Thanks for the link. I have the TPB of "Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow", which rocks (Moore's two-issue take on the end of the original Superman continutity, before the mid-1980's reboot); I'll have to pick this up.
Anytime you have the ballot see electronics close to the place and time where the voter marks and submits it, you make it possible for an engineer to accidentally design the circuit to reveal the ballot content in radio noise, thus enabling surveillance.
Awefuly farfetched. Be much easier to do some sort of shoulder-surfing, hidden cameras in the voting booths or something.
But if van Eck radiation is a concern, just require TEMPEST-like certification of voting electronics.
I view the banning of public nudity as unfortunate but legitimate: most people want it.
But mere majority does not make a law legitimate; else censorship, slavery, anti-sodomy laws, even ethnic cleansing, would be legitimate if the numbers fell the right way.
A law must fall within the rightful purview of the state to be legitimate.
What is the rightful purview of the state? I've always though the Preamble to the Constitution summed it up pretty well: establish justice, secure tranquility, common defense, promote general welfare, and secure liberty, for citizens now and in the future.
I don't see how stopping someone from walking through the park with no pants on falls under that rightful purview.
In my mind, banning nudity during daytime TV is no better or worse than banning nudity in a public park.
And what business of the state is it to ban nudity in a public park?
Indeed, we'd all be served by a greater acceptance of public nudity. A few days spent in a clothing optional environment does wonders for increasing your own body-acceptance and decreasing hysteria about other people's bodies.
Make it one page with a short work history (past 5 years only)
Why just the past five years? Stuff I did in 2000 might be quite relevant to some need an employer has, or might get a foot in the door through networking ("Hey, Joe! Says this guy worked at XYZ corp in 1999. You used to work there, you know him?").
BTW, I'm not in the market but get a fair number of calls each month from recruiters. My resume's format must be ok.
but it is my opinion that a hug is about being close to someone and feeling their warmth, not being sqeezed by an air compressor
Certainly the social aspects are a big part of it, but it's possible that light squeezing pressure on the chest may have a physiological effect. I would speculate that it might, for example, stimulate more complete exhalation, which would in turn trigger a relaxation response.
It would be interesting to compare a vest like this with the use of calming acupressure points to induce relaxation responses.
...but can someone explain why the stock price is going up based upon this news?
I'm a MFE stockholder (worked for Trusted Information Systems, had options, TIS went public and was bought by Network Associates, which became MFE...it's interesting to watch, at least) so I've been following this a little. There was a suspicion of a problem for months, which had pulled the price down. Now that it's known what the problem is, and steps are being taken to resolve it, that drag on the price is being cut loose.
Are OSS projects that rely so heavily on a single person able to be trusted for widespread use?
What, you don't think proprietary code projects often rely heavily on a single person? I've certainly worked on projects where if a critical team member (or even a less-critical guy with poor documentation habits) got hit by a bus, the whole thing would have tanked.
In most cases, what your dealing with is a "Nationalist" (someone who distrusts certain nationalites because of cultural characteristics)
No, nationalism is a different stupid idea. Whether the bigotry based on national origin of which you speak is best labeled racism, ethnocentrism, xenophobia, or whatever, is an academic point irrevelvant to this discussion.
or someone who contempt the homosexual lifestyle, rather than fearing homosexuals and someone who's parranoid rather than stupid.
There's no such thing as "the homosexual lifestyle" any more than there's "the heterosexual lifestyle".
All government power comes out of the barrel of a gun. (Ok, occasionally there's a billy club involved.) That's why soldiers, cops, and prison guards carry them. Each and every law is predicated on the threat of these guns to back it up.
There's no way to have censorship that doesn't ultimately mean, "If you say certain things, armed agents of the government will use force to silence you." Censorship is violence.
How would you like it if Al Qaeda were to open a TV channel and spread its anti-western propaganda towards the muslim population of your country, in the name of a freedom they're bound to anihilate?
The fact that I don't like something, doesn't mean it's ok to use the threat of force to stop people from doing it. Especailly and particuarly when it comes to speech and belief.
Al Qaeda, of course, is a criminal group, and can't own anything, and TV stations are legally required to use the airwaves for the public good, so the specific scenario you mention isn't possible. But if some wacko wants to start a newpaper that says "Al Qaeda is great!", it neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.
I don't like it, but so what? I might not like the fact that my neighbor has a "Vote Republican" sticker on her car; I might not like the fact that guy down the street is Scientologist. That doesn't mean I get to use the threat of force to silence them.
I am 100% for "free speech", but even in the US you "can't yell fire in a theater".
You can indeed yell "fire" in a theatre, if there happens to be fire, or if the circumstances are such that it's not going to cause a dangerous panic. (Penn Gillette does a great bit about this while juggling flaming torches - "Oh my god, FIRE! Oops, it went out".) The oft-cited restriction on yelling "fire!" is one of time and place of expression, not of content.
But is there a different standard, based on the local population?
No. Criminal sanctions against expressing certain messages - pointing guns at people to make them shut up - are never justified. Any society in which they occur is a poor excuse for a civilization.
See if you can find a copy of the 1942 book "Popular Mathematics" by Denning Miller. It goes from arithmetic to calculus, taking generally a more geometrical, physical, and historical approach than most math classes do these days.
I was pretty good in math, up until I hit differential equations; I bought this book just for curiosity, so I can't really say if it will help you. But it looks like copies can be found on eBay for just a few bucks, so I'd say it's worth the gamble.
After proposing the equation Fermi pointed out if intelligent life is so common, where are they? A space faring civilization travelling at 1% the speed of light would cross the galaxy in ten million years. Relative to the age of the Milky Way Galaxy, ten million years is a very short period of time. This is called the Fermi Paradox. Where are they?
The so-called "Fermi Paradox" seems a weak argument against the existance of intelligent extraterrestrial life.
First: life, intelligent life, spacefaring civilization, and interstellar-faring civilizations are quite different things. The last may never be practical, not just for technical but for biological and sociological reasons. The universe could be filled with civilizations that fill their own star systems, but aside from an occasional uncrewed probe, never leave.
Second: how would we know the signs of interstellar civilization? Our models are founded on the assumption that what we see is natural. Maybe gamma-ray bursts are wormhole construction blasts. Maybe the "missing mass" is billions of stars each contained in some Dyson-sphere like container, doing something unimaginable to the energy they collect so that there's no radiation visible to us. I'm not seriously proposing these, just pointing out that if there were a galactic civilization out there doing some stellar hyper-engineering, we'd assume it's traces were results of natural processes.
Third: any civilization that survives long enough to become interstellar, is going to have to develop an ecological ethic, else they'd have choked on their own shit before they got off-planet. If they learned to leave few footprints on their own planet, maybe they carry that into space. (Yes, this is the opposite of my second option above. For more speculation along these lines' David Brin's Uplift series is a fun read.)
...during which, Carl Sagan never said "billions and billions". That was actually a Johnny Carson spoof. (For you kids out there, Carson was Leno's predecessor.)
Did you know that Japan had plans to invade the US West Coast and destroy the Panama Canal? Whether or not they could hold that territory is immaterial.
Would the Japanese have liked to invade the West Coast? Probably. Was it something they could actually implement? Doubtful. The best they managed were the bomb balloon attacks.
The Panama Canal is not in the U.S., last I checked, so is not relevant to this discussion.
You've also forgotten the Cuban Missile Crisis. Had things gone badly, the Soviets would have nuked us then invaded.
In fact, that's why they wanted missles in Cuba in the first place, to create a workable nuclear deterrant against the U.S.
(Certainly the USSR had rational basis for desiring such a deterrant, with the U.S. being both the only nation to ever use nuclear weapons and a nation which had participated in
an invasion of Russia in support of the Tzar duing the Russian Revolution.)
It was more likely that the U.S. would attempt to (again) invade Cuba; there were plans and preparations underway for this for this. We're all fortunate that Khrushchev had a cooler head than Kennedy and negotiated a deal. (Of course, Khrushchev wasn't on a steady regimen of amphetamines and steroids.)
Luckily, copyrights aren't mandatory! If RAW had wanted, he could have released all his work into the public domain and requested donations rather than royalties!
There are other possible options beside the current copyright scheme or public domain. However, most rely on legal or technological infrastrutre that didn't exist when Illuminatus! was published back in 1975, when Xerox machines were a strange new technology.
