There is a quote attributed (perhaps erroneously) to Mussolini, but he is alleged to have said "Socialism should more properly be called corporatism, because it combines the power of the business sector with the power of the state".
Wow, mindless anti-socialism hits a new high.
It is fascism -- a radically anti-socialism dogma -- that Mussolini spoke of: "Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power." -- attributed to Benito Mussolini
Socialism, on the other hand, is control of economic resources -- capital -- by the workers who use them to produce goods and services, rather than by a government-backed class of absentee owners or "investors". Such control can be exercised through the proxy of a state (state socialism, e.g. Marxism) or directly (libertarian socialism, e.g. anarchism).
You aren't buying material. You are paying for a license to use the material in a certain way.
When you buy a game console, does the store have you sign some licensing document? No? Then the "you don't own, you're just licensing" theory is a steaming pile of horseshit.
These game consoles are the rightful property of their owners, who can rightfully use them in an consensual act, including hiring someone to repair or modify them.
Flybys and visits... What for? You can do that just as fine with robotic probes.
No, you can't. That's the point. An operator in Mars-stationary orbit can control a bot on the surface in near-realtime -- about a 50 ms one-way lag time, if my quick calculations are correct. You could play an decent FPS with lag times that short. The Earth-Mars one-way radio lag varies from over three minutes to 22 minutes.
It is not a test to see how far we can throw a rock - it is a test to see how close we are to the colonization of our solar system.
While dreams of "Mankind Conquering Space!" are pleasant, system colonization is not a suitable goal for any technology we might develop within the next few centuries. We might -- and should -- put up a few research stations through out the system, but McMurdo is not an Antarctic "colony".
The FSF's position: selling free software (i.e., charging for distribution of copies) is A-OK.
Many people believe that the spirit of the GNU project is that you should not charge money for distributing copies of software, or that you should charge as little as possible -- just enough to cover the cost.
Actually we encourage people who redistribute free software to charge as much as they wish or can.
...
Since free software is not a matter of price, a low price isn't more free, or closer to free. So if you are redistributing copies of free software, you might as well charge a substantial fee and make some money. Redistributing free software is a good and legitimate activity; if you do it, you might as well make a profit from it.
You've got the blessing of the Free Software Foundation. Sell, baby, sell!
any attempt to gain access to a system where you're not authorized is hacking
Nonsense. The way that you determine if you're authorized to access a system is to attempt to gain access via the normal means.
Am I authorized to enter that store? Let me see if the front door is open.
Am I authorized to view the shares on that PC? Let me try to mount them (or whatever the proper term is in Windows-land).
As for the "having a look round" bit: I don't know what the law is like where you live, but if someone does that here, they're gonna end up in the local jail waiting to go before a judge to explain just why they're wandering around.
They may be arrested, but if the law you cited is the only one applicable, they will be freed with no charges pressed since they did not intend to commit any misdemeanor. (Indeed, if the law you cite is the applicable one, there'd be no case if the house wasn't occupied...)
Tauren should also count as native American, though they're less traditionally humanoid.
Dude. Listen to yourself. People who are not white are supposed to identify with game characters who are "less traditionally humanoid"? Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot.
So you are saying that our whole freaking planet is a reality show?
Yes, didn't know know? "Well, you don't think the whole universe works the way Earth does, do you? No! One species, one planet! There's a planet of deer, a planet of Asians, and so on! We put them all together on Earth and the whole universe tunes in to watch the fun!"
Does anyone find it odd that Reagan managed to somehow thwart the Soviet Empire, with its vast and genuine spy networks, enormous weapons apparatus, all without either firing a shot or compromising the Constitution?
As for Reagan, perhaps you forget Grenada? Beirut? Iran-Contra? Support for death squads in Nicaragua, Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras? Support for Saddam Hussein? Support for the Muhjadeen -- support for Osama bin Laden, for cryin' out loud? Reagan (or at least, the powers behind the figurehead of Reagan) caused many shots to be fired, and used the Constitution as toilet paper. And it was his "borrow and spend" policies and his fetish for deregulation that started us on the path to the economic ruin we now enjoy.
