic, right?
I'm surprised the poster didn't consider increasing the font size...
Yes.
and/or switching to a high-resolution, anti-aliased font.
High resolution, sure, but antialiasing, not so much. If you have to blur a font to make it look good on the screen, that means it's a lousy font for the screen.
Unless you're setting something up for dead trees, when you're looking at a computer screen, use a font designed for pixels. May I suggest Lucida Sans Typewriter, a.k.a. lucidatypewriter? It comes standard on Unixy boxes. Try it with a DarkSlateGray background and a white foreground; or a navy or black background and a green foreground, with a nice big size. Good times.
Hypnosis can be used to remember e.g. a phone number you saw when you were 6 months old and couldn't read yet...
Hypnosis is a state of suggestibility. If while you are in a trance, I suggest to you that you can remember something, odds are good that will you will believe that you remember it. That doesn't mean you're doing so accurately. This is what leads to false memories.
I'm sorry, but why does a building such as the Empire State Building qualify for "copyright on its image"?
It doesn't.
Buildings built after 1990 can qualify for copyright on their design. I.e., you can't say "nifty building, I'm going to build one just like it."
Some people have apparently confused this with a general copyright on the image of a building, but they are incorrect: "The copyright in an architectural work that has been constructed does not include the right to prevent the making, distributing, or public display of pictures, paintings, photographs, or other pictorial representations of the work, if the building in which the work is embodied is located in or ordinarily visible from a public place."
So you can say ""nifty building, I'm going to take a bunch of photos of it and sell them." (In the U.S., at least. The French have tried to copyright the lighting configuration of the Eiffel Tower, and the Egyptians have made noise about copyrighting ancient monuments.)
I was raised Catholic and used to parrot the line about how Jeshua ben Joseph's blood "will be shed for you and for all so that sins may be forgiven", but now that I've grown up I can't make any sense out of it.
The whole human sacrifice thing is pretty disturbing. What, an omnipotent God really really wants to "forgive" the creations he screwed up and make imperfect, but can't until somebody gets tortured to death? Yow. Talk about not being able to admit when you're wrong.
And I wasn't even born when they executed the fellow, so I don't think you can blame his death on any time I "missed the mark" (which is all that "sin" means).
Poor guy. You can see the retcon in the story: The Jews are looking for a Messiah, a leader to save them from Roman oppression. Jeshua starts making trouble for the powers that be. A little contradictory with the whole "love your neighbor" and "blessed are the peacemakers" thing, then telling people to sell their clothes to buy swords and chasing people out of the temple with a whip for being capitalists, but hey, that's politics. So they think he might be the guy. Then he gets nailed to a tree, which pretty much ends his career as a rabble-rousing rabbi.
Do his followers accept that therefore he wasn't the Messiah they were looking for?
Of course not. That's not human nature.
Nope, instead they redefine what the Messiah is: not someone to save us from the Romans, but someone to save us from, um, er, "sin"! Yeah, that's it! It was all part of the plan. And what was a fairly reasonable set of wisdom teachings becomes an immortality cult based around human sacrifice.
Ladies and gentlemen of this supposed jury, it does not make sense.
If you said "all blacks are criminals, they should go back to Africa", or "homosexuals are girly, they should all just be straight like me" you'd have everyone on your back, berating you for your insensitivity. It's the same thing with theists.
Uh, no, it's not.
It is of course inaccurate to say that every theist is intolerant, and it is completely wrong to deny freedom of worship to anyone. But belief in nonsense is not like having dark skin, or preferring to have sex with people with a certain set of genitals.
Especially when people believing that nonsense have used it as justification to kill.
Sure, but you have to set up an account and give out your ID.
Maybe you prefer to chat via IM rather than on the phone with your SO and close friends, I can understand that. But for random folks whose messages you're willing to let sit a couple hours, or even ignore together, I'm having trouble understanding why you would give these people the ability to IM you in the first place, rather than just give out your e-mail address.
