I grew up in a conservative Christian household so I got the full scare story on the ebils of rock and roll before I dipped my toe in the other side. From the Christian POV, rock is monolithic. There's the titular head represented by Satan who is coordinating everything in a top-down hierarchical fashion from AC/DC, Ozzy, and Alice Cooper on down to the Beatles and Pat Boone. Even the most banal, lite rock-friendly artist is promoting Satan's message of substance abuse, loose morals, easy sex and enjoyment of life. Drug messages are backmasked into the music. Sex permeates the videos. Album jackets and psychedelic posters all have their hidden symbols and meanings; it's fun to take a trip, put acid in your veins. (supernaut!)
Then you look at it from the other side and shit, it's just a business. Rebellion is popular so you package it, commoditize it and sell it. Satan has nothing to do with it unless that's just a personal nickname for soulless assholes in suits. You really think it takes a prince of darkness to sell people on the idea of having fun and getting laid? Puhleeeeeeeeaze. Some rocker can declare he's doing something in the name of rock and roll, critics can argue about what rock is, how it should be, but they're all just tossing ideas into the collective memetic cess pool. There's no ecumenical councils trying to establish rock orthodoxy, no pope of rock to excommunicate you if you aren't doing it right.
It's the same thing with Anonymous. There's a vague, poorly expressed ideal with everyone supporting their own irreconcilable interpretation of it. You can't really have a civil war amongst people who were never unified to begin with. That's making the fundamental mistake of assuming Anonymous is top-down, hierarchical, and organized. Organized anarchy? That's as oxymoronic as Christian rock.
HP makes terrible products and abuses their customers shamefully. That's why they went out of business and a better company with a superior product has taken their place. Everyone wins!
It's a 3hr drive for me and it would kill me to commit to seeing a launch and then have to make the trip three or four times until they finally meet the schedule. The streaming TV is nice. I'll usually head outside if the launch is a go and get a good 15 seconds of visibility as the shuttle clears the horizon clutter, before the SRB's separate. Had a pretty good view back in elementary school when Challenger blew.
I don't know who your 'everybody' refers to. Maybe it doesn't include me and the plethora of other satisfied MS Office 2007 users. Are we 'nobodies'?
Every intelligent person I've spoken with about the ribbon hates it with the sort of passion usually reserved for spammers and child pornographers. But don't worry, scrote. There are plenty of 'tards out there living really kick-ass lives.
Okay, We Give Up We feel so ashamed By The Editors | Friday, April 1, 2005 | 55
There's no easy way to admit this. For years, helpful letter writers told us to stick to science. They pointed out that science and politics don't mix. They said we should be more balanced in our presentation of such issues as creationism, missile defense and global warming. We resisted their advice and pretended not to be stung by the accusations that the magazine should be renamed Unscientific American, or Scientific Unamerican, or even Unscientific Unamerican. But spring is in the air, and all of nature is turning over a new leaf, so there's no better time to say: you were right, and we were wrong. In retrospect, this magazine's coverage of so-called evolution has been hideously one-sided. For decades, we published articles in every issue that endorsed the ideas of Charles Darwin and his cronies. True, the theory of common descent through natural selection has been called the unifying concept for all of biology and one of the greatest scientific ideas of all time, but that was no excuse to be fanatics about it. Where were the answering articles presenting the powerful case for scientific creationism? Why were we so unwilling to suggest that dinosaurs lived 6,000 years ago or that a cataclysmic flood carved the Grand Canyon? Blame the scientists. They dazzled us with their fancy fossils, their radiocarbon dating and their tens of thousands of peer-reviewed journal articles. As editors, we had no business being persuaded by mountains of evidence.
Moreover, we shamefully mistreated the Intelligent Design (ID) theorists by lumping them in with creationists. Creationists believe that God designed all life, and that's a somewhat religious idea. But ID theorists think that at unspecified times some unnamed superpowerful entity designed life, or maybe just some species, or maybe just some of the stuff in cells. That's what makes ID a superior scientific theory: it doesn't get bogged down in details.
Good journalism values balance above all else. We owe it to our readers to present everybody's ideas equally and not to ignore or discredit theories simply because they lack scientifically credible arguments or facts. Nor should we succumb to the easy mistake of thinking that scientists understand their fields better than, say, U.S. senators or best-selling novelists do. Indeed, if politicians or special-interest groups say things that seem untrue or misleading, our duty as journalists is to quote them without comment or contradiction. To do otherwise would be elitist and therefore wrong. In that spirit, we will end the practice of expressing our own views in this space: an editorial page is no place for opinions.
