I still regret not living in a dorm my first year or two of university
You didn't miss much...I have found that the social structure here is very similiar to high school.
Hmmm... I actually find it odd that you'd feel that way.
I spent 4 1/2 years living in a dorm, the last 1 1/2 after the dorm was wired for ethernet (which I helped do). And I would never have said it was like high school in any manner - about as different as you can get. Mainly because those groups of people that didn't want to be in HS and just caused trouble weren't present in college.
Just about ALL of the bad stuff about high school, to me at least, was gone from college. You didn't have the people going after you if you were different. Professors treated everyone like adults, not like kids they were paid to babysit. Busywork, which is so popular in public schools, was darn near non-existent.
And I'd encourage everyone to at least give the dorms a shot, especially with the internet access. There's nothing like having all of your friends on a couple floors in the same building, being able to all get together at a moment's notice. Having rather little cleaning, cooking, etc, to worry about.
I would have liked to have stayed there a few more years...:) ---
I hope MSNBC keeps that photo up for the story. It looks like Gates is yawning and Steve is on drugs or something... they both look pretty bad...
Hey, does anyone else think Steve looks anything like Drew's brother from The Drew Carey Show? I think it would be funny to see him in a dress, wig, and heels...:) ---
There are still people out there banning books like this (heck, some schools even talked about banning the Harry Potter books due to "witchcraft"),
lets not forget the banning the Bible in our schools and school library either.
Don't assume that it's a question of which book to ban - I'm against banning of any books.
But if you read them, you'll find the Bible has more objectionable material than pretty much any other banned book. It's chock full of violence, murder, sex, genocide, etc. Groups that ban books would ban any book where a man sleeps with his two daughers and has children with them in a second - unless that book has "Holy Bible" on the front.
If the 'enlightened' attitude of the majority of Slahdot readers is any indication of the future, I suggest we should be more concerned about going even further back when Christians were thrown to the lions
I don't want to do either. It's not an either/or situation, where you either toss the Christians to the lions or burn the witches. Any intolerance of the sort is wrong, regardless of where you get it (your mind, or from the "scriptures").
If you really think this country is more likely to persecute Christians than other religions, then I suggest you get out of whatever world your mind is in - you'll find reality more to your liking. ---
Seriously, just about anything "could" survive interstellar space, under the right conditions. (If you were to cryogenically preserve a human, and lob them out into interstellar space, they'd be just fine. Until they hit something, that is, at which point they'd fragment over the landscape and make a bit of a mess for the locals to clean up.)
You forget about the radiation levels out there. Without any atmosphere to shield them, they'd be subject to higher levels. Radiation will damage most organic tissue whether it's frozen or not.
Hurl a cryogenically preserved person into space, and if they aren't hurt from other sources, the radation would probably prevent their thawing. ---
In other news, ultra-Orthodox Rabbis have stated that thinking for yourself is a crime punishable by death and eternal damnation. When we asked a few ultra-Orthodox Jews, they all said "I do what the Rabbi says," except for the one who was dying of asphyxiation because a Rabbi told her that breathing was a bad thing for her and she stopped doing it.
The world changes. Pretending it's not happening and trying to ignore it isn't going to work, at least not for most people. (There are always people out there who will do anything authority tells them to) Let's just hope those kind of people don't get into governments. ---
Unless the cordone the computers off into little booths, I'm sure that there's plenty of precedence saying what is and what is not acceptable use.
You're free to rent your porn for a video store. You're free to buy any magazine you'd like. But the government (paid for with my taxes) should not have to pay forcomputers and internet access for libraries if in turn they are going to be used by people too poor to but their own magazines... \
Porns a freedom, not a right.
If there was a filter out there that JUST filtered out porn, this would be a different issue.
As it is, all of these filter sites make political and moral choices in their filtering. From sites such as the National Organization for Women, gay/les/bi/tg support sites, Wicca/witchcraft sites, etc. They all show very clear political (and often socially conservative) agendas.