Slavery allowed the elite to devote themselves to intellectual concerns. If Plato had to spend half his day in the fields, would he have written what he did? Of course not.
If Plato had had to get up off his ass and do some productive work once in a while, he might have had some more sensible ideas. Instead his anti-democratic notion of "philosopher-kings", and his metaphysical elevation of ideas over observations, have been toxic streams in Western thought for millennia.
That might be true, but there seems to be something about the culture which seems to raise terrorists very easily compared to other cultures.
Religion and culture have little to do with it -- it's all about semantics. So long as state actions are labeled "war" rather than "terrorism", then those parts of the planet that got hosed by colonialism and the Cold War to the point of leaving behind unstable nation-states are going to produce "terrorists" rather than "soldiers".
If we were honest and labeled all aggressive transnational violence and use of weapons of mass destruction as "terrorism", then the greatest source and supporter of terrorism would be a nation that's about 76% Christian.
Re:Decent text editor still not included right?
on
Emacs Hits Version 23
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· Score: 1
The one big downside that Emacs has compared to the rest is that its old and was created in a time when GUIs where a thing of the future, so everything is build around text...
Somehow you misspelled "advantage" as "downside".
A text editor that's built around text is a good idea.
Re:Decent text editor still not included right?
on
Emacs Hits Version 23
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· Score: 1
I have a fully graphical calendar, it contains no text, not even numbers. Guess you can represent time without text, funny that.
You can do so, yes, but it's a mighty stupid thing to do.
I tend to have things in my calendar like "karate class, 6:30 pm" or "Carl's party, 8pm". Text is a better way for 99.99999 percent of computer users to represent that data than circles, squares, or other graphical elements.
There's a reason why we live so much longer now a days compared to middle ages and before and hell, even to beginning of 1900.
Actually, life expectancy for those who make it past childhood hasn't increased much at all. It's a reduction in infant and child mortality that's paid off.
That is technological improvement, so there's no really any reason why technologically made or improved food would be more riskier.
There's no a priori reason it would be any less riskier.
Technology is not some magical thing that can only do good. "Improvements" in technology often end up doing harm to some people even as they benefit others.
Even on the cheapest plans, there are so many minutes included, plus free nights and weekends, plus free mobile-to-mobile, et cetera. I think I've only gone over my included monthly minutes once.
I suspect that few callers are paying for those 15 seconds of instructions.
I was excited that you might have found a surgical technique that meets the placebo-controlled blinded test standard, now I'm disappointed. You really ought to read a study's findings before you cite it.
Try Googling randomized controlled trial surgery
Following your link I find studies where the "control" is drug therapy or another medical intervention. If you have one where surgery is compared versus a sham procedure, please, point it out to me -- perhaps there's one mentioned in a study behind a paywall.
It's no good to have a study find that "surgery X is better than drug Y" -- maybe the benefits were due to a few days of enforced rest, skilled nursing care, and hospital food, not to mention that nebulous "placebo effect", or even a side-effect of general anesthesia, rather than due to the actual cutting and sewing of flesh.
The term surgeons use is not "placebo" but "sham surgery".
Sham surgery is a form of placebo.
It may be OK to thread a catheter into somebody's coronary arteries and squirt saline, but nobody is going to ask a patient to undergo abdominal or chest surgery, with a mortality of 1% or even 0.1%, just to satisfy somebody's idea of a perfect scientific design.
But sham thoracic and cranial surgery has been performed. The first, and most famous, use of a placebo surgical technique as a control was to investigate mammary artery ligation for relief of angina pectoris. And tests of transplantation of human embryonic dopamine neurons and of fetal pig cells into the brains Parkinson's patients, were also compared to sham techniques. In all three of these cases, the "real" operation was no more effective than the placebo.