People don't stand up and collect donations on Slashdot for old computer programmers who lost their hands or are too old to see the screens anymore, do they?
I mean, it's nice to rework some old public domain ideas into a story and copyright it (see Disney), and it's nice to be generous to your fellow man, etc., but I don't get this call to action slashdot article stuff.
In no way did RAW merely "rework some old public domain ideas".
If you don't know anything about the guy or his work, perhaps you should at least Google for his name before speaking up?
The last time the U.S. was threated with invading forces that posed a threat to our rights was 1814. (No, Pearl Harbor doesn't count, Hawaii wasn't a state. Nor does 9/11, it as an act of mass murder, not an invasion attempt.) The last threat against the rights of U.S. citizens by the U.S. government was probably on Bush's desk this morning.
I salute veterans and active military personel for their courage and their desire to serve. And I'm grateful for the VA's tax-funded health care, which saved my father's life last year. (He served in Viet Nam.)
But in choosing to serve the U.S. government, they've displayed poor judgement. Serving the government and serving the nation are two very different things.
If you're looking for sob stories about nice people falling on hard times, there are for more worthy cases than Robert Anton.
Maybe so. This happens to be the case before me at the moment, so I'm sending money. If I spend a lot of my time going around trying to rank who's "most worthy" of receiving a couple bucks, that's time wasted I could be putting toward doing good or making money to contribute to good causes.
The universal code of military justice gives clear guidelines that make it extremely clear that soldiers cannot commit war crimes. Any solider is allowed to disobey an order if obeying the order would result in the commission of a war crime.
That's the theory.
The reality is that an soldier who says "This invasion of (insert nation here) is a crime and I will not go", will be convicted of desertion.
Where's your outrage for the guys in Iraq killing Iraqis because they aren't sunni or shiite or whateverthefuck version of Islam?
While I am outraged at Iraqis killing Iraqis, they don't claim to be acting on behalf or in my name. Americans who are killing Iraqis do claim to be acting in my interests and name. On a personal level, that makes it more outrageous.
Robert Anton Wilson is the coauthor, with Robert Shea, of the underground classic The Illuminatus! Trilogy , which won the 1986 Prometheus Hall of Fame Award. His other writings include Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy, called "the most scientific of all science fiction novels," by New Scientist, and several nonfiction works of Futurist psychology and guerilla ontology, such as Prometheus Rising and The New Inquisition. Wilson, who sees himself as a Futurist, author, and stand-up comic, regularly gives seminars at Eslan and other New Age centers. Wilson has made both a comedy record (Secrets of Power) and a punk rock record (The Chocolate Biscuit Conspiracy), and his play Wilhelm Reich in Hell was performed at the Edmund Burke Theatre in Dublin, Ireland. His novel Illuminatus! was adapted as a 10-hour science fiction rock epic and performed under the patronage of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II at Great Britain's National Theatre, where Wilson appeared briefly on stage in a special cameo role. Robert Anton Wilson is also a former editor at Playboy magazine.
If you don't know, or don't like, his work, fine. That's your problem. Go read some other story. But his work is well known among the/. demographic, and some people may want to take action.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks for the link. I have the TPB of "Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow", which rocks (Moore's two-issue take on the end of the original Superman continutity, before the mid-1980's reboot); I'll have to pick this up.
Awefuly farfetched. Be much easier to do some sort of shoulder-surfing, hidden cameras in the voting booths or something.
But if van Eck radiation is a concern, just require TEMPEST-like certification of voting electronics.
But mere majority does not make a law legitimate; else censorship, slavery, anti-sodomy laws, even ethnic cleansing, would be legitimate if the numbers fell the right way.
A law must fall within the rightful purview of the state to be legitimate.
What is the rightful purview of the state? I've always though the Preamble to the Constitution summed it up pretty well: establish justice, secure tranquility, common defense, promote general welfare, and secure liberty, for citizens now and in the future.
I don't see how stopping someone from walking through the park with no pants on falls under that rightful purview.
Well, that's because millions of Jews (backed by the British) already succeeded in wresting land away from Arabs.
And what business of the state is it to ban nudity in a public park?