However, I'm never interrupted by this configuration....If I have something to say to someone, I send the message when it's good time for me - completely ignoring the mode they have set themselves in...I only expect that eventually - maybe - they will read the message I sent to them
So you've managed to make IM behave just like e-mail. Great. So why not just use e-mail?
I mean, you(probably) wouldn't simply ignore someone that you didn't want to talk to if you were sitting in a bar drinking a beer and they walked up to you jabbering about something unimportant.
There are non-verbal cues that one uses IRL to say, "I am not interested in talking to you right now."
I agree. I have no problem leaving a new IM sitting there for five minutes or a couple hours until I'm ready to respond, or just closing it altogether without responding if I know I'll never get around to it.
Slashdot Mirror
If bombing civilians makes an organization terrorist, then any government which has engaged in mass aerial bombardment or artillery strikes is a terrorist.
Not that I disagree with that conclusion. It's all about who writes the history.
Incorrect. Selection is not modification. It's one thing to play draw poker with a regulation deck, selecting cards for your hand; it's quite another to mix in cards from a tarot deck.
When dealing with our spaceship's life support system, unknown quantities must be treated as hazards until proven otherwise.
The irrational bias here is the one favoring unrestricted use of GMOs, the belief in some techno-romantic notion of "big science" conquering unruly nature.
(Don't think irrational positive bias towards a technology is possible? Look at any story here involving Apple.)
And of course corn pollen conveniently stays on corn plants, and never blows through the air to land milkweed.
Does it do so often enough to present a hazard to monarchs? I don't know. But your contention that it "doesn't even make ecological sense" is unwarranted.
A "safety" protocol that threatens to wipe out neighboring crops. Here I am growing organic corn, saving seed, doing things the wholesome old-fashioned way, when a bunch of Terminator pollen blows from your field across mine. Next season all those seeds I saved, don't sprout.
Yeah, that's safety.
GM crops should simply not be grown in the open air. You want to grow 'em, fine, so long as you manage to keep the pollen contained under biohazard protocols in a greenhouse
Completely different. Selective breeding does not introduce new information into a species' genome.
And I'll note that all that selective breeding took place without patents.
The mendacity of Monsanto, et. al. is evident from their differing stories about how unique GM crops are. When safety concerns come up, it's "hey, this is just corn! Nothing special, shouldn't even be specially labeled. We produced it by means not significantly different than the selective breeding used for all of history."
But when it's time to apply for patents, it's "this is our invention! Nothing like it has ever existed before! It it so unique and precious that the federal government should use force to prevent anyone else from using it without our permission!"
Great idea. Best way to do that is to let developing nations grow native crops for local consumption. The solution to hunger requires food sovereignty, not patented GM crops of questionable safety grown for the profit of agribusiness giants.
If you want to cut through the whole free will/determinism "dilemma", read Raymond Smullyan's Is God A Taoist?:
Yes, but spinal reflexes are extremely simple - "hot! drop it!" or "muscle tearing! contract!". IIRC, they're usually just a three neuron circuit - input, one interneuron, and output. The sort of complex behaviors exhibited when we perform a trained athletic feat can only be coordinated by the brain.
Ethnic cleansing is one form that the nationalism, elitism, and aggression of fascism can take.
That's only part of it. Extreme nationalism is also key, along with a militaristic "will to power", a mystical faith in elite "natural leaders", and economic corporatism. Authoritarianism by itself does not make fascism.
None of these other traits are evidenced in federal funding of pre-schools. (But are disturbingly evident in other trends in contemporary America.) And by the standards of modern civilization it's a hard sell that government-funded education is authoritarian; the question of federalism, of whether the funding takes place at the federal or state level, is irrelevant to this question.
Growing power from Iran would not require any U.S. military presence in the Middle East. In fact, nothing that happens in the Middle East requires any U.S. military presence there. The job of U.S. military is supposed to be to protect the U.S. from attack. No one in the Middle East can launch an invasion of the U.S.
Well, no trouble other than half of the country being back under Taliban control.