Blocking those sites is the equivalent of a library having books against the gay lifestyle but not any in support, or the religion section covering only Christianity. ---
He does not believe that 2 women raising a child as a family unit is a proper environment, nor does he wish his child to be taught such. As a parent that is his right. And you can not flame him for his moral stance.
I don't know of any schools that have taught that... the only teachings I know of have been more of the factual type... "some people have a mom and dad, others have only a mom, or only a dad, or two moms or two dads"...
Hopefully he's teaching his children that just because Heather was two moms that it doesn't mean that Heather herself is a bad person, and that she can be made fun of...
I'm not going to get into the "morals" of whether a two-mother household is a proper environment. But just remember that the current "proper" family unit (mother, father, and children) is extremely new, and a few hundred years ago would probably have been considered very improper and immoral. ---
I dont want my 7 year old being taught "heather has two mommies" in school..
I know this is off topic, but I want to see what you mean about this...
Do you mean that when the kids talk about their parents, that you don't want your kid hearing that Heather has two mommies? Or you don't want your kid hearing that Heather is still ok even though she has two mommies? ---
In fact, "witchcraft" is the number one reason why books are banned. Sick, sad world.
It's all about religious intolerance. If you think about it, we've got a rich tradition of that... many of the early settlers in the US came from countries that had been practicing persecution of various religions, and many of the colonies set up over here due to persecution back in Europe just went ahead and did it themselves.
People have had to fight since the beginning to try and end this tradition. Every attempt to put prayer back in schools, or the Ten Commandments, is an attempt to go back to these days.
Sure, we're not killing "witches" anymore, but there are plenty of cases of Wiccan kids being suspended for wearing a Pentagram, of communities "protesting" Wiccans. Heck, when many conservative groups found out that Wiccans were allowed to perform their religious ceremonies in the military, large protests were held. Bush has even said that if he were president, he'd issue an executive order to end the Wiccan rituals. (i.e. make the military officialy discriminatory toward religion)
There are still people out there banning books like this (heck, some schools even talked about banning the Harry Potter books due to "witchcraft"), showing that it would likely be easy to fall back to the times when they burned witches. ---
Not the one's I've seen... they talk about being for less government, until you come to laws on morality, where they could probably list thousands they'd like to see passed. ---
I said crack because high-powered cocaine (and, obviously, opiates) are without question the most likely 'victimless' drugs to actually cause victims- either in the form of physical addiction that some people never escape, or in the form of criminal acts performed to get the money for more crack or opiates.
Do you know why crack is around? Two reasons - it allows dealers to divide their supply of cocaine up even more, and get more money from it. And because it can be sold for cheap, and most poor drug users can't afford real cocaine so they use crack. It's used because it's a cheap high.
The legalization of cocaine would very likely reduce the number of people taking crack, and even more the number of future users, since they would be able to afford other things. Thus they would get away from this highly dangerous stuff. ---
'll definitely not be voting republican. I can't stand the way they like to legislate morality. McCain is especially bad about this, but Bush isn't much better. Then there's Forbes saying that the DOJ shouldn't go after Microsoft. No chance of him getting my vote.
You think they're bad? Go check out Gary Bauer's views. His campaign motto could be called "fighting against freedom and civil rights". I think I'd rather have Pat Buchanan in office than him... and I think Pat himself needs to be stranded in the middle of that African country with the murderous dictator he did business with... ---
Correct! We should treat all taxes the same.. by eliminating them all! And NOT taxing the internet is a good way to start.
Hey! Great idea!
No government, no military, no police, no fire department, no highway department! And nothing you can do when the local MegaCorp dumps a load of nuclear waste into the nearby river...
Heck, let's even sell off the military equipment, and return the money to the people! Might suck when Saddam uses the newly purchased ICBMs to nuke us into a huge wasteland, but at least you're not paying any taxes. ---
They didn't ask what Harry Browne thinks, but I bet I can guess. How are most slashdot readers planing to vote? Almost every geek I know is a libertarian, though many don't realize it.