Indeed, we'd all be served by a greater acceptance of public nudity. A few days spent in a clothing optional environment does wonders for increasing your own body-acceptance and decreasing hysteria about other people's bodies.
Why just the past five years? Stuff I did in 2000 might be quite relevant to some need an employer has, or might get a foot in the door through networking ("Hey, Joe! Says this guy worked at XYZ corp in 1999. You used to work there, you know him?").
BTW, I'm not in the market but get a fair number of calls each month from recruiters. My resume's format must be ok.
Free advertizing isn't very useful if your ability to actually transact business is gone.
Certainly the social aspects are a big part of it, but it's possible that light squeezing pressure on the chest may have a physiological effect. I would speculate that it might, for example, stimulate more complete exhalation, which would in turn trigger a relaxation response.
It would be interesting to compare a vest like this with the use of calming acupressure points to induce relaxation responses.
I'm a MFE stockholder (worked for Trusted Information Systems, had options, TIS went public and was bought by Network Associates, which became MFE...it's interesting to watch, at least) so I've been following this a little. There was a suspicion of a problem for months, which had pulled the price down. Now that it's known what the problem is, and steps are being taken to resolve it, that drag on the price is being cut loose.
If most people cannot tell the difference, than it's not far better. That smells like the sort of silliness the "audiophile" market is famous for.
What, you don't think proprietary code projects often rely heavily on a single person? I've certainly worked on projects where if a critical team member (or even a less-critical guy with poor documentation habits) got hit by a bus, the whole thing would have tanked.
No, nationalism is a different stupid idea. Whether the bigotry based on national origin of which you speak is best labeled racism, ethnocentrism, xenophobia, or whatever, is an academic point irrevelvant to this discussion.
There's no such thing as "the homosexual lifestyle" any more than there's "the heterosexual lifestyle".
All government power comes out of the barrel of a gun. (Ok, occasionally there's a billy club involved.) That's why soldiers, cops, and prison guards carry them. Each and every law is predicated on the threat of these guns to back it up.
There's no way to have censorship that doesn't ultimately mean, "If you say certain things, armed agents of the government will use force to silence you." Censorship is violence.
The fact that I don't like something, doesn't mean it's ok to use the threat of force to stop people from doing it. Especailly and particuarly when it comes to speech and belief.
Al Qaeda, of course, is a criminal group, and can't own anything, and TV stations are legally required to use the airwaves for the public good, so the specific scenario you mention isn't possible. But if some wacko wants to start a newpaper that says "Al Qaeda is great!", it neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.
I don't like it, but so what? I might not like the fact that my neighbor has a "Vote Republican" sticker on her car; I might not like the fact that guy down the street is Scientologist. That doesn't mean I get to use the threat of force to silence them.
You can indeed yell "fire" in a theatre, if there happens to be fire, or if the circumstances are such that it's not going to cause a dangerous panic. (Penn Gillette does a great bit about this while juggling flaming torches - "Oh my god, FIRE! Oops, it went out".) The oft-cited restriction on yelling "fire!" is one of time and place of expression, not of content.
No. Criminal sanctions against expressing certain messages - pointing guns at people to make them shut up - are never justified. Any society in which they occur is a poor excuse for a civilization.
Obviously you can stand censorship, since you're calling for it in your post.
You can legitimately "un-tolerate" it by speaking out against it, by pointing out the rascists, homophobes, et cetera, are idiots.
You cannot legitimately point guns at people to make them shut up.
See if you can find a copy of the 1942 book "Popular Mathematics" by Denning Miller. It goes from arithmetic to calculus, taking generally a more geometrical, physical, and historical approach than most math classes do these days.
I was pretty good in math, up until I hit differential equations; I bought this book just for curiosity, so I can't really say if it will help you. But it looks like copies can be found on eBay for just a few bucks, so I'd say it's worth the gamble.
The so-called "Fermi Paradox" seems a weak argument against the existance of intelligent extraterrestrial life.
First: life, intelligent life, spacefaring civilization, and interstellar-faring civilizations are quite different things. The last may never be practical, not just for technical but for biological and sociological reasons. The universe could be filled with civilizations that fill their own star systems, but aside from an occasional uncrewed probe, never leave.