So again, I ask: if anyone has an example of a placebo-controlled trail of a surgical technique where the real technique proved more effective that the placebo, please post it.
1-sentence course in medical ethics: A doctor can't do anything to a patient that wouldn't benefit the patient.
A revolutionary diet therapy. Someone trying to cure cancer by non-medicinal means.
How is diet a "non-medicinal means"? Does your definition of "medicine" extend only to synthetic drugs?
There is a very good reason alternative medicine is not accepted: it does not work. If you want it to be accepted medically; do the legwork and prove that it works in reproducible double blind tests.
So surgery is not medicine, then? There are zero blinded tests -- let alone double blind tests -- demonstrating the effectiveness of surgery. In fact, in every case where a surgical procedure has been tested against a placebo operation, the surgery has been no more effective than the placebo.
Very, very little of mainstream modern medicine has been demonstrated to be more effective than placebo treatments in any sort of controlled study. Medicine likes to wear science's costume, but for the most part, it's faking it.
Neither Equilibrium nor V for Vendetta deal with the same ideas as 1984 in any comparable depth.
The graphic novel V for Vendetta is significantly deeper than the movie of the same name, and is intended to present a different set ideas than Orwell's novel 1984, though it does have overlap.
Neither V for Vendetta nor Equilibrium is a "crude caricature" of 1984, they are independent works with their own points. If you want someone to get the ideas of 1984, have them read or view some version of that work -- ideally, read the damn book, or if not that watch one of the film adaptations.
(The movie V for Vendetta, though, may rightfully be called a crude caricature of Moore's graphic novel.)
Microsoft and Intel did not kill the OLPC. The OLPC was enough to kill itself.
Specifically, Sugar killed the OLPC. I have XFCE on mine, and it's a usable, if low-powered, netbook. I took it to the Starwood Festival just last week and was able to use Emacs to edit files on SD cards, and Sylpheed and Firefox (using my Palm Centro as a USB modem) for e-mail and web browsing, all on a hardware platform that's power-frugal and is toughened against the rain and the muck.
Hardware-wise, it's a fine little platform. But those who developed the Sugar UI need to be taken out and horsewhipped.
There is a multimillion dollar demand in Asian countries for, among other pieces of the tigers, the male tiger penis. It is seen in many Asian cultures as a sacred aphrodisiac.
The thing about a lot of Chinese herbal remedies is that the ones have a big fuss made over them, were the ones recommended for the Emperor and the aristocracy.
You know what's also supposed to be a good medicine for building yang in Chinese medicine? Walnuts. But that's clearly not good enough, not special and unique enough, for some royal bastard. You're an important guy, you have to go have some sentient being killed to prove it. And then because you are an important guy, everyone else wants to follow in your footsteps.
(Of course, the same applies in our culture. Know what's a good treatment for heart disease? A diet based around whole plant foods, exercise, and stress reduction. But that's clearly not good enough, not special and unique enough, for some master-of-the-universe type. You're an important guy, you have to go treat your body like shit until you need the bypass surgery -- despite the fact that its benefits are questionable. But at least with bypass surgery, your death or your case of "pump head" only directly affects you, whereas using tiger penis to treat your impotence has a hell of an impact on the tiger.)
Re:Amusingly..
on
R.I.P. FTP
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· Score: 4, Informative
If you are maintaining a local copy and then 'uploading' it to the server, you freaking use rsync.
rsync can freaking use ssh, rsh, or its own daemon connection. Using an rsync:// or an rsh connection is freaking insecure. But freaking-a, rsync over ssh freaking rocks.
It's ironic that the Founding Fathers were considered "liberals" in their day (look up the term classical liberal) but both sides of the political spectrum would love to censor speech at any opportunity
Both sides of which spectrum? Certainly one can be a socialist or a capitalist, a free marketer or a central planner, a hawk or a dove, and still be in favor of (or opposed to) censorship. But censorship is authoritarian; if you favor it, you are not a liberal of any sort, classical or contemporary.