I disagree. While a large majority would probably be interested in a libertarian candidate, they'd only do so for so long, until government has been shrunk enough. The eventual end-product of libertarianism, which seems to be a government of three people in a wooden shack and a totally unregulated country doesn't appeal to me - the government is probably the only thing keeping the country by being run by SuperCorp, the mass merger of all corporations, that would be in control of everything. I really don't want to pay an Oxygen bill to them... ---
No, but he did play professional basketball... however, that does not make him black.
Interestingly, the only African-American candidate on the list, Alan Keyes, also seems to be one of the most conservative. After I took the poll, he was at the bottom. With a score of 4. Only 4. I can tell that if his views determined where this country was going, I'd be going to another country. But I guess I'm an extremely liberal person (80 for Ralph Nader, 79 for Bill Bradley). ---
It's estimated that 15%-20% of all human conceptions end in spontaneous abortion or stillbirth.
Actually, you're VERY low on that number.
The actual statistics that I've heard from a variety of sources is that 75%-90% of all fertilized human eggs never make it to birth. This includes everything from eggs that don't implant in the uterus, to spontaneous rejection by the body (the mother's body isn't exactly open and friendly to an embryo), to DNA that turns out to be unworkable or incompatible.
So for every person born, 3-9 possible humans died after conception. ---
So no, I don't distrust science per se, but I do kinda cringe when scientists start dicking around with things they know very little of.
Then do you even understand what science is about? They play with what they don't know much about so that they can learn about it and increase that knowledge.
If they stuck to what they knew about, then how would they ever learn anything? You might get a little bit more familiar with it, find out a few details, but never make any big breakthroughs when everything you work with is well explored.
Heck, if they stuck to what they knew from the beginning, we'd never have gotten anywhere. Even which foods we can eat have been discovered through trying what they didn't know.
If we could keep the politicians and buisinesspeople out of it, then we would see it screwed up and abused. ---
So don't get bent out of shape over the use of "Christmas". If the sacred holiday of Christmas isn't part of your belief system, then insert whatever celebration is appropriate for you. (Especially for those of you who don't get a day off on or around 25 Dec., and therefore don't like thinking of it as "the holiday season".)
Perhaps just treat the Winter Solstice as the main holiday and let the various religions refer to it by their own names? You don't need a religion to get into the spirit of giving and the like. And besides, Christmas is a direct descendant of the old pagan celebrations for the Winter Solstice, as when they were (forcerfully) converted they didn't want to give up their celebration around that time of the year, so the supposed birthdate of the god Mithra was commandeered to celebrate as the birthday of Jesus. ---
Re:I would have taken the $500k and here's why..
on
No EToy for Christmas
·
· Score: 3
You make it sound like it's acceptable to make etoy.com change their name because otherwise etoys.com might lose some business, and it won't bother etoy.com as much to make the change. That's utter BS. etoy.com was around long beforehand, and they shouldn't have to change just because they didn't think about the future and pay attention to similar domain names.
The law isn't about causing the least trouble. If the president of the US came up and shot you in the head, should the court that he/she shouldn't have to go to jail because it'll cause much more trouble than is we just let him/her go?
The law is supposed to stand up for what is right, regardless of who's inconvienced. It's the principal of the matter. Big companies don't get to take things from little people just because it might be annoying for them if they don't have it.
You don't build a huge supermarket in a small lot and then try to force nearby businesses to give you their lots just because otherwise you'd have to go somewhere else or build a smaller market. ---
The WTO helps keep special interests from using vote-based so-called democracy to preserve their past advantages against progess and the future.
No, the WTO is about taking laws to the lowest common denominator for the purpose of "free trade". Environmental laws, health regulations, and other things along these lines have all been considered as "trade barriers" by the WTO. Decided by small, back-room decisions with no accountability.
I'm all for world trade. I'm far from a "luddite" as you claim the anti-WTO people to be. But I'm not for allowing corporations to decide that laws passed for the good of the people should be removed because it keeps them from raking in more money. The WTO's goals are for corporate greed, and little else. ---
Sure it has a lot to do with intellectual property, but the WTO protests are more about keeping the environmental and labor legislative power out of the hands of the 500 or so global corporations that dominate the international trade scene. Insurrection is the only way to go.
The WTO has been making some amazing claims as to what constitutes a "trade barrier". Often environmental and health laws fit into this territory - did you know that the WTO considered the whole "doplhin-safe tuna" thing in the US to be a trade barrier? Last I knew, companies weren't even allowed to advertise their tuna as dolphin-safe (though I haven't looked at a can of tuna to double check).
There's nothing wrong with globalization. There are, however, numerous things wrong with the "backroom deal" method that the WTO is using. ---
"I think some people use their imaginations a bit too much."
I wonder if the guy really thought about it before saying this. I have a REALLY hard time with the idea that this is even possible? Use your imagination TOO much? Heck, even a few years ago someone probably might have said the same thing about what he's doing now.
It's the people that use their imagination a lot that push the envelope of what we can do, and what we even think about trying to do.
I know it's a minor nitpick with the article, but it really got under my skin.
PS. On a side note was anyone else a little disapointed with the outcome of the X-files/Millenium cross over? I thought it was a rather ignoble end of Frank Black and what he did. Still I think he got off lucky. He would have been put in jail for being too "into" death and murder anyway.
It wasn't what I wanted, but then again, what I want is to be able to spend those Friday evenings with the lights off, the TV on, and being totally creeped out every week by Milennium - IMHO, one of the best TV series I've ever seen.
I guess I feel it was worth it just to see Frank Black again, to hear that creepy Millenium-music, to hear them talk about the Millenium Group, and to see that cute little girl on the screen again. I actually thought for a little bit they might give us ex-Millenium fans a early Christmas gift of wrapping up the loose-ends that the series wasn't able to (because of it's sudden ending). Nope, no such luck - answered absolutely nothing. ---
Slashdot Mirror
You've just got to learn to ignore people (possibly using technological means) who do not stand behind their words with a reputation.
Hmmm... does Slashdot need to offer users personal killfiles? So we can eliminate from our view the posts from people who bother us continually?
---
I still regret not living in a dorm my first year or two of university
:)
You didn't miss much...I have found that the social structure here is very similiar to high school.
Hmmm... I actually find it odd that you'd feel that way.
I spent 4 1/2 years living in a dorm, the last 1 1/2 after the dorm was wired for ethernet (which I helped do). And I would never have said it was like high school in any manner - about as different as you can get. Mainly because those groups of people that didn't want to be in HS and just caused trouble weren't present in college.
Just about ALL of the bad stuff about high school, to me at least, was gone from college. You didn't have the people going after you if you were different. Professors treated everyone like adults, not like kids they were paid to babysit. Busywork, which is so popular in public schools, was darn near non-existent.
And I'd encourage everyone to at least give the dorms a shot, especially with the internet access. There's nothing like having all of your friends on a couple floors in the same building, being able to all get together at a moment's notice. Having rather little cleaning, cooking, etc, to worry about.
I would have liked to have stayed there a few more years...
---
I hope MSNBC keeps that photo up for the story. It looks like Gates is yawning and Steve is on drugs or something... they both look pretty bad...
:)
Hey, does anyone else think Steve looks anything like Drew's brother from The Drew Carey Show? I think it would be funny to see him in a dress, wig, and heels...
---
There are still people out there banning books like this (heck, some schools even talked about banning the Harry Potter books due to "witchcraft"),
lets not forget the banning the Bible in our schools and school library either.
Don't assume that it's a question of which book to ban - I'm against banning of any books.
But if you read them, you'll find the Bible has more objectionable material than pretty much any other banned book. It's chock full of violence, murder, sex, genocide, etc. Groups that ban books would ban any book where a man sleeps with his two daughers and has children with them in a second - unless that book has "Holy Bible" on the front.
If the 'enlightened' attitude of the majority of Slahdot readers is any indication of the future, I suggest we should be more concerned about going even further back when Christians were thrown to the lions
I don't want to do either. It's not an either/or situation, where you either toss the Christians to the lions or burn the witches. Any intolerance of the sort is wrong, regardless of where you get it (your mind, or from the "scriptures").