Get ready for a new Scientific American. No more discussions of how science should inform policy. If the government commits blindly to building an anti-ICBM defense system that can't work as promised, that will waste tens of billions of taxpayers' dollars and imperil national security, you won't hear about it from us. If studies suggest that the administration's antipollution measures would actually increase the dangerous particulates that people breathe during the next two decades, that's not our concern. No more discussions of how policies affect science either-so what if the budget for the National Science Foundation is slashed? This magazine will be dedicated purely to science, fair and balanced science, and not just the science that scientists say is science. And it will start on April Fools' Day.
Scientific American is a trademark of Scientific American, Inc., used with permission
I'm a novelist who has been published by legacy publishers (old style of publishing).
Ah, excellent! Here's a question: what would you consider the production costs to be of your book?
My assumption has always been that it's: 1. 90% the time involved for the writer to write, usually a year for a standard commercial novel 2. 10% for a really good editor to help him pull his thoughts together
That's to get the manuscript ready. Then there's all of the other costs of printing, distributing, and marketing and that's why the writer sees pennies on the dollar for any book that's sold in the store.
I think Amazon's probably taking a little too much in comparison to what they're offering but it's still much better than the publisher's deal. How many dollars in total sales would you need each year for a comfortable income, writing full-time? In legacy publishing it looks like you need to be selling millions and millions of dollars worth of product just to support a modest income.
Given that identical twins don't consider themselves different instances of the same person, I'm inclined to say that there's definitely a divergence point at which you will lose control of one of these "vectors" you're postulating. The real question for me is: who gets to keep your name? It'll be like all the pain and hassle of a divorce, squared.
Excellent point and one that's explored in the Stross novels. Some vectors feel differentiated enough to declare themselves real persons and refuse to merge back with the original which would be personal extinction for that clone.
I think that a future like this would obliterate conventional notions of self. If you think about religion cynically, it's a way of keeping people from cowering in existential dread. Not many armies would function properly without the promise of life after death for the soldiers. And even without that, most people need the comfort of a heaven to help them endure the passing of friends and family. Now try integrating the idea of multiple selves.
I think in a world like that people would come to externalize the concept of the soul. The soul resides in the memory bank that holds your pattern. The instances of yourself running around are just emanations of that soul and backups bring your continuity back to the soul. So death of an instance seems real but is not. And the people who can't handle that kind of mental jujitsu will be at a disadvantage compared to those who can.
So let's say you've got mind backups and cloning in your setting. The conventional approach is that you have one version of you at a time and weekly backups. You die, your clone is decanted and given the most recent update. Life goes on.
But that's thinking conventionally. Why not have multiple instances of you running in parallel? If we presume cloning and resurrection is expensive, only really important people will have it. Your best secret agent, your top scientist, sadly probably your typical reality TV bimbo.
Then you take it one step further. What makes you you? Consider how vastly people can change based on life experiences. How long can two of you exist apart, experiencing things until you're no longer indiscernibly the same?
Charlie Stross took this to some pretty wild extremes. It feels like a mix of disaster recovery software and mindfucking. So you have a general "you" that's what gets backed up. You can create multiple instances that you call vectors. You can live apart as real people. You might split a vector to go deep cover in an organization. Maybe you're involved in war and swap out your orthohuman body for a killing machine instead. You spawn off another dozen instances and you're a regiment of killing machines, all operating in concert. Each vector's accumulated experiences represents a delta from the original split point. Those new experiences can be merged back into the primary backup that is "you." If the experience is too painful, you may elect to excise it from your memory instead.
Raises some interesting questions. If you don't believe in an immaterial soul, then the sense of self is just a conceit within the neural net of your own meat brain. If you make a copy of your mind and upload it to machine, which you is you? The one outside the machine will think "Gee, I'm glad I'm still here" and the one in the machine thinks "Gee, I'm glad I made it in here." Can you both be right? Now let's say that you come out of the clone vat and you have a conversation with yourself. "I'm the original," says the one meeting you. "I'm asking you to go off and do something dangerous, possibly suicidal." Do you do it? There's a backup, will you really be dead? This instance of you, yes. But how long does this instance of you last, really? Are you the same person you were as a child? As a young man? As an old man? Those parts of yourself are just as lost as if they died in the past. A parent watching a child grow up to be a drug addict killing himself one injection at a time, can he really say the child who bounced on his knee is still alive? A corpse was once the child and yet given up living perhaps, but that child is gone.
A Strossian future gets convoluted very quickly. See Accelleando and Glasshouse.
Area 51 is chock full of advanced but terrestrial technology. The government leaks this stuff seemingly confirming UFO's or half-assed and inadequate cover stories just to stir up conspiracy nuts. You tell someone you saw strange things in the sky over Groom Lake, people will smile and twirl their fingers in circles beside their heads.
