Uh, no. It would be truly remarkable that a person could fly. Wait... that a person could appear floating in space at a distance... wait... that a person could survive being immolated in fire... wait... that we could control the energies of the atom... wait. That we could observe the beginnings of the universe... That groups of people could come together simultaneously from all parts of the globe to meet and communicate their opinions, without travelling. We could call it a forum!
You are using non-secret institutions to represent the entire government. Government is not a monolith, is it a heterogeneous collection of different institutions of varying degrees of competence, from the postal service to black ops and everything in between. The vast and incomprehensibly wealthy US gov is probably the most complex set of institutions on the planet.
By definition, you don't know anything about black ops, other than the gaping hole left by tens or even hundreds of billions of dollars in camouflaged funding. Senators on the right committees only have the right to know that they exist, nothing more. There's a measure of competence for you: they are knowable only by their absence in the public record.
Is it any surprise that the levels of security and embedded operations have been complexifying steadily since projects like Manhattan or Operation Paperclip? Given the sound evidence of secrecy, vast wealth and power and mandate, the warnings of Ike, and the traditions established in WWII, just what do you expect?
Also, consider this: given the choice between survival of certain loved ones and keeping a secret, which would you choose? Secrets aren't hard to manage if you operate by a different code.
As for the "Thanks for your custom!" Americans tend to think that US English is correct as opposed to England English. Ludicrous, I know, but it's the truth. I'm an American, but I actually did know the phrase. I learned it from "The Prisoner".
That's saddening, because it means you didn't learn it from the vast body of texts known as "literature," though you appear to be literate.
Ya I know... but I'm canadian, we [s]ay 'snarky', eh, and affect a vague phony queenie accent when we want to invoke elitism... ahh, stet, you wouldn't understand, it's a colony thing.
If Bush is a mass murderer then so was Wilson, FDR, Truman, Kennedy, LBJ, Nixon, Reagan, Bush Sr., and Clinton. Each called the military against another country and groups of people died. There's war, and there's war crimes. Even Robert McNamara admitted in 'The Fog of War,' with a haunted look and tears in his eyes, that the firebombing of Japan was a systematic war crime that he participated in -- but winning means you aren't held accountable.
Yeah well, considering the huge number of Chinese people living in Canada, whoever's launching these attacks should back the fuck off. I can't think of very many countries that are as welcoming to Chinese immigrants as Canada, because a significant portion of the world is (justifiably) pissed off / scared of them.
Me, I like Chinese food a lot:) The city of Richmond (part of Greater Vancouver) has an estimated 50% chinese population.
Someone once asked me to characterize Canadian food. After some thought, it occurred to me that the one thing that is available pretty much everywhere, in every small town, is a canadian version of the chinese diner, serving puffy battered shrimp, gristly sweet and sour pork and fried rice and fortune cookies for dessert. It really unifies the country, and it's not coincidental that they're particularly likely anywhere the railroad goes, because chinese semi-indentured workers were imported to build it.
So: anglicized cantonese food is the hallmark of canadian cuisine.
Dropping extra votes in the box could be done in a Canadian election, but it would be detected at the end of the day when the number of votes are compared to the number of voters and the number of ballots handed out. If there was a problem on a wide scale, it would be known, and presumably the election rerun. I've scrutineered in Canadian elections too. In the voting stations I've seen stuffing boxes would be extremely difficult, requiring the skills of an illusionist. People from different parties are present and vigilant, the procedures are sensible.
There's something very satisfying about counting paper ballots and watching it done. It's simple, clean, and easy to get right, and you can keep going right through a power outage. The whole e-voting thing is mystifying... why would citizens give up such basic checks and balances?
normal good people have things to hide, confidential and private matters that need protection. Good point: some of the things I might have to hide would be in order to protect others... they aren't my secrets to reveal. Discretion is a safety issue at worst, and a fundamental courtesy, at least.
Taking into consideration computer security issues, I think I'll pass. Why? There are already trojan horses for the brain, like religion; worms, like jingles and product design; and zero-day exploits like money, not to mention rootkits like crack. I'd say the average brain is worse off than an unpatched WinXP install hooked up to broadband with no firewall.
Without the ability to install properly open code, I suggest a good security patch, like zen, or some other semi-mystical skepticism.
These aren't wildebeests you can study secretly from a hidden blind. They're humans. You try to watch them in secret they are going to figure it out and find you. Yeah. So, let's wait until we can contact them without messing them up.
This reminds me of a story of an anthropologist who went into the jungles of Burma looking for a tribe that was unsullied by exposure to Western Civilization sometime in the 70's or early 80's.... It turns out that a group of missionaries were driven from China by the Communists in the early 50's and lived out their lives among this "uncontacted" tribe. That reminds me of meeting a chinese Kuomintang 'refugee' during the late '80's in the same region who lived an isolated tribal existence, thought that Nixon was going to return Chiang Kai Shek to power, and sacrificed a chicken in front of me to prove his sincerity. Culture is complex, and it gave me apocalyptic nightmares... I don't think we'd fare so well after the fall of civilization.
I just am guessing that these folk are living a life similar to the paleolithic, but it's likely, based on similar tribes, the evidence of their tech, etc. My point is that we can't afford to confirm it just yet. We need to stabilize the region, develop appropriate protocols for contact, and approach very carefully. We are NOT ready for contact.
I think what he is getting at isn't the details of the culture, like their music or language. Sure, though those things have intrinsic value in themselves, like a lost Bach canon or a Shang dynasty urn. What is useful for the planet as a whole is a people who have the opportunity to truly keep themselves separate from modernity and pursue a paleolithic existence. It's mindset, yes, and specific epistemologies like botanical use, and physiology, and the development of specific social relations under specific conditions. Later, when we can properly sustain contact without destroying what we observe, the information might save us all.