If you really think this country is more likely to persecute Christians than other religions, then I suggest you get out of whatever world your mind is in - you'll find reality more to your liking.
---
Seriously, just about anything "could" survive interstellar space, under the right conditions. (If you were to cryogenically preserve a human, and lob them out into interstellar space, they'd be just fine. Until they hit something, that is, at which point they'd fragment over the landscape and make a bit of a mess for the locals to clean up.)
You forget about the radiation levels out there. Without any atmosphere to shield them, they'd be subject to higher levels. Radiation will damage most organic tissue whether it's frozen or not.
Hurl a cryogenically preserved person into space, and if they aren't hurt from other sources, the radation would probably prevent their thawing.
---
In other news, ultra-Orthodox Rabbis have stated that thinking for yourself is a crime punishable by death and eternal damnation. When we asked a few ultra-Orthodox Jews, they all said "I do what the Rabbi says," except for the one who was dying of asphyxiation because a Rabbi told her that breathing was a bad thing for her and she stopped doing it.
The world changes. Pretending it's not happening and trying to ignore it isn't going to work, at least not for most people. (There are always people out there who will do anything authority tells them to) Let's just hope those kind of people don't get into governments.
---
Unless the cordone the computers off into little booths, I'm sure that there's plenty of precedence saying what is and what is not acceptable use.
You're free to rent your porn for a video store. You're free to buy any magazine you'd like. But the government (paid for with my taxes) should not have to pay forcomputers and internet access for libraries if in turn they are going to be used by people too poor to but their own magazines... \
Porns a freedom, not a right.
If there was a filter out there that JUST filtered out porn, this would be a different issue.
As it is, all of these filter sites make political and moral choices in their filtering. From sites such as the National Organization for Women, gay/les/bi/tg support sites, Wicca/witchcraft sites, etc. They all show very clear political (and often socially conservative) agendas.
Blocking those sites is the equivalent of a library having books against the gay lifestyle but not any in support, or the religion section covering only Christianity.
---
He does not believe that 2 women raising a child as a family unit is a proper environment, nor does he wish his child to be taught such. As a parent that is his right. And you can not flame him for his moral stance.
I don't know of any schools that have taught that... the only teachings I know of have been more of the factual type... "some people have a mom and dad, others have only a mom, or only a dad, or two moms or two dads"...
Hopefully he's teaching his children that just because Heather was two moms that it doesn't mean that Heather herself is a bad person, and that she can be made fun of...
I'm not going to get into the "morals" of whether a two-mother household is a proper environment. But just remember that the current "proper" family unit (mother, father, and children) is extremely new, and a few hundred years ago would probably have been considered very improper and immoral.
---
I dont want my 7 year old being taught "heather has two mommies" in school..
I know this is off topic, but I want to see what you mean about this...
Do you mean that when the kids talk about their parents, that you don't want your kid hearing that Heather has two mommies? Or you don't want your kid hearing that Heather is still ok even though she has two mommies?
---
In fact, "witchcraft" is the number one reason why books are banned. Sick, sad world.
It's all about religious intolerance. If you think about it, we've got a rich tradition of that... many of the early settlers in the US came from countries that had been practicing persecution of various religions, and many of the colonies set up over here due to persecution back in Europe just went ahead and did it themselves.
People have had to fight since the beginning to try and end this tradition. Every attempt to put prayer back in schools, or the Ten Commandments, is an attempt to go back to these days.
Sure, we're not killing "witches" anymore, but there are plenty of cases of Wiccan kids being suspended for wearing a Pentagram, of communities "protesting" Wiccans. Heck, when many conservative groups found out that Wiccans were allowed to perform their religious ceremonies in the military, large protests were held. Bush has even said that if he were president, he'd issue an executive order to end the Wiccan rituals. (i.e. make the military officialy discriminatory toward religion)
There are still people out there banning books like this (heck, some schools even talked about banning the Harry Potter books due to "witchcraft"), showing that it would likely be easy to fall back to the times when they burned witches.