When you have the Military controling civilian security, the civilians become the enemy...You can't just take an MP out of the fleet, give him a badge and a gun, and expect him to take a squad car around the block with out incident.
We've been militarizing ordinary police work for the past few decades, since the Reagan era. It's part of the general trend of the militarization of society pushed by authoritarian neoconservatives.
people don't want to be offended by someone telling them they are wrong to do this
or that
I don't much care if you merely tell me I'm wrong to do this or that. I care when you start waving guns around to enforce your idea of what's right or wrong.
on the other hand, they have no problem offending people that don't want to see, for example, obscenity.
Folks, it's simple: if you don't want to be offended by something you consider obscene, DON'T LOOK AT IT.
So it's not unsportsman like to target someone who isn't aware of your presence?
When you walk into an area designated for fighting, it's your responsibility to be aware of who else is there. Don't step into a boxing ring and then complain that you didn't see the other guy until he punched you.
It isn't taking advantage of a loophole to get the game itself to kill the player for you with virtually no work on your part?
Like, say, rocket-blasting someone into a lava pool? Or telefragging? These aren't loopholes like spawn camping, they're strategy. "In ancient times, those known as good warriors prevailed when it was easy to prevail." -- Sun Tzu
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, mindless anti-socialism hits a new high.
It is fascism -- a radically anti-socialism dogma -- that Mussolini spoke of: "Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power." -- attributed to Benito Mussolini
Socialism, on the other hand, is control of economic resources -- capital -- by the workers who use them to produce goods and services, rather than by a government-backed class of absentee owners or "investors". Such control can be exercised through the proxy of a state (state socialism, e.g. Marxism) or directly (libertarian socialism, e.g. anarchism).
When you buy a game console, does the store have you sign some licensing document? No? Then the "you don't own, you're just licensing" theory is a steaming pile of horseshit.
These game consoles are the rightful property of their owners, who can rightfully use them in an consensual act, including hiring someone to repair or modify them.
No, you can't. That's the point. An operator in Mars-stationary orbit can control a bot on the surface in near-realtime -- about a 50 ms one-way lag time, if my quick calculations are correct. You could play an decent FPS with lag times that short. The Earth-Mars one-way radio lag varies from over three minutes to 22 minutes.
While dreams of "Mankind Conquering Space!" are pleasant, system colonization is not a suitable goal for any technology we might develop within the next few centuries. We might -- and should -- put up a few research stations through out the system, but McMurdo is not an Antarctic "colony".
The FSF's position: selling free software (i.e., charging for distribution of copies) is A-OK.
You've got the blessing of the Free Software Foundation. Sell, baby, sell!
Nonsense. The way that you determine if you're authorized to access a system is to attempt to gain access via the normal means.
Am I authorized to enter that store? Let me see if the front door is open.
Am I authorized to view the shares on that PC? Let me try to mount them (or whatever the proper term is in Windows-land).
They may be arrested, but if the law you cited is the only one applicable, they will be freed with no charges pressed since they did not intend to commit any misdemeanor. (Indeed, if the law you cite is the applicable one, there'd be no case if the house wasn't occupied...)
Dude. Listen to yourself. People who are not white are supposed to identify with game characters who are "less traditionally humanoid"? Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot.
Yes, didn't know know? "Well, you don't think the whole universe works the way Earth does, do you? No! One species, one planet! There's a planet of deer, a planet of Asians, and so on! We put them all together on Earth and the whole universe tunes in to watch the fun!"
What a strange and imaginative world you live in.
The Soviet "Empire" fell over because it had too much central economic planning and because the people of Russia and the other Soviet states chafed under authoritarian rule. The U.S. didn't "win" the Cold War; in so far as anyone won (and really, it was and remains "meet the new boss, same as the old boss"), it was the soldiers and ordinary people who denied the coup attempt against Gorbachev who did.