I think the odds of alien life in this universe are very good; I think the odds for intelligent life are also good. But unless there's some lovely scifi physics waiting out there for us, space travel seems like it'll be awfully damned expensive and complicated. And little green men in flying saucers seems a little too -- how should I put it --- mundane? Too mundane for an interstellar alien intelligence.
When you consider that in light of the cheesy denials, it seems like it's not just paranoids getting worked up over nothing, it looks like the government is egging them on. Therefore my theory of using aliens to cover for the real secrets.
"I deal only in facts, that's why I'm a cocky fuckin' bastard." -- Bill Hicks
The problem is that clamping your hands over your ears and screaming "Lalalalalala I can't hear you!" has become a viable strategy. There seems to be no selection process against it. If we're in the woods and I tell a conservative a mushroom is poisonous and they shouldn't eat it and they do, the problem resolves itself. In the modern day, I can tell them a fact that's every bit as true as the one about the mushroom such as deficits mattering but it doesn't just kill them, it kills both of us. What's wrong with this picture?
I like the European date format. dd/mm/yy makes sense, since it goes from the smallest time frame (days), to the largest. The American format seems silly.
- PS: I'm American.
While I completely agree with you on this one, I'm helpless when it comes to working with it. It's like customary vs. metric -- I can't think that way. Fahrenheit vs. Celsius, can't think that way. And yes, I think that logically Celsius makes far more sense.
The only way around such bullshit is to just teach the right way with the kids and let the old way die out. Weights and measures are like language, it's hard to pick a new one up when you've been immersed in the old one.
"There are more fighting robots than elevators in the country."
That's the metric we're using? So all i need to do to have my own robot war is build a single robot, and find a country with no elevators for it to attack?
There's also more robots than working toilets. Thanks, crappy military construction outsourcing.
They'll tax junk food and that money will go back into the slush fund and spent on other shit. Net result: people get their money taken, nothing good comes of it, and someone will declare mission accomplished.
I'd always thought that the one advantage they'd have to the existence of demonic possession and proof of Satan would be that they could at least say "See? That part of the story's right. So you have to believe that there's a God, too!" But, as many have pointed out, one doesn't always follow the other. A pagan could point to the tree shattered by the thunderbolt and say that this is proof of Zeus for where else could such a bolt have come from? Before science explained such things, the skeptic's arguments were as baseless as the pagan's claims. If there are demons, does this imply there must be a Satan? And even if all of Catholic demonology were proven to be accurate in the enumeration and ranking of such things, could we trust church dogma on their origin story?
I always liked the idea of a story where the demonic possessions are happening and are supernatural, not just misdiagnosed epilepsy, and yet a very effective exorcist is himself an unbeliever in the faith.
It also makes me think of a possibly apocryphal story....
LEGEND HAS IT that in the early 1920s one of Vladimir Lenin's fellow Bolsheviks asked him to justify the growing number of atrocities they were committing in the name of a socialist future. "If you want to make an omelet," Lenin insisted, "you have to be willing to break a few eggs." To which the Bolshevik replied, "Comrade, I see the broken eggs everywhere. But where, oh where, is the omelet?"
Can you imagine how bad the cartels would be hurting if this stuff got legalized? You'd better believe they'd be buying up senators left and right to keep it banned.
It's been years since I'd looked. The whole front page is nothing but crappy forum troll posts. I get a feeling this isn't just an April Fool's thing. It's like/b/ but sadder.
The Democrats have done plenty of nasty stuff, to be sure, but I honestly can't think of anything they've done lately, all on their own, that's so blatantly anti-American as this.
I'm an independent. I hate Republicans for acting like Republicans and I hate Democrats for acting like Republicans. The stuff I'm furious at Obama for isn't all left and socialist; I'm furious at him for all the Bush league stuff he's doing. Unitary executive, expanded wars, expanded deficits, passionate fellation of big business interests, disregard for civil liberties, the plight of the common American, and all the goddamn promises he made when was running for office.
American People Hire High-Powered Lobbyist To Push Interests In Congress OCTOBER 6, 2010 | ISSUE 46â40
Americans hope lobbyist Jack Weldon will finally give them a voice in Washington.
WASHINGTONâ"Citing a desire to gain influence in Washington, the American people confirmed Friday that they have hired high-powered D.C. lobbyist Jack Weldon of the firm Patton Boggs to help advance their agenda in Congress.
Known among Beltway insiders for his ability to sway public policy on behalf of massive corporations such as Johnson & Johnson, Monsanto, and AT&T, Weldon, 53, is expected to use his vast network of political connections to give his new client a voice in the legislative process.
Weldon is reportedly charging the American people $795 an hour.
"Unlike R.J. Reynolds, Pfizer, or Bank of America, the U.S. populace lacks the access to public officials required to further its legislative goals," a statement from the nation read in part. "Jack Weldon gives us that access."
"His daily presence in the Capitol will ensure the American people finally get a seat at the table," the statement continued. "And it will allow him to advance our message that everyone, including Americans, deserves to be represented in Washington."
Enlarge Image
Weldon says he hopes to spin the American public, above, as a group worth Congress' time.
The 310-million-member group said it will rely on Weldon's considerable clout to ensure its concerns are taken into account when Congress addresses issues such as education, immigration, national security, health care, transportation, the economy, affordable college tuition, infrastructure, jobs, equal rights, taxes, Social Security, the environment, housing, the national debt, agriculture, energy, alternative energy, nutrition, imports, exports, foreign relations, the arts, and crime.
Sources confirmed that Weldon is already scheduled to have drinks Monday with several members of the Senate Appropriations Committee to discuss saving the middle class.
"If you have a problem, say, with America's atrocious treatment of its veterans, you can't just pick up a phone and call your local congressman," Weldon told reporters from his office on K Street Monday. "You need someone on the inside who understands how democracy works; someone who knows how to grease the wheels a little."
Weldon said that after successfully advocating on behalf of Goldman Sachs and BP, he is relishing the opportunity to lobby for the American people, calling it the "challenge of a lifetime." The veteran D.C. power player admitted that his new client is at a disadvantage because it lacks the money and power of other groups.
"The goal is to make it seem politically advantageous for legislators to keep the American people in mind when making laws," Weldon said. "Lawmakers are going to ask me, 'Why should I care about the American people? What's in it for me?' And it will be up to me and my team to find some reason why they should consider putting poverty and medical care for children on the legislative docket."
"To be honest," Weldon added, "the American people have always been perceived as a little naÃve when it comes to their representative government. But having me on their side sends a clear message that they're finally serious and want to play ba
Where I live I have two choices, AT&T and Comcast. It's like trying to pick a side to root for on the Ostfront in WWII. Can we root against them both?
I've gone through a six month period of terrible service with the AT&T fuckers. Service keeps dropping out, problem isn't on my end. Their fucking Indians don't have any clue what's going on with the service techs over here, nobody updates the account info properly, nobody gives a damn. And while we're at it, why do I have to type in my phone number for them to route it properly if they're just going to ask me what it is when I get there?
The problem is that there's no fucking free market. There is no competition. There's a duopoly with each choice being craptastic. The next pro-business cheerleader who goes teary-eyed about the marketplace of choice is getting my fist in his gob.
"The human toll here looks to be much worse than the economic toll and we can be grateful for that." -- Larry Kudlow, CNBC host and failed human being
But why the sudden turn to violence? Who even knew Hobbits had firearms?
Same way it read to me. I'm imagining Bilbo climbing out of the well with a shotgun. "This! is my boomstick!" A hobbit with a 'tude? You know that's unheard of.
Typical conservative POV: 1. American exceptionalism 2. American exceptionalism redux -- we're so freakin' awesome, God's chosen people etc 3. Strong on national defense 4. Self-reliance 5. Sloppy kisses for capitalism 6. Strong support for the average folk (working people who work for their money) 7. Everything that's wrong with this country starts and ends with liberals and they're the ones trying to tear it apart from the inside because the black filth of communism is pumping through their veins
Well, the reality is that America's not all that special. We're being torn apart from the inside in end-stage capitalism where we cease to exploit internal markets and are now cannibalizing ourselves to support the credit binge.
I would tend to think that a strong national defense begins with a strong national economy. We wouldn't need to be engaging in all these wars in the middle east if we didn't need their oil. Viable alternative power like solar and wind would do more to secure our nation than fleets of F-22's.
I understand why that sort of thing isn't happening. I just don't understand why these people are too blind to see it. Gay marriage is a threat to the American family? Fuck, no! Two parents having to work 60 hours a week to put food on the table is destroying the American family. Pay enough so that one job-holder can support a full-time parent who stays at home and you'll make one hell of a start towards saving the family. And how about some goddamn affordable health care? No, we can't have health care but we can ban abortion and that's being pro-life. Wait, what?
I just can't understand how myopic people are. It's like those seniors marching at the townhall meetings carrying signs saying "Government: hands off my medicare!"