---
.. aren't conservatives for LESS government?
Not the one's I've seen... they talk about being for less government, until you come to laws on morality, where they could probably list thousands they'd like to see passed.
---
I said crack because high-powered cocaine (and, obviously, opiates) are without question the most likely 'victimless' drugs to actually cause victims- either in the form of physical addiction that some people never escape, or in the form of criminal acts performed to get the money for more crack or opiates.
Do you know why crack is around? Two reasons - it allows dealers to divide their supply of cocaine up even more, and get more money from it. And because it can be sold for cheap, and most poor drug users can't afford real cocaine so they use crack. It's used because it's a cheap high.
The legalization of cocaine would very likely reduce the number of people taking crack, and even more the number of future users, since they would be able to afford other things. Thus they would get away from this highly dangerous stuff.
---
'll definitely not be voting republican. I can't stand the way they like to legislate morality. McCain is especially bad about this, but Bush isn't much better. Then there's Forbes saying that the DOJ shouldn't go after Microsoft. No chance of him getting my vote.
You think they're bad? Go check out Gary Bauer's views. His campaign motto could be called "fighting against freedom and civil rights". I think I'd rather have Pat Buchanan in office than him... and I think Pat himself needs to be stranded in the middle of that African country with the murderous dictator he did business with...
---
Correct! We should treat all taxes the same.. by eliminating them all! And NOT taxing the internet is a good way to start.
Hey! Great idea!
No government, no military, no police, no fire department, no highway department! And nothing you can do when the local MegaCorp dumps a load of nuclear waste into the nearby river...
Heck, let's even sell off the military equipment, and return the money to the people! Might suck when Saddam uses the newly purchased ICBMs to nuke us into a huge wasteland, but at least you're not paying any taxes.
---
They didn't ask what Harry Browne thinks, but I bet I can guess. How are most slashdot readers planing to vote? Almost every geek I know is a libertarian, though many
don't realize it.
I disagree. While a large majority would probably be interested in a libertarian candidate, they'd only do so for so long, until government has been shrunk enough. The eventual end-product of libertarianism, which seems to be a government of three people in a wooden shack and a totally unregulated country doesn't appeal to me - the government is probably the only thing keeping the country by being run by SuperCorp, the mass merger of all corporations, that would be in control of everything. I really don't want to pay an Oxygen bill to them...
---
Bill Bradley, is that the African-American?
No, but he did play professional basketball... however, that does not make him black.
Interestingly, the only African-American candidate on the list, Alan Keyes, also seems to be one of the most conservative. After I took the poll, he was at the bottom. With a score of 4. Only 4. I can tell that if his views determined where this country was going, I'd be going to another country. But I guess I'm an extremely liberal person (80 for Ralph Nader, 79 for Bill Bradley).
---
There is a web site dedicated to body modification of all sorts... there are people who have done things to even make this a bit tame.
Body Modification E-Zine, at www.bme.freeq.com, is dedicated to this.
A warning before you look, however - it's not a place for the squeamish. There is some really odd stuff, especially in the extreme section.
---
It's estimated that 15%-20% of all human conceptions end in spontaneous abortion or stillbirth.
Actually, you're VERY low on that number.
The actual statistics that I've heard from a variety of sources is that 75%-90% of all fertilized human eggs never make it to birth. This includes everything from eggs that don't implant in the uterus, to spontaneous rejection by the body (the mother's body isn't exactly open and friendly to an embryo), to DNA that turns out to be unworkable or incompatible.
So for every person born, 3-9 possible humans died after conception.
---
So no, I don't distrust science per se, but I do kinda cringe when scientists start dicking around with things they know very little of.
Then do you even understand what science is about? They play with what they don't know much about so that they can learn about it and increase that knowledge.
If they stuck to what they knew about, then how would they ever learn anything? You might get a little bit more familiar with it, find out a few details, but never make any big breakthroughs when everything you work with is well explored.
Heck, if they stuck to what they knew from the beginning, we'd never have gotten anywhere. Even which foods we can eat have been discovered through trying what they didn't know.