As for Reagan, perhaps you forget Grenada? Beirut? Iran-Contra? Support for death squads in Nicaragua, Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras? Support for Saddam Hussein? Support for the Muhjadeen -- support for Osama bin Laden, for cryin' out loud? Reagan (or at least, the powers behind the figurehead of Reagan) caused many shots to be fired, and used the Constitution as toilet paper. And it was his "borrow and spend" policies and his fetish for deregulation that started us on the path to the economic ruin we now enjoy.
If Plato had had to get up off his ass and do some productive work once in a while, he might have had some more sensible ideas. Instead his anti-democratic notion of "philosopher-kings", and his metaphysical elevation of ideas over observations, have been toxic streams in Western thought for millennia.
Religion and culture have little to do with it -- it's all about semantics. So long as state actions are labeled "war" rather than "terrorism", then those parts of the planet that got hosed by colonialism and the Cold War to the point of leaving behind unstable nation-states are going to produce "terrorists" rather than "soldiers".
If we were honest and labeled all aggressive transnational violence and use of weapons of mass destruction as "terrorism", then the greatest source and supporter of terrorism would be a nation that's about 76% Christian.
Somehow you misspelled "advantage" as "downside".
A text editor that's built around text is a good idea.
You can do so, yes, but it's a mighty stupid thing to do.
I tend to have things in my calendar like "karate class, 6:30 pm" or "Carl's party, 8pm". Text is a better way for 99.99999 percent of computer users to represent that data than circles, squares, or other graphical elements.
Actually, life expectancy for those who make it past childhood hasn't increased much at all. It's a reduction in infant and child mortality that's paid off.
If lifestyle-related obesity, heart disease, and cancers continue to increase, it's quite possible that we will see a decline in life expectancy, even as technology improves.
There's no a priori reason it would be any less riskier.
Technology is not some magical thing that can only do good. "Improvements" in technology often end up doing harm to some people even as they benefit others.
Even on the cheapest plans, there are so many minutes included, plus free nights and weekends, plus free mobile-to-mobile, et cetera. I think I've only gone over my included monthly minutes once.
I suspect that few callers are paying for those 15 seconds of instructions.
This study -- which was actually of a drug used to treat tissue before transplantation, rather than of a surgical technique -- found that "Failure of at least 1 vein graft is quite common within 12 to 18 months after CABG surgery. Edifoligide is no more effective than placebo in preventing these events. Longer-term follow-up and additional research are needed to determine whether edifoligide has delayed beneficial effects, to understand the mechanisms and clinical consequences of vein graft failure, and to improve the durability of CABG surgery."
I was excited that you might have found a surgical technique that meets the placebo-controlled blinded test standard, now I'm disappointed. You really ought to read a study's findings before you cite it.
Following your link I find studies where the "control" is drug therapy or another medical intervention. If you have one where surgery is compared versus a sham procedure, please, point it out to me -- perhaps there's one mentioned in a study behind a paywall.
It's no good to have a study find that "surgery X is better than drug Y" -- maybe the benefits were due to a few days of enforced rest, skilled nursing care, and hospital food, not to mention that nebulous "placebo effect", or even a side-effect of general anesthesia, rather than due to the actual cutting and sewing of flesh.
Sham surgery is a form of placebo.
But sham thoracic and cranial surgery has been performed. The first, and most famous, use of a placebo surgical technique as a control was to investigate mammary artery ligation for relief of angina pectoris. And tests of transplantation of human embryonic dopamine neurons and of fetal pig cells into the brains Parkinson's patients, were also compared to sham techniques. In all three of these cases, the "real" operation was no more effective than the placebo.
We can add to that a test of arthroscopic surgery for knee arthritis which failed to show any benefit of a real surgery over a fake cut.
So again, I ask: if anyone has an example of a placebo-controlled trail of a surgical technique where the real technique proved more effective that the placebo, please post it.
The fact that it's difficult to te
How is diet a "non-medicinal means"? Does your definition of "medicine" extend only to synthetic drugs?