Do these "special funding initiatives" somehow not have to be paid for? If so, let's just declare "special funding initiatives" for universal health care, a trip to Mars, and a pony for every American.
Of course ending the war would free up funds. The fact that war spending isn't accounted for in the regular budget is just accounting mendacity.
Really? You honestly have a hard time thinking of things more fascist than federal funding and oversight for early education? C'mon. Wars of aggression, torture of suspects, the world's largest prison population...there are plenty of things happening right here in the U.S. that are much more fascist than that. Not to mention how fascist actual fscking fascists were with their, you know, ethnic cleansing and complete and total repression and all.
Federal funding for pre-school programs may be a bad idea. It may even be unconstitutional. There are rational debates to be had about it. But to claim that such a program is fascist is simply absurd.
This sounds would be more like Head Start, which has been mildly useful.
No, it's called a non sequitur. Neutrinos, from man-made reactions or from natural ones, have not been seen to exist traveling at any velocity besides a whisker away from c. All neutrinos are equal.
The question here is not just whether weird dangerous particles could form, but with what velocity relative to the earth. If they can exist at all (and I'm not saying that they can) a non-evaporating micro black hole or a stranglet or a monopole at rest with respect to the earth is a different beast than one moving with a relativistic velocity, in terms of the probability that it could interact with the planet in a way hazardous to our health. The LHC would create the former, cosmic ray interactions the later (again, if they were created at all).
Five planets out of the entire damn cosmos is certainly an impressive sample size...
Uh, yes. So what? No one was talking about neutrinos.
In 4.5 billion years or so, I suspect there have been few if any collisions between particles with high but opposite velocities. How often does one high energy cosmic ray particle knock into another going the opposite direction?
Yes, lots of collisions between high velocity particles with (roughly) stationary particles near the surface of the earth have happened, and nothing bad enough to destroy the Earth has happened. That is not proof about the results of collisions between particles with opposing high velocities.
Imagine shooting pool with balls that stick together. Imagine further that there's a possibility that the chemical process that makes them stick together is corrosive to the felt of the table. If the eight is sitting stationary right by the pocket and you shoot the cue ball into it, they stick together and go into the pocket together[*], and don't get a chance to eat into the table. You could shoot all day and the table would be safe, and you'd know nothing about whether the stickiness is corrosive or not.
But now I propose a new game. We'll stand at opposite ends of the table and shoot balls toward each other. Now when two hit, their momentum cancels out and this lump is left sitting on the table, maybe burning a hole in the felt.
([*]Yeah, there's the whole rolling versus sliding friction thing, conveniently ignored here. We're also assuming that the pockets take up the entire side of the table, so you never miss.)
Sure. But the idea is that the particles so produced would be zipping along rapidly due to the momentum imparted by the collision, and would go right through the planet with a small chance of reacting with anything.
You DO know that such collisions involve one particle with high velocity impacting a particle at rest (relatively speaking) with respect to the earth, making the collision products scatter like billiard balls after a good break and thus taking them away from the planet in short order? As opposed to colliding two streams with opposite and equal momentums, creating whatever they create at rest (relatively speaking) with respect to the earth?
Am I expecting the earth to get eaten up by strangelets or mini black holes? No. But the "oh, hush, collisions like this happen all the time" apology has a big leak in it that I haven't yet heard addressed. If evil bits get created in natural collisions, they go scooting off into space at high velocities before they have a chance to do damage here; while if evil bits where to get created in the LHC, they'd have little momentum and would hang around.
So how many orders of magnitude smarter than the guys who told us that the Space Shuttle would was safe to one mission in 100,000, are the guys telling us this is perfectly safe?
You've just managed to describe "blurring" in a very round-about way. :-)
Crisp text on a video display has pixels on or off. When I xmag over an xterm or emacs window using the lovely lucidatypewriter font, I see that each pixel is either foreground color or background color, none of this "alpha" blending guff.