Slashdot Mirror
I grew up in a conservative Christian household so I got the full scare story on the ebils of rock and roll before I dipped my toe in the other side. From the Christian POV, rock is monolithic. There's the titular head represented by Satan who is coordinating everything in a top-down hierarchical fashion from AC/DC, Ozzy, and Alice Cooper on down to the Beatles and Pat Boone. Even the most banal, lite rock-friendly artist is promoting Satan's message of substance abuse, loose morals, easy sex and enjoyment of life. Drug messages are backmasked into the music. Sex permeates the videos. Album jackets and psychedelic posters all have their hidden symbols and meanings; it's fun to take a trip, put acid in your veins. (supernaut!)
Then you look at it from the other side and shit, it's just a business. Rebellion is popular so you package it, commoditize it and sell it. Satan has nothing to do with it unless that's just a personal nickname for soulless assholes in suits. You really think it takes a prince of darkness to sell people on the idea of having fun and getting laid? Puhleeeeeeeeaze. Some rocker can declare he's doing something in the name of rock and roll, critics can argue about what rock is, how it should be, but they're all just tossing ideas into the collective memetic cess pool. There's no ecumenical councils trying to establish rock orthodoxy, no pope of rock to excommunicate you if you aren't doing it right.
It's the same thing with Anonymous. There's a vague, poorly expressed ideal with everyone supporting their own irreconcilable interpretation of it. You can't really have a civil war amongst people who were never unified to begin with. That's making the fundamental mistake of assuming Anonymous is top-down, hierarchical, and organized. Organized anarchy? That's as oxymoronic as Christian rock.
HP makes terrible products and abuses their customers shamefully. That's why they went out of business and a better company with a superior product has taken their place. Everyone wins!
It's a 3hr drive for me and it would kill me to commit to seeing a launch and then have to make the trip three or four times until they finally meet the schedule. The streaming TV is nice. I'll usually head outside if the launch is a go and get a good 15 seconds of visibility as the shuttle clears the horizon clutter, before the SRB's separate. Had a pretty good view back in elementary school when Challenger blew.
Looks like someone doesn't get the Idiocracy reference.
Every intelligent person I've spoken with about the ribbon hates it with the sort of passion usually reserved for spammers and child pornographers. But don't worry, scrote. There are plenty of 'tards out there living really kick-ass lives.
Scientific American (irony not intended)
Okay, We Give Up
We feel so ashamed
By The Editors | Friday, April 1, 2005 | 55
There's no easy way to admit this. For years, helpful letter writers told us to stick to science. They pointed out that science and politics don't mix. They said we should be more balanced in our presentation of such issues as creationism, missile defense and global warming. We resisted their advice and pretended not to be stung by the accusations that the magazine should be renamed Unscientific American, or Scientific Unamerican, or even Unscientific Unamerican. But spring is in the air, and all of nature is turning over a new leaf, so there's no better time to say: you were right, and we were wrong.
In retrospect, this magazine's coverage of so-called evolution has been hideously one-sided. For decades, we published articles in every issue that endorsed the ideas of Charles Darwin and his cronies. True, the theory of common descent through natural selection has been called the unifying concept for all of biology and one of the greatest scientific ideas of all time, but that was no excuse to be fanatics about it. Where were the answering articles presenting the powerful case for scientific creationism? Why were we so unwilling to suggest that dinosaurs lived 6,000 years ago or that a cataclysmic flood carved the Grand Canyon? Blame the scientists. They dazzled us with their fancy fossils, their radiocarbon dating and their tens of thousands of peer-reviewed journal articles. As editors, we had no business being persuaded by mountains of evidence.
Moreover, we shamefully mistreated the Intelligent Design (ID) theorists by lumping them in with creationists. Creationists believe that God designed all life, and that's a somewhat religious idea. But ID theorists think that at unspecified times some unnamed superpowerful entity designed life, or maybe just some species, or maybe just some of the stuff in cells. That's what makes ID a superior scientific theory: it doesn't get bogged down in details.
Good journalism values balance above all else. We owe it to our readers to present everybody's ideas equally and not to ignore or discredit theories simply because they lack scientifically credible arguments or facts. Nor should we succumb to the easy mistake of thinking that scientists understand their fields better than, say, U.S. senators or best-selling novelists do. Indeed, if politicians or special-interest groups say things that seem untrue or misleading, our duty as journalists is to quote them without comment or contradiction. To do otherwise would be elitist and therefore wrong. In that spirit, we will end the practice of expressing our own views in this space: an editorial page is no place for opinions.