If we could keep the politicians and buisinesspeople out of it, then we would see it screwed up and abused.
---
So don't get bent out of shape over the use of "Christmas". If the sacred holiday of Christmas isn't part of your belief system, then insert whatever celebration is appropriate for you. (Especially for those of you who don't get a day off on or around 25 Dec., and therefore don't like thinking of it as "the holiday season".)
Perhaps just treat the Winter Solstice as the main holiday and let the various religions refer to it by their own names? You don't need a religion to get into the spirit of giving and the like. And besides, Christmas is a direct descendant of the old pagan celebrations for the Winter Solstice, as when they were (forcerfully) converted they didn't want to give up their celebration around that time of the year, so the supposed birthdate of the god Mithra was commandeered to celebrate as the birthday of Jesus.
---
You make it sound like it's acceptable to make etoy.com change their name because otherwise etoys.com might lose some business, and it won't bother etoy.com as much to make the change. That's utter BS. etoy.com was around long beforehand, and they shouldn't have to change just because they didn't think about the future and pay attention to similar domain names.
The law isn't about causing the least trouble. If the president of the US came up and shot you in the head, should the court that he/she shouldn't have to go to jail because it'll cause much more trouble than is we just let him/her go?
The law is supposed to stand up for what is right, regardless of who's inconvienced. It's the principal of the matter. Big companies don't get to take things from little people just because it might be annoying for them if they don't have it.
You don't build a huge supermarket in a small lot and then try to force nearby businesses to give you their lots just because otherwise you'd have to go somewhere else or build a smaller market.
---
The WTO helps keep special interests from using vote-based so-called democracy to preserve their past advantages against progess and the future.
No, the WTO is about taking laws to the lowest common denominator for the purpose of "free trade". Environmental laws, health regulations, and other things along these lines have all been considered as "trade barriers" by the WTO. Decided by small, back-room decisions with no accountability.
I'm all for world trade. I'm far from a "luddite" as you claim the anti-WTO people to be. But I'm not for allowing corporations to decide that laws passed for the good of the people should be removed because it keeps them from raking in more money. The WTO's goals are for corporate greed, and little else.
---
Sure it has a lot to do with intellectual property, but the WTO protests are more about keeping the environmental and labor legislative power out of the hands of the 500 or so global corporations that dominate the international trade scene. Insurrection is the only way to go.
The WTO has been making some amazing claims as to what constitutes a "trade barrier". Often environmental and health laws fit into this territory - did you know that the WTO considered the whole "doplhin-safe tuna" thing in the US to be a trade barrier? Last I knew, companies weren't even allowed to advertise their tuna as dolphin-safe (though I haven't looked at a can of tuna to double check).
There's nothing wrong with globalization. There are, however, numerous things wrong with the "backroom deal" method that the WTO is using.
---
"I think some people use their imaginations a bit too much."
I wonder if the guy really thought about it before saying this. I have a REALLY hard time with the idea that this is even possible? Use your imagination TOO much? Heck, even a few years ago someone probably might have said the same thing about what he's doing now.
It's the people that use their imagination a lot that push the envelope of what we can do, and what we even think about trying to do.
I know it's a minor nitpick with the article, but it really got under my skin.
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PS. On a side note was anyone else a little disapointed with the outcome of the X-files/Millenium cross over? I thought it was a rather ignoble end of Frank Black and what he did. Still I think he got off lucky. He would have been put in jail for being too "into" death and murder anyway.
It wasn't what I wanted, but then again, what I want is to be able to spend those Friday evenings with the lights off, the TV on, and being totally creeped out every week by Milennium - IMHO, one of the best TV series I've ever seen.
I guess I feel it was worth it just to see Frank Black again, to hear that creepy Millenium-music, to hear them talk about the Millenium Group, and to see that cute little girl on the screen again. I actually thought for a little bit they might give us ex-Millenium fans a early Christmas gift of wrapping up the loose-ends that the series wasn't able to (because of it's sudden ending). Nope, no such luck - answered absolutely nothing.
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