So surgery is not medicine, then? There are zero blinded tests -- let alone double blind tests -- demonstrating the effectiveness of surgery. In fact, in every case where a surgical procedure has been tested against a placebo operation, the surgery has been no more effective than the placebo.
Very, very little of mainstream modern medicine has been demonstrated to be more effective than placebo treatments in any sort of controlled study. Medicine likes to wear science's costume, but for the most part, it's faking it.
The graphic novel V for Vendetta is significantly deeper than the movie of the same name, and is intended to present a different set ideas than Orwell's novel 1984, though it does have overlap.
Neither V for Vendetta nor Equilibrium is a "crude caricature" of 1984, they are independent works with their own points. If you want someone to get the ideas of 1984, have them read or view some version of that work -- ideally, read the damn book, or if not that watch one of the film adaptations.
(The movie V for Vendetta, though, may rightfully be called a crude caricature of Moore's graphic novel.)
Specifically, Sugar killed the OLPC. I have XFCE on mine, and it's a usable, if low-powered, netbook. I took it to the Starwood Festival just last week and was able to use Emacs to edit files on SD cards, and Sylpheed and Firefox (using my Palm Centro as a USB modem) for e-mail and web browsing, all on a hardware platform that's power-frugal and is toughened against the rain and the muck.
Hardware-wise, it's a fine little platform. But those who developed the Sugar UI need to be taken out and horsewhipped.
The thing about a lot of Chinese herbal remedies is that the ones have a big fuss made over them, were the ones recommended for the Emperor and the aristocracy.
You know what's also supposed to be a good medicine for building yang in Chinese medicine? Walnuts. But that's clearly not good enough, not special and unique enough, for some royal bastard. You're an important guy, you have to go have some sentient being killed to prove it. And then because you are an important guy, everyone else wants to follow in your footsteps.
(Of course, the same applies in our culture. Know what's a good treatment for heart disease? A diet based around whole plant foods, exercise, and stress reduction. But that's clearly not good enough, not special and unique enough, for some master-of-the-universe type. You're an important guy, you have to go treat your body like shit until you need the bypass surgery -- despite the fact that its benefits are questionable. But at least with bypass surgery, your death or your case of "pump head" only directly affects you, whereas using tiger penis to treat your impotence has a hell of an impact on the tiger.)
rsync can freaking use ssh, rsh, or its own daemon connection. Using an rsync:// or an rsh connection is freaking insecure. But freaking-a, rsync over ssh freaking rocks.
Stone-age technology such as intercoms?
And everybody lives in tribes, some people's tribes are just hundreds of millions strong. We are pack animals.
Both sides of which spectrum? Certainly one can be a socialist or a capitalist, a free marketer or a central planner, a hawk or a dove, and still be in favor of (or opposed to) censorship. But censorship is authoritarian; if you favor it, you are not a liberal of any sort, classical or contemporary.
We've been militarizing ordinary police work for the past few decades, since the Reagan era. It's part of the general trend of the militarization of society pushed by authoritarian neoconservatives.
You thought wrong. As U.S. Attorney Mary Beth Buchanan said after putting a California couple in a cage for selling dirty pictures, "These prison sentences affirm the need to continue to protect the public from obscene, lewd, lascivious or filthy material, the production of which degrades all of us." Obscenity laws are based on the insane notion that the mere existence of dirty pictures is harmful.
I don't much care if you merely tell me I'm wrong to do this or that. I care when you start waving guns around to enforce your idea of what's right or wrong.
Folks, it's simple: if you don't want to be offended by something you consider obscene, DON'T LOOK AT IT.
When you walk into an area designated for fighting, it's your responsibility to be aware of who else is there. Don't step into a boxing ring and then complain that you didn't see the other guy until he punched you.
Like, say, rocket-blasting someone into a lava pool? Or telefragging? These aren't loopholes like spawn camping, they're strategy. "In ancient times, those known as good warriors prevailed when it was easy to prevail." -- Sun Tzu