A screen is not a photograph, and for the best ergonomics you shouldn't try to make it act like one.
So high oil prices make it profitable for entrenched interests to maintain the status quo, with all of its ecological devastation...your "Woo capitalism!" was ironic, right?
Gods, yes. Back before the days of LCD monitors, a CRT refresh rate of less then about 70Hz felt like forks in my eyes.
Yes.
High resolution, sure, but antialiasing, not so much. If you have to blur a font to make it look good on the screen, that means it's a lousy font for the screen.
Unless you're setting something up for dead trees, when you're looking at a computer screen, use a font designed for pixels. May I suggest Lucida Sans Typewriter, a.k.a. lucidatypewriter? It comes standard on Unixy boxes. Try it with a DarkSlateGray background and a white foreground; or a navy or black background and a green foreground, with a nice big size. Good times.
Hypnosis is a state of suggestibility. If while you are in a trance, I suggest to you that you can remember something, odds are good that will you will believe that you remember it. That doesn't mean you're doing so accurately. This is what leads to false memories.
It doesn't.
Buildings built after 1990 can qualify for copyright on their design. I.e., you can't say "nifty building, I'm going to build one just like it."
Some people have apparently confused this with a general copyright on the image of a building, but they are incorrect: "The copyright in an architectural work that has been constructed does not include the right to prevent the making, distributing, or public display of pictures, paintings, photographs, or other pictorial representations of the work, if the building in which the work is embodied is located in or ordinarily visible from a public place."
So you can say ""nifty building, I'm going to take a bunch of photos of it and sell them." (In the U.S., at least. The French have tried to copyright the lighting configuration of the Eiffel Tower, and the Egyptians have made noise about copyrighting ancient monuments.)
What in the world does that mean?
I was raised Catholic and used to parrot the line about how Jeshua ben Joseph's blood "will be shed for you and for all so that sins may be forgiven", but now that I've grown up I can't make any sense out of it.
The whole human sacrifice thing is pretty disturbing. What, an omnipotent God really really wants to "forgive" the creations he screwed up and make imperfect, but can't until somebody gets tortured to death? Yow. Talk about not being able to admit when you're wrong.
And I wasn't even born when they executed the fellow, so I don't think you can blame his death on any time I "missed the mark" (which is all that "sin" means).
Poor guy. You can see the retcon in the story: The Jews are looking for a Messiah, a leader to save them from Roman oppression. Jeshua starts making trouble for the powers that be. A little contradictory with the whole "love your neighbor" and "blessed are the peacemakers" thing, then telling people to sell their clothes to buy swords and chasing people out of the temple with a whip for being capitalists, but hey, that's politics. So they think he might be the guy. Then he gets nailed to a tree, which pretty much ends his career as a rabble-rousing rabbi.
Do his followers accept that therefore he wasn't the Messiah they were looking for? Of course not. That's not human nature.
Nope, instead they redefine what the Messiah is: not someone to save us from the Romans, but someone to save us from, um, er, "sin"! Yeah, that's it! It was all part of the plan. And what was a fairly reasonable set of wisdom teachings becomes an immortality cult based around human sacrifice.
Ladies and gentlemen of this supposed jury, it does not make sense.
Uh, no, it's not.
It is of course inaccurate to say that every theist is intolerant, and it is completely wrong to deny freedom of worship to anyone. But belief in nonsense is not like having dark skin, or preferring to have sex with people with a certain set of genitals.
Especially when people believing that nonsense have used it as justification to kill.
Sure, but you have to set up an account and give out your ID.
Maybe you prefer to chat via IM rather than on the phone with your SO and close friends, I can understand that. But for random folks whose messages you're willing to let sit a couple hours, or even ignore together, I'm having trouble understanding why you would give these people the ability to IM you in the first place, rather than just give out your e-mail address.
So you've managed to make IM behave just like e-mail. Great. So why not just use e-mail?
There are non-verbal cues that one uses IRL to say, "I am not interested in talking to you right now."
So why IM at all? E-mail.