Isn't it a little arrogant for us to tell others how they have to live their lives a specific way just for our own benefit? Yes, it is.
Whether we judge our own way of life superior or inferior is one thing. When we make a choice for someone else, even to leave them alone for our benefit, that is still taking away their freedom to choose. And not deciding not to choose is itself a choice. Malarky. Contact, at present, means forcing our way of life on them... the worst parts of our way of life: cf. aboriginal populations all over the globe.
'Normal'? 'We need...'? Is everything about you? No, it's about the whole planet, starting with the hoo-mans, who happen to be able to incinerate the surface but incapable of a just and reasonable society, and unfamiliar with the very basic precautionary principle.
They're human beings. They should be given chance to assess their situation and make their own informed choices as they want. They're not an exhibit for our enjoyment, nor should they have to suffer penitence for our guilty consciences about our forefathers handling of such situations. Keeping them isolated is as arrogant as deciding they should be modernized. There is a middle way of lesser evil to tread perhaps. Yes, that's my point too. The question is how to give them that choice in a way that doesn't rapidly eliminate them?
We're simply unprepared to do it properly. I'm advocating waiting until we figure out how to actually give them a choice: no plague, no cargo cult, no seduction, no bribery, no greed, no propaganda or manifest destiny; just the facts. But who will present the facts of modern life to them in a relatively objective manner? Anthropologists have been struggling with this since Stanley Diamond's liberation anthropology proposals 45 years ago, and the James Clifford crowd haven't sorted it out yet. If the experts can't figure it out, our brightest and best, WTF can a slashdot thread accomplish? I say leave them alone until we actually grow up somewhat as a civilization. We're still sadly primitive, by our own standards.
This is either utterly incompetent or more threatening than terrorism. The ones we really have to worry about are pathological, and aren't going to show that craziness outwardly. Ultimately, this isn't based on real risks.
completely free of internal restraints, and your unhampered liberty to do just as you please, with no pangs of conscience, is conveniently invisible to the world.
That's from a typical definition of psychopath. Basically, a skilled liar right down to the subconscious, someone this camera system would never catch.
Catching actually dangerous sociopaths (rather than, say, annoying jerks) requires sociocultural skills, not geometry. This will just make life more miserable for the decent folk.
Let's not forget that these people represent a kind of norm. This biological form that we take right now more or less developed during the long Stone Age -- i.e. most of our unwritten history is in that way of life. It means that the roots of our culture, and perhaps the way our brains are organised, draw sustenance from this long period.
We need these people to be just who they are, unchanged, for our own understanding of ourselves.
The problem is the ethics of contact: do we withhold the benefits of civilization? Is modernization a fair process? It's easy to dismiss a preservationist approach as romanticizing the savage, from your abstracted armchair reality. But, live with tribal peoples for a while, and you realize that short of modern medicine and food surpluses, not only is it not so bad, it has distinct advantages as a lifestyle, and is not so different from our own.
Whatever. I expect them to be overrun, poisoned, shot, and assimilated, then held up as an example of the superiority of civilization.
Marx and Engels don't actually corner the market ('scuse the pun) in 21st century thinking about social power.
Current theory in power relations is heavily influenced by Foucault and structuralists and scholars like Frederic Jameson, and systems theorists like Bateson. Remember, context is everything, so that a person in one situation and moment can be abusing their power, and in the next be the abused, due to a shift in the 'story' or rules. The narratives of oppression, such as slavery or settler-aboriginal, are pretty persistent, and run through modern society in complex ways. Some people actually still think that way, and try to spread their ideas. Usually, the oppressed in any situation contributes to their own oppression through all kinds of denial, or unstrategic resistance. Privilege is often denied in polite situations to disguise embarassing responsibilities, which makes it harder to clear things up.
Ideology is like halitosis: it's someone else's problem.
I have this great photo of my spouse at 9.5 months pregnant in the pub hoisting a glass of stout... with the midwives. An hour later, our son was born.
At that very late stage of pregnancy a proper dose of nutritious alcohol isn't a bad thing, in fact it was just the thing to induce labour. But you should have seen the looks on the faces of the other customers! Especially as she put down the nearly empty glass, and got up to walk to the car, saying "it's time, aaah, go go go!"
Alcohol at any dose is primarily risky when the nervous system is forming, during the first trimester of pregnancy. After that, be very very careful, and at the end, it can be an aid. Like most things medicinal, it isn't cut and dry, and any laws to the contrary might have endangered our son, who needed to come out that day.
I have turned out with a high IQ score and have done quite well academically. My parents never pushed me toward it, and my redneck-middile-of-nowhere school didn't either. This was done completely on my own, and was only slightly complicated by my impoverished upbringing. It did make things difficult, but I motivated myself to overcome it. The same is not true, however, for my two younger siblings. Good point. Does economic success mark intelligence? You showed more than IQ in getting out of the situation.
I come from middle-class privilege (relatively--hard circumstances, broken family, stress and hellish problems, but enough money). My sister is of average intelligence but uneducated, and not curious; worked hard, got lucky, and could retire at age 40. I'm brainy in a weird way, sometimes scary smart to others, but hampered in other (nerdly) ways by that. I'm not interested in wealth, and have always been debtless but nearly broke.
Anyone comparing us would point to me as more "intelligent" yet not as smart as her. I concur, she's the smart one.
There's canny, there's clever, there's deep, there's skilled, there's insightful, there's eidetic memory, there's a bevy of words to describe intelligence. Likewise, there are many markers of success, and everