Despite being posted on the raging hotbed of socialist ideals that is Slashdot, I'm assuming that your comment was facetious in nature.
Now, I'm not going to argue that yes, it really is a good idea, but I am going to say, wouldn't it be great if the richest people in the world voluntarily (as in, without even being asked to) gave significant amounts to worthy, external causes? And by significant, I don't mean, "oooh, Bill just gave $1 million to somebody," but rather, "Bill Gates today announced that he would donate 50% of his total worth to the following charities."
Many rich people philanthropize just enough to be seen doing it, and don't give as much as they could give. Others devote their personal time, energy, and money to one cause after another, believing that it is right for them to use their resources to help others. Even if you don't like his music (or the particular causes he chooses, which I often don't), you have to admit that U2's Bono is an admirable public figure. He spends his time between albums and tours running around helping various causes and movements...And even if he doesn't give that much to the cause monetarily, his presence gets the cause into the news so that the average Joe will notice it. Even if wealthy folks don't want to give money to a cause, they could at least take a few hours to speak out in support of it to draw attention to it.
After all, how popular would the Free Tibet movement be in America if it weren't for the fact that there are a bunch of bands promoting it?
I don't assume that this is what the UN guy who suggested this tax had in mind (when considering issues like local email, mailing lists, etc. I don't think he has ever used email before)
I imagine this isn't the result of blatant stupidity, as you credit it to, but rather a (l)user-level comprehension of e-mail systems. There seriously are people who think that AOL *is* the Internet. I imagine it wouldn't be too hard for AOL to keep track of how many e-mails you send. This person is probably someone who was on AOL (or some similarly nice, friendly, touchy-feely ISP) and noticed that they give him a count of how many e-mails he has sent. Upon noticing this, he didn't stop to ask someone who actually knew how this stuff works, but ran out and said, "they keep track of how much e-mail you send, which means we can tax e-mail and use the money to let starving Ethiopians networked Quake!"
True, it's an idea that's not even half-baked, but it's not a completely absurd idea for someone with (l)user-level expertise to come up with.
Wait, they can confidently estimate it down to the last digit? If so, then they're much better at keeping track of people than I would have given them credit for.
Of course, they probably just estimated to the nearest thousand and made up the last three digits to make people think they're watching that closely...
Re:Instinctive libertarian knee-jerking on Slashdo
on
UN Proposes Email Tax
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· Score: 1
Or rather, that we were able to stay in denial about losing it longer than they were. You don't win a war, hot or cold...You just lose less because of it than the other guy.
I had something like that with BMG, when I wanted out. They don't have an e-mail addess or phone number you can use to unsubscribe, but instead make you write them by snail mail.
Easy enough to get around, though...Just ignore the junk mail they send out. When they send you a cd every month ('cause you didn't respond to the junk mail saying you didn't want it) write "refused, return to sender" on the package and drop it back in the mailbox. Once they pay shipping in both directions for your cds every month, they'll call you and ask what's up, and you tell them you want out.
Of course, a few months later, they started sending me junk mail again...But they had changed their system so that, if you don't respond, they don't send you anything. Much easier to ignore that way.
the requirement to be a COMPUTER HACKER is an ability to code
I don't know about that...I've seen some people who were really into circuitry.
Other than that pickiness, though, I'm inclined to agree with you. A hacker is not "someone who can code well", but a more general "someone who does something really well and loves doing it really well".
Your reference to ESR's Hacker's Howto is a good one, and I was going to include a hyperlink to it, but I don't remember the exact url, and tuxedo appears to be/.'ed or something.
Hmmm....You imply that this is impossible. Wouldn't it happen if the soldiers happened to be marching at such a pace that they matched the bridge's resonant frequency? Ever seen footage of the Tacoma Narrows bridge collapsing? All it took was a nice steady breeze that happened to set up the wrong kind of resonance in the bridge.
Or, of course, you could just wait a few months until the local video rental place decides that they really don't need fifty copies of it anymore, and sells off forty of them at $10 each...
The US House just passed a bill that would reform the drug war seizure laws. (basically, if you're suspected of producing/distributing/possessing drugs, they can permanently confiscate your possessions in the name of investigating the drug charges. needless to say, this gets abused.) I'm not sure what exactly this bill would do, if passed into law (I've only read the introduction, which described it's purpose as "initiating reform". yeah, now *there's* a real measurable target. Alas, I forget the name of the bill, but at least someone in the government is making a token effort at paying attention to the lunacy that goes on in the name drug control.
My girlfriend (and a henchman) entered about 500 requests between the two of them for New Kids on the Block a few months ago as a protest to the "crap pop bands" you mentioned....NKotB made 2nd place on TRL...
Of course, they did it manually....
Re:"Few" indispensable vocations?
on
GEEK Unions?
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· Score: 1
I'm not sure what exactly the story is called, but if I'm thinking of the same one you are, it's by Robert A. Heinlein and can be found in his(excellent) story collection "The Past Through Tomorrow". I'd include a link to Amazon, but I just checked there, and they say it's out of print.
1. A lot of us don't look for flash and novelty in our games as the definition of fun. Some of us will go play Half-Life at a friend's house for half an hour because he just got a Voodoo3 and wanted to show off, and then go home and play Nethack. And enjoy the latter more. Look at today's slashdot article on the Pac Man high score for lots of discussions on "classic" video games. On the other hand, many people *do* look for flash, so I can't fault him on this one.
2. The author seemed to think that stability in games is nothing more than a nice perq, saying that an annoying bug in a game will simply cause you to return the game and never buy from that company again. IMHO, it must not be a very engaging game, if you give it up for a bug and don't lament it. The games that are worth playing, you'll play despite the bugs (and home the company releases a patch). I don't know how many times I screamed in irritation after hours of Alpha Centauri (yes, I admit it, I play games on Win98. I'll go cower in shame for daring to say that on slashdot, I promise) on Iron Man mode (no saving in exchange for 2x score) only to have an invalid page fault pop up during the computer's turn. Yet I go back and play it again because it's *fun*. It's engaging...Engrossing...It may not be the flashiest thing in the world (and, indeed, the graphics are often quoted as the worst aspect of SMAC) but the gameplay is enjoyable, and the replay value is very high.
I think I had a few more, but I can't remember...Overall, it was a well-written essay.
This is true. If they're going to get it anyway, we (America) might as well be the ones to sell it to them. The advantages to this are twofold. First of all, it would allow our companies to reap the profits, and second, it would allow us to have some idea of what kind of stuff they're buying. (even if they only buy part of their collections from the US, it'll give us a better idea of what they have than if they buy none of it from us)
Your sig says "Open Source Anarcho-Capitalist". I invite anyone who knows something I don't to correct me on this, but anarchism is more or less another name for libertarian-socialism, and "anarcho-capitalist" is sort of a contradiction in terms. As in, a small, relatively unobtrusive government (the libertarian half) but with the workers owning the factories and other means of production (the socialist half).
Rousseau (not really an anarchist, I believe, but shares most of their views) says in his The Social Contract that
Every man has naturally a right to everything he needs...Having his share, he ought to keep to it, and can have no further right against the community.
In general, to establish the right of the first occupier over a plot of groud, the following conditions are necessary: first, the land must not yet be inhabited; secondly, a man must occupy only the amount he needs for his subsistance; and, in the third place, possession must be taken, not by an empty ceremony, but by labour and cultivation, the only sign of proprietorship that should be respected by others.
Rousseau goes on to discuss these terms, but, in general, emphasizes the points that a person only has a right to own as much as he needs to survive, and definitely not to more than he can use. He also discusses how even private property is not truly ownership, but merely stewardship, of an individual caring for certain property as a service to the community.
I believe that these beliefs on property rights -- only as much as you need -- are fairly standard to anarchism, whereas capitalism's property rights -- as much as you can earn or take and hold on to -- are very much *not* anarchist.
If anyone knows I am wrong (and I mean with evidence, not flames), I ask that you correct me on this.
Actually, I don't think dry ice has a normally occurring liquid state. (hence "dry") I believe that carbon dioxide is an example of a substance that sublimates, which, if I remember my chemistry right, means that it goes directly between solid and gaseous forms wihtout passing through the liquid stage. I imagine it is *possible* to get liquid carbon dioxide, but I don't think it's a naturally occurring thing.
I think what we want in this case is liquid nitrogen, rather than dry ice. Liquid N2 is great stuff. Dip in a raquetball, a flower, a mouse (no, I've not personally done the last), and it near-instatly becomes frozen solid (and fragile as glass). Which means that the sex offender monitors would spray the, ah, offending members with liquid nitrogen and then fire a bolt into the resulting chunk of ice....Smashing it cleanly into little pieces.
My girlfriend used to be a heavy caffeine drinker, (in this case, heavy == almost continuous during waking hours) including several times when she would go for three or four days at a time on nothing but black coffee.
One night she wound up in the hospital vomiting blood. They found out she had acquired an allergy to caffeine. Since then I've been a lot more moderate with my caffeine-guzzling...
Well, you can look at computers as a huge loss of productivity if you look at people like programmers and network admins. Someone from fifty years ago would look at the average programmer and say, "that person isn't doing anything useful." I mean, sitting there talking to a television screen with a bunch of buttons? And for what purpose? So that other people can talk to their television screens? Puh-leeze. Don't tell me that's actually useful.
Also, there's a productivity loss involved in redoing documents. When letters were typed rather than word processed, you had to retype the entire letter if you wanted to change it. If it was good enough, people said, "eh, it's good enough" and let it be. With a word processor, though, it's easy to make revisions. Just open your file, make your changes, print, and save. So people do a lot more revising than they did. "t may be good enough, but I just want to change this sentence. All right, done. No, wait, I don't like that font. All right, done. No, wait..." and so on.
But it's a huge productivity gain in other areas. I'd like to see someone crack RC5 without a computer, for example, or do any of the huge, physics- and math-related number crunching that computers are used for. It may be possible, but incredibly slower and probably more error prone than a computer. CAD is often easier than drafting by hand, and computer-controlled machining is faster and more precise -- when correctly programmed -- than hand machining.
...or lack thereof. I know many a college student (and even a few high schoolers) who have Palm Pilots, including myself. We use them for jotting down homework assignments, making notes of book titles that we need to look for on our next trip to the library, keeping track of profs' office hours, and keeping track of our lab group partners. What do the people who don't have Palm Pilots do? Write this information down on whatever piece of paper is handy. And lose it. At $180, my Palm is much too expensive for me to forget about, whereas a random piece of paper is fairly meaningless. Even if you don't lose the piece of paper, its a lot easier to pull up your assignments on the Palm Pilot than flip through your half-dozen notebooks until you find the page you wrote the information down on. I don't know if this can be defined as productivity, but it's definitely helpful and useful.
Of course, Quest and Breakout are useful for ultra-dull lectures, too...It's a combination of tool, toy, and, yes, geek status symbol. But just because it does all three doesn't mean it's particularly bad at the first.
Re:Explanation of The Force is A Farce
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Episode II Rumours
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· Score: 1
Has anyone ever read the Four Lords of the Diamond series by Chalker (I think)? A rough overview: there's a solar system discovered which is home to a microscopic organism/force. This organism can be found within every cell of all living things (and I think within non-living things, too; it's been a while since I read it) and forms a fairly symbiotic relationship. Only thing is, if you leave the solar system, this organism dies, and you die with it, as all of your cells have become dependant on its presence. So, of course, the intergalactic government uses it as an inescapable prison system.
Some persons, however, are close enough to this organism to communicate with it. Through will and emotion they can instruct this organism which is a part of them. The organisms within them communicate with the organisms outside of them, transmitting the human user's will. The organisms in the target will manipulate their surroundings to comply with the user's desires.