Get ready for a new Scientific American. No more discussions of how science should inform policy. If the government commits blindly to building an anti-ICBM defense system that can't work as promised, that will waste tens of billions of taxpayers' dollars and imperil national security, you won't hear about it from us. If studies suggest that the administration's antipollution measures would actually increase the dangerous particulates that people breathe during the next two decades, that's not our concern. No more discussions of how policies affect science either-so what if the budget for the National Science Foundation is slashed? This magazine will be dedicated purely to science, fair and balanced science, and not just the science that scientists say is science. And it will start on April Fools' Day.
Scientific American is a trademark of Scientific American, Inc., used with permission
© 2011 Scientific American, a Division of Nature America, Inc.
All Rights Reserved.
I'm a novelist who has been published by legacy publishers (old style of publishing).
Ah, excellent! Here's a question: what would you consider the production costs to be of your book?
My assumption has always been that it's:
1. 90% the time involved for the writer to write, usually a year for a standard commercial novel
2. 10% for a really good editor to help him pull his thoughts together
That's to get the manuscript ready. Then there's all of the other costs of printing, distributing, and marketing and that's why the writer sees pennies on the dollar for any book that's sold in the store.
I think Amazon's probably taking a little too much in comparison to what they're offering but it's still much better than the publisher's deal. How many dollars in total sales would you need each year for a comfortable income, writing full-time? In legacy publishing it looks like you need to be selling millions and millions of dollars worth of product just to support a modest income.
Curved Charged Coupled Device? Wouldn't that be CCCD?
Excellent point and one that's explored in the Stross novels. Some vectors feel differentiated enough to declare themselves real persons and refuse to merge back with the original which would be personal extinction for that clone.
I think that a future like this would obliterate conventional notions of self. If you think about religion cynically, it's a way of keeping people from cowering in existential dread. Not many armies would function properly without the promise of life after death for the soldiers. And even without that, most people need the comfort of a heaven to help them endure the passing of friends and family. Now try integrating the idea of multiple selves.
I think in a world like that people would come to externalize the concept of the soul. The soul resides in the memory bank that holds your pattern. The instances of yourself running around are just emanations of that soul and backups bring your continuity back to the soul. So death of an instance seems real but is not. And the people who can't handle that kind of mental jujitsu will be at a disadvantage compared to those who can.
So let's say you've got mind backups and cloning in your setting. The conventional approach is that you have one version of you at a time and weekly backups. You die, your clone is decanted and given the most recent update. Life goes on.
But that's thinking conventionally. Why not have multiple instances of you running in parallel? If we presume cloning and resurrection is expensive, only really important people will have it. Your best secret agent, your top scientist, sadly probably your typical reality TV bimbo.
Then you take it one step further. What makes you you? Consider how vastly people can change based on life experiences. How long can two of you exist apart, experiencing things until you're no longer indiscernibly the same?
Charlie Stross took this to some pretty wild extremes. It feels like a mix of disaster recovery software and mindfucking. So you have a general "you" that's what gets backed up. You can create multiple instances that you call vectors. You can live apart as real people. You might split a vector to go deep cover in an organization. Maybe you're involved in war and swap out your orthohuman body for a killing machine instead. You spawn off another dozen instances and you're a regiment of killing machines, all operating in concert. Each vector's accumulated experiences represents a delta from the original split point. Those new experiences can be merged back into the primary backup that is "you." If the experience is too painful, you may elect to excise it from your memory instead.
Raises some interesting questions. If you don't believe in an immaterial soul, then the sense of self is just a conceit within the neural net of your own meat brain. If you make a copy of your mind and upload it to machine, which you is you? The one outside the machine will think "Gee, I'm glad I'm still here" and the one in the machine thinks "Gee, I'm glad I made it in here." Can you both be right? Now let's say that you come out of the clone vat and you have a conversation with yourself. "I'm the original," says the one meeting you. "I'm asking you to go off and do something dangerous, possibly suicidal." Do you do it? There's a backup, will you really be dead? This instance of you, yes. But how long does this instance of you last, really? Are you the same person you were as a child? As a young man? As an old man? Those parts of yourself are just as lost as if they died in the past. A parent watching a child grow up to be a drug addict killing himself one injection at a time, can he really say the child who bounced on his knee is still alive? A corpse was once the child and yet given up living perhaps, but that child is gone.
A Strossian future gets convoluted very quickly. See Accelleando and Glasshouse.
Area 51 is chock full of advanced but terrestrial technology. The government leaks this stuff seemingly confirming UFO's or half-assed and inadequate cover stories just to stir up conspiracy nuts. You tell someone you saw strange things in the sky over Groom Lake, people will smile and twirl their fingers in circles beside their heads.
I think the odds of alien life in this universe are very good; I think the odds for intelligent life are also good. But unless there's some lovely scifi physics waiting out there for us, space travel seems like it'll be awfully damned expensive and complicated. And little green men in flying saucers seems a little too -- how should I put it --- mundane? Too mundane for an interstellar alien intelligence.
When you consider that in light of the cheesy denials, it seems like it's not just paranoids getting worked up over nothing, it looks like the government is egging them on. Therefore my theory of using aliens to cover for the real secrets.
Death threats against Democrats are given the "aw, shucks" treatment.
Yeah, mod me down. That doesn't make it any less true.
"I deal only in facts, that's why I'm a cocky fuckin' bastard." -- Bill Hicks
The problem is that clamping your hands over your ears and screaming "Lalalalalala I can't hear you!" has become a viable strategy. There seems to be no selection process against it. If we're in the woods and I tell a conservative a mushroom is poisonous and they shouldn't eat it and they do, the problem resolves itself. In the modern day, I can tell them a fact that's every bit as true as the one about the mushroom such as deficits mattering but it doesn't just kill them, it kills both of us. What's wrong with this picture?
I like the European date format. dd/mm/yy makes sense, since it goes from the smallest time frame (days), to the largest. The American format seems silly.
- PS: I'm American.
While I completely agree with you on this one, I'm helpless when it comes to working with it. It's like customary vs. metric -- I can't think that way. Fahrenheit vs. Celsius, can't think that way. And yes, I think that logically Celsius makes far more sense.
The only way around such bullshit is to just teach the right way with the kids and let the old way die out. Weights and measures are like language, it's hard to pick a new one up when you've been immersed in the old one.
"There are more fighting robots than elevators in the country."
That's the metric we're using? So all i need to do to have my own robot war is build a single robot, and find a country with no elevators for it to attack?
There's also more robots than working toilets. Thanks, crappy military construction outsourcing.
They'll tax junk food and that money will go back into the slush fund and spent on other shit. Net result: people get their money taken, nothing good comes of it, and someone will declare mission accomplished.
I'd always thought that the one advantage they'd have to the existence of demonic possession and proof of Satan would be that they could at least say "See? That part of the story's right. So you have to believe that there's a God, too!" But, as many have pointed out, one doesn't always follow the other. A pagan could point to the tree shattered by the thunderbolt and say that this is proof of Zeus for where else could such a bolt have come from? Before science explained such things, the skeptic's arguments were as baseless as the pagan's claims. If there are demons, does this imply there must be a Satan? And even if all of Catholic demonology were proven to be accurate in the enumeration and ranking of such things, could we trust church dogma on their origin story?
I always liked the idea of a story where the demonic possessions are happening and are supernatural, not just misdiagnosed epilepsy, and yet a very effective exorcist is himself an unbeliever in the faith.
It also makes me think of a possibly apocryphal story....
LEGEND HAS IT that in the early 1920s one of Vladimir Lenin's fellow Bolsheviks asked him to justify the growing number of atrocities they were committing in the name of a socialist future. "If you want to make an omelet," Lenin insisted, "you have to be willing to break a few eggs." To which the Bolshevik replied, "Comrade, I see the broken eggs everywhere. But where, oh where, is the omelet?"
I see your demons but where is your God?
Can you imagine how bad the cartels would be hurting if this stuff got legalized? You'd better believe they'd be buying up senators left and right to keep it banned.
It's been years since I'd looked. The whole front page is nothing but crappy forum troll posts. I get a feeling this isn't just an April Fool's thing. It's like /b/ but sadder.
I only wish the most recent redesign was the april fool joke.
The Democrats have done plenty of nasty stuff, to be sure, but I honestly can't think of anything they've done lately, all on their own, that's so blatantly anti-American as this.
I'm an independent. I hate Republicans for acting like Republicans and I hate Democrats for acting like Republicans. The stuff I'm furious at Obama for isn't all left and socialist; I'm furious at him for all the Bush league stuff he's doing. Unitary executive, expanded wars, expanded deficits, passionate fellation of big business interests, disregard for civil liberties, the plight of the common American, and all the goddamn promises he made when was running for office.
American People Hire High-Powered Lobbyist To Push Interests In Congress
OCTOBER 6, 2010 | ISSUE 46â40
Americans hope lobbyist Jack Weldon will finally give them a voice in Washington.
WASHINGTONâ"Citing a desire to gain influence in Washington, the American people confirmed Friday that they have hired high-powered D.C. lobbyist Jack Weldon of the firm Patton Boggs to help advance their agenda in Congress.
Known among Beltway insiders for his ability to sway public policy on behalf of massive corporations such as Johnson & Johnson, Monsanto, and AT&T, Weldon, 53, is expected to use his vast network of political connections to give his new client a voice in the legislative process.