Second: how would we know the signs of interstellar civilization? Our models are founded on the assumption that what we see is natural. Maybe gamma-ray bursts are wormhole construction blasts. Maybe the "missing mass" is billions of stars each contained in some Dyson-sphere like container, doing something unimaginable to the energy they collect so that there's no radiation visible to us. I'm not seriously proposing these, just pointing out that if there were a galactic civilization out there doing some stellar hyper-engineering, we'd assume it's traces were results of natural processes.
Third: any civilization that survives long enough to become interstellar, is going to have to develop an ecological ethic, else they'd have choked on their own shit before they got off-planet. If they learned to leave few footprints on their own planet, maybe they carry that into space. (Yes, this is the opposite of my second option above. For more speculation along these lines' David Brin's Uplift series is a fun read.)
...during which, Carl Sagan never said "billions and billions". That was actually a Johnny Carson spoof. (For you kids out there, Carson was Leno's predecessor.)
Would the Japanese have liked to invade the West Coast? Probably. Was it something they could actually implement? Doubtful. The best they managed were the bomb balloon attacks.
The Panama Canal is not in the U.S., last I checked, so is not relevant to this discussion.
Had the Soviets been stupid enough to nuke us, our retalitory strike would have wiped them out. Before the Cuban deployment, the U.S. had the USSR outgunned by about an order of magnitude.
In fact, that's why they wanted missles in Cuba in the first place, to create a workable nuclear deterrant against the U.S.
(Certainly the USSR had rational basis for desiring such a deterrant, with the U.S. being both the only nation to ever use nuclear weapons and a nation which had participated in an invasion of Russia in support of the Tzar duing the Russian Revolution.)
It was more likely that the U.S. would attempt to (again) invade Cuba; there were plans and preparations underway for this for this. We're all fortunate that Khrushchev had a cooler head than Kennedy and negotiated a deal. (Of course, Khrushchev wasn't on a steady regimen of amphetamines and steroids.)
There are other possible options beside the current copyright scheme or public domain. However, most rely on legal or technological infrastrutre that didn't exist when Illuminatus! was published back in 1975, when Xerox machines were a strange new technology.
I seem to recall several appeals for legal funds on /. for programmers in trouble. http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/06/30/18 54228&tid=123&tid=95&tid=145">Chip Salzenberg, for example.
I'm sure if Torvolds or Wall or RMS or ESR was in the same situation as RAW we'd see people trying to help in the same way.
In no way did RAW merely "rework some old public domain ideas".
If you don't know anything about the guy or his work, perhaps you should at least Google for his name before speaking up?
Soldiers work for the government, which is much more of a threat to my right to read books than the people of Iraq, Yugoslavia, Somalia, Panama, Grenada, Vietnam, Korea, Lebanon, Panama, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Cambodia, Laos, Libya, or anyplace else the U.S. has conducted military actions in the past 50 years.
The last time the U.S. was threated with invading forces that posed a threat to our rights was 1814. (No, Pearl Harbor doesn't count, Hawaii wasn't a state. Nor does 9/11, it as an act of mass murder, not an invasion attempt.) The last threat against the rights of U.S. citizens by the U.S. government was probably on Bush's desk this morning.
I salute veterans and active military personel for their courage and their desire to serve. And I'm grateful for the VA's tax-funded health care, which saved my father's life last year. (He served in Viet Nam.)
But in choosing to serve the U.S. government, they've displayed poor judgement. Serving the government and serving the nation are two very different things.
Maybe so. This happens to be the case before me at the moment, so I'm sending money. If I spend a lot of my time going around trying to rank who's "most worthy" of receiving a couple bucks, that's time wasted I could be putting toward doing good or making money to contribute to good causes.
That's the theory.
The reality is that an soldier who says "This invasion of (insert nation here) is a crime and I will not go", will be convicted of desertion.
While I am outraged at Iraqis killing Iraqis, they don't claim to be acting on behalf or in my name. Americans who are killing Iraqis do claim to be acting in my interests and name. On a personal level, that makes it more outrageous.
Plenty of people have bought his books over the years. Wilson is a well-known author and speaker:
If you don't know, or don't like, his work, fine. That's your problem. Go read some other story. But his work is well known among the