For example, an Adept (as I believe they were called) by the name of (for example) Vader could direct his symbiotic organisms to reach out to the organisms in another person with the message, "cut off air supply", and the organisms in the target would cause the victim's windpipe to close (like Keanu's mouth melting shut in Matrix).
My point (as rambling as it may be) is that perhaps the Force can be found within everyone and everything. Doesn't Yoda say at one point that the Force is in everything? Perhaps control of the Force is a mental/emotional/spiritual ability. "The Force is strong in this one" could mean not that there is a lot of the Force present (as it is in everything) but that the combination of traits necessary to activate and control the Force is strong. The particles that Qui-Gon checks Anakin for could be indicators not of the Force itself, but indicators of activated Force.
Or, this could just be the product of too little sleep. More coffee....
I know that Trent Reznor (Nine Inch Nails) owns the Nothing label which he releases his/NIN's albums under. (Marilyn Manson and some other artists are on the label too)
However, I don't know enough to say whether this is an example of an artist owning the copyright for his/her/their own music, or if Nothing is just an intermediary and the label (and thus his music) is really owned by a larger label.
What do you all have against teaching children to focus on thoughts that are righteous and pure, and trying to protect them from what is impure?
Lets make a deal. If you can tell us what "thoughts that are righteous and pure" includes and does not include in a way that each and every/.er agrees with, then we'll all agree that we should teach children to focus on those things.
And I'll have you know up front that I consider sex and human sexuality to be right (if not righteous) and pure and that I consider censorship to be "impure" and definitely not righteous. We've already seen posts from/.ers who disagree with me on this. Therefore, we can see that it's impossible to empirically define "righteous and pure".
I have nothing against teaching my children to focus on "righteous and pure" ideals, but that includes protecting them from people who think that sex is somehow "dirty" and that anything related to sex should be hidden from their eyes and ears.
Forget the government, what about Microsoft? You'd have to buy service packs once a month or else the MS-Nanobots would extend little blades and start cutting all of your blood vessels. And the MS-Nanobots wouldn't be something you voluntarily purchase. MS would secretly pay Starbucks to dump these things in the coffee by the truckload. Not to mention paying Abercrombie and J. Crew to dust their clothes with them. (after all, if they can afford to spend that much on coffee and clothes, then MS can charge them anything they want...)
Of course, within a week, the FSF/OSS community would whip up GPL'd hunter-seeker nanobots that would kill MS 'bots on on sight, so we'd be all good....
Slashdot Mirror
Not even...It's one "fucking cent" per 100 e-mails, actually...
Despite being posted on the raging hotbed of socialist ideals that is Slashdot, I'm assuming that your comment was facetious in nature.
Now, I'm not going to argue that yes, it really is a good idea, but I am going to say, wouldn't it be great if the richest people in the world voluntarily (as in, without even being asked to) gave significant amounts to worthy, external causes? And by significant, I don't mean, "oooh, Bill just gave $1 million to somebody," but rather, "Bill Gates today announced that he would donate 50% of his total worth to the following charities."
Many rich people philanthropize just enough to be seen doing it, and don't give as much as they could give. Others devote their personal time, energy, and money to one cause after another, believing that it is right for them to use their resources to help others. Even if you don't like his music (or the particular causes he chooses, which I often don't), you have to admit that U2's Bono is an admirable public figure. He spends his time between albums and tours running around helping various causes and movements...And even if he doesn't give that much to the cause monetarily, his presence gets the cause into the news so that the average Joe will notice it. Even if wealthy folks don't want to give money to a cause, they could at least take a few hours to speak out in support of it to draw attention to it.
After all, how popular would the Free Tibet movement be in America if it weren't for the fact that there are a bunch of bands promoting it?
I imagine this isn't the result of blatant stupidity, as you credit it to, but rather a (l)user-level comprehension of e-mail systems. There seriously are people who think that AOL *is* the Internet. I imagine it wouldn't be too hard for AOL to keep track of how many e-mails you send. This person is probably someone who was on AOL (or some similarly nice, friendly, touchy-feely ISP) and noticed that they give him a count of how many e-mails he has sent. Upon noticing this, he didn't stop to ask someone who actually knew how this stuff works, but ran out and said, "they keep track of how much e-mail you send, which means we can tax e-mail and use the money to let starving Ethiopians networked Quake!"
True, it's an idea that's not even half-baked, but it's not a completely absurd idea for someone with (l)user-level expertise to come up with.
Wait, they can confidently estimate it down to the last digit? If so, then they're much better at keeping track of people than I would have given them credit for.
Of course, they probably just estimated to the nearest thousand and made up the last three digits to make people think they're watching that closely...
Or rather, that we were able to stay in denial about losing it longer than they were. You don't win a war, hot or cold...You just lose less because of it than the other guy.
I had something like that with BMG, when I wanted out. They don't have an e-mail addess or phone number you can use to unsubscribe, but instead make you write them by snail mail.
Easy enough to get around, though...Just ignore the junk mail they send out. When they send you a cd every month ('cause you didn't respond to the junk mail saying you didn't want it) write "refused, return to sender" on the package and drop it back in the mailbox. Once they pay shipping in both directions for your cds every month, they'll call you and ask what's up, and you tell them you want out.
Of course, a few months later, they started sending me junk mail again...But they had changed their system so that, if you don't respond, they don't send you anything. Much easier to ignore that way.
I want to know what will happen when the Win2K embedded in your Xerox copier crashes...Will it just start printing out blue sheets of paper?
I don't know about that...I've seen some people who were really into circuitry.
Other than that pickiness, though, I'm inclined to agree with you. A hacker is not "someone who can code well", but a more general "someone who does something really well and loves doing it really well".
Your reference to ESR's Hacker's Howto is a good one, and I was going to include a hyperlink to it, but I don't remember the exact url, and tuxedo appears to be /.'ed or something.
Hmmm....You imply that this is impossible. Wouldn't it happen if the soldiers happened to be marching at such a pace that they matched the bridge's resonant frequency? Ever seen footage of the Tacoma Narrows bridge collapsing? All it took was a nice steady breeze that happened to set up the wrong kind of resonance in the bridge.
Or, of course, you could just wait a few months until the local video rental place decides that they really don't need fifty copies of it anymore, and sells off forty of them at $10 each...
Similarly, I've seen people use prepaid gas station cards to pay for stuff, and not have the card's balance change in ten trips...
The US House just passed a bill that would reform the drug war seizure laws. (basically, if you're suspected of producing/distributing/possessing drugs, they can permanently confiscate your possessions in the name of investigating the drug charges. needless to say, this gets abused.) I'm not sure what exactly this bill would do, if passed into law (I've only read the introduction, which described it's purpose as "initiating reform". yeah, now *there's* a real measurable target. Alas, I forget the name of the bill, but at least someone in the government is making a token effort at paying attention to the lunacy that goes on in the name drug control.
My girlfriend (and a henchman) entered about 500 requests between the two of them for New Kids on the Block a few months ago as a protest to the "crap pop bands" you mentioned....NKotB made 2nd place on TRL...
Of course, they did it manually....
I'm not sure what exactly the story is called, but if I'm thinking of the same one you are, it's by Robert A. Heinlein and can be found in his(excellent) story collection "The Past Through Tomorrow". I'd include a link to Amazon, but I just checked there, and they say it's out of print.
I have a few objections to the essay...
1. A lot of us don't look for flash and novelty in our games as the definition of fun. Some of us will go play Half-Life at a friend's house for half an hour because he just got a Voodoo3 and wanted to show off, and then go home and play Nethack. And enjoy the latter more. Look at today's slashdot article on the Pac Man high score for lots of discussions on "classic" video games. On the other hand, many people *do* look for flash, so I can't fault him on this one.
2. The author seemed to think that stability in games is nothing more than a nice perq, saying that an annoying bug in a game will simply cause you to return the game and never buy from that company again. IMHO, it must not be a very engaging game, if you give it up for a bug and don't lament it. The games that are worth playing, you'll play despite the bugs (and home the company releases a patch). I don't know how many times I screamed in irritation after hours of Alpha Centauri (yes, I admit it, I play games on Win98. I'll go cower in shame for daring to say that on slashdot, I promise) on Iron Man mode (no saving in exchange for 2x score) only to have an invalid page fault pop up during the computer's turn. Yet I go back and play it again because it's *fun*. It's engaging...Engrossing...It may not be the flashiest thing in the world (and, indeed, the graphics are often quoted as the worst aspect of SMAC) but the gameplay is enjoyable, and the replay value is very high.
I think I had a few more, but I can't remember...Overall, it was a well-written essay.
This is true. If they're going to get it anyway, we (America) might as well be the ones to sell it to them. The advantages to this are twofold. First of all, it would allow our companies to reap the profits, and second, it would allow us to have some idea of what kind of stuff they're buying. (even if they only buy part of their collections from the US, it'll give us a better idea of what they have than if they buy none of it from us)
Your sig says "Open Source Anarcho-Capitalist". I invite anyone who knows something I don't to correct me on this, but anarchism is more or less another name for libertarian-socialism, and "anarcho-capitalist" is sort of a contradiction in terms. As in, a small, relatively unobtrusive government (the libertarian half) but with the workers owning the factories and other means of production (the socialist half).
Rousseau (not really an anarchist, I believe, but shares most of their views) says in his The Social Contract that
Rousseau goes on to discuss these terms, but, in general, emphasizes the points that a person only has a right to own as much as he needs to survive, and definitely not to more than he can use. He also discusses how even private property is not truly ownership, but merely stewardship, of an individual caring for certain property as a service to the community.
I believe that these beliefs on property rights -- only as much as you need -- are fairly standard to anarchism, whereas capitalism's property rights -- as much as you can earn or take and hold on to -- are very much *not* anarchist.
If anyone knows I am wrong (and I mean with evidence, not flames), I ask that you correct me on this.
Actually, I don't think dry ice has a normally occurring liquid state. (hence "dry") I believe that carbon dioxide is an example of a substance that sublimates, which, if I remember my chemistry right, means that it goes directly between solid and gaseous forms wihtout passing through the liquid stage. I imagine it is *possible* to get liquid carbon dioxide, but I don't think it's a naturally occurring thing.
I think what we want in this case is liquid nitrogen, rather than dry ice. Liquid N2 is great stuff. Dip in a raquetball, a flower, a mouse (no, I've not personally done the last), and it near-instatly becomes frozen solid (and fragile as glass). Which means that the sex offender monitors would spray the, ah, offending members with liquid nitrogen and then fire a bolt into the resulting chunk of ice....Smashing it cleanly into little pieces.
My girlfriend used to be a heavy caffeine drinker, (in this case, heavy == almost continuous during waking hours) including several times when she would go for three or four days at a time on nothing but black coffee.
One night she wound up in the hospital vomiting blood. They found out she had acquired an allergy to caffeine. Since then I've been a lot more moderate with my caffeine-guzzling...
Well, you can look at computers as a huge loss of productivity if you look at people like programmers and network admins. Someone from fifty years ago would look at the average programmer and say, "that person isn't doing anything useful." I mean, sitting there talking to a television screen with a bunch of buttons? And for what purpose? So that other people can talk to their television screens? Puh-leeze. Don't tell me that's actually useful.
Also, there's a productivity loss involved in redoing documents. When letters were typed rather than word processed, you had to retype the entire letter if you wanted to change it. If it was good enough, people said, "eh, it's good enough" and let it be. With a word processor, though, it's easy to make revisions. Just open your file, make your changes, print, and save. So people do a lot more revising than they did. "t may be good enough, but I just want to change this sentence. All right, done. No, wait, I don't like that font. All right, done. No, wait..." and so on.
But it's a huge productivity gain in other areas. I'd like to see someone crack RC5 without a computer, for example, or do any of the huge, physics- and math-related number crunching that computers are used for. It may be possible, but incredibly slower and probably more error prone than a computer. CAD is often easier than drafting by hand, and computer-controlled machining is faster and more precise -- when correctly programmed -- than hand machining.
...or lack thereof. I know many a college student (and even a few high schoolers) who have Palm Pilots, including myself. We use them for jotting down homework assignments, making notes of book titles that we need to look for on our next trip to the library, keeping track of profs' office hours, and keeping track of our lab group partners. What do the people who don't have Palm Pilots do? Write this information down on whatever piece of paper is handy. And lose it. At $180, my Palm is much too expensive for me to forget about, whereas a random piece of paper is fairly meaningless. Even if you don't lose the piece of paper, its a lot easier to pull up your assignments on the Palm Pilot than flip through your half-dozen notebooks until you find the page you wrote the information down on. I don't know if this can be defined as productivity, but it's definitely helpful and useful.
Of course, Quest and Breakout are useful for ultra-dull lectures, too...It's a combination of tool, toy, and, yes, geek status symbol. But just because it does all three doesn't mean it's particularly bad at the first.
Has anyone ever read the Four Lords of the Diamond series by Chalker (I think)? A rough overview: there's a solar system discovered which is home to a microscopic organism/force. This organism can be found within every cell of all living things (and I think within non-living things, too; it's been a while since I read it) and forms a fairly symbiotic relationship. Only thing is, if you leave the solar system, this organism dies, and you die with it, as all of your cells have become dependant on its presence. So, of course, the intergalactic government uses it as an inescapable prison system.
Some persons, however, are close enough to this organism to communicate with it. Through will and emotion they can instruct this organism which is a part of them. The organisms within them communicate with the organisms outside of them, transmitting the human user's will. The organisms in the target will manipulate their surroundings to comply with the user's desires.
For example, an Adept (as I believe they were called) by the name of (for example) Vader could direct his symbiotic organisms to reach out to the organisms in another person with the message, "cut off air supply", and the organisms in the target would cause the victim's windpipe to close (like Keanu's mouth melting shut in Matrix).
My point (as rambling as it may be) is that perhaps the Force can be found within everyone and everything. Doesn't Yoda say at one point that the Force is in everything? Perhaps control of the Force is a mental/emotional/spiritual ability. "The Force is strong in this one" could mean not that there is a lot of the Force present (as it is in everything) but that the combination of traits necessary to activate and control the Force is strong. The particles that Qui-Gon checks Anakin for could be indicators not of the Force itself, but indicators of activated Force.
Or, this could just be the product of too little sleep. More coffee....
I know that Trent Reznor (Nine Inch Nails) owns the Nothing label which he releases his/NIN's albums under. (Marilyn Manson and some other artists are on the label too)
However, I don't know enough to say whether this is an example of an artist owning the copyright for his/her/their own music, or if Nothing is just an intermediary and the label (and thus his music) is really owned by a larger label.
Anyone know anything about this?
Lets make a deal. If you can tell us what "thoughts that are righteous and pure" includes and does not include in a way that each and every /.er agrees with, then we'll all agree that we should teach children to focus on those things.
And I'll have you know up front that I consider sex and human sexuality to be right (if not righteous) and pure and that I consider censorship to be "impure" and definitely not righteous. We've already seen posts from /.ers who disagree with me on this. Therefore, we can see that it's impossible to empirically define "righteous and pure".
I have nothing against teaching my children to focus on "righteous and pure" ideals, but that includes protecting them from people who think that sex is somehow "dirty" and that anything related to sex should be hidden from their eyes and ears.
Forget the government, what about Microsoft? You'd have to buy service packs once a month or else the MS-Nanobots would extend little blades and start cutting all of your blood vessels. And the MS-Nanobots wouldn't be something you voluntarily purchase. MS would secretly pay Starbucks to dump these things in the coffee by the truckload. Not to mention paying Abercrombie and J. Crew to dust their clothes with them. (after all, if they can afford to spend that much on coffee and clothes, then MS can charge them anything they want...)
Of course, within a week, the FSF/OSS community would whip up GPL'd hunter-seeker nanobots that would kill MS 'bots on on sight, so we'd be all good....