Weldon is reportedly charging the American people $795 an hour.
"Unlike R.J. Reynolds, Pfizer, or Bank of America, the U.S. populace lacks the access to public officials required to further its legislative goals," a statement from the nation read in part. "Jack Weldon gives us that access."
"His daily presence in the Capitol will ensure the American people finally get a seat at the table," the statement continued. "And it will allow him to advance our message that everyone, including Americans, deserves to be represented in Washington."
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Weldon says he hopes to spin the American public, above, as a group worth Congress' time.
The 310-million-member group said it will rely on Weldon's considerable clout to ensure its concerns are taken into account when Congress addresses issues such as education, immigration, national security, health care, transportation, the economy, affordable college tuition, infrastructure, jobs, equal rights, taxes, Social Security, the environment, housing, the national debt, agriculture, energy, alternative energy, nutrition, imports, exports, foreign relations, the arts, and crime.
Sources confirmed that Weldon is already scheduled to have drinks Monday with several members of the Senate Appropriations Committee to discuss saving the middle class.
"If you have a problem, say, with America's atrocious treatment of its veterans, you can't just pick up a phone and call your local congressman," Weldon told reporters from his office on K Street Monday. "You need someone on the inside who understands how democracy works; someone who knows how to grease the wheels a little."
Weldon said that after successfully advocating on behalf of Goldman Sachs and BP, he is relishing the opportunity to lobby for the American people, calling it the "challenge of a lifetime." The veteran D.C. power player admitted that his new client is at a disadvantage because it lacks the money and power of other groups.
"The goal is to make it seem politically advantageous for legislators to keep the American people in mind when making laws," Weldon said. "Lawmakers are going to ask me, 'Why should I care about the American people? What's in it for me?' And it will be up to me and my team to find some reason why they should consider putting poverty and medical care for children on the legislative docket."
"To be honest," Weldon added, "the American people have always been perceived as a little naÃve when it comes to their representative government. But having me on their side sends a clear message that they're finally serious and want to play ba
Where I live I have two choices, AT&T and Comcast. It's like trying to pick a side to root for on the Ostfront in WWII. Can we root against them both?
I've gone through a six month period of terrible service with the AT&T fuckers. Service keeps dropping out, problem isn't on my end. Their fucking Indians don't have any clue what's going on with the service techs over here, nobody updates the account info properly, nobody gives a damn. And while we're at it, why do I have to type in my phone number for them to route it properly if they're just going to ask me what it is when I get there?
The problem is that there's no fucking free market. There is no competition. There's a duopoly with each choice being craptastic. The next pro-business cheerleader who goes teary-eyed about the marketplace of choice is getting my fist in his gob.
"The human toll here looks to be much worse than the economic toll and we can be grateful for that."
-- Larry Kudlow, CNBC host and failed human being
Shuttle Replacement = Duke Nuke'Em Forever
The only way we're getting a shuttle replacement is if someone other than NASA's in charge.
But why the sudden turn to violence? Who even knew Hobbits had firearms?
Same way it read to me. I'm imagining Bilbo climbing out of the well with a shotgun. "This! is my boomstick!"
A hobbit with a 'tude? You know that's unheard of.
Typical conservative POV:
1. American exceptionalism
2. American exceptionalism redux -- we're so freakin' awesome, God's chosen people etc
3. Strong on national defense
4. Self-reliance
5. Sloppy kisses for capitalism
6. Strong support for the average folk (working people who work for their money)
7. Everything that's wrong with this country starts and ends with liberals and they're the ones trying to tear it apart from the inside because the black filth of communism is pumping through their veins
Well, the reality is that America's not all that special. We're being torn apart from the inside in end-stage capitalism where we cease to exploit internal markets and are now cannibalizing ourselves to support the credit binge.
I would tend to think that a strong national defense begins with a strong national economy. We wouldn't need to be engaging in all these wars in the middle east if we didn't need their oil. Viable alternative power like solar and wind would do more to secure our nation than fleets of F-22's.
I understand why that sort of thing isn't happening. I just don't understand why these people are too blind to see it. Gay marriage is a threat to the American family? Fuck, no! Two parents having to work 60 hours a week to put food on the table is destroying the American family. Pay enough so that one job-holder can support a full-time parent who stays at home and you'll make one hell of a start towards saving the family. And how about some goddamn affordable health care? No, we can't have health care but we can ban abortion and that's being pro-life. Wait, what?
I just can't understand how myopic people are. It's like those seniors marching at the townhall meetings carrying signs saying "Government: hands off my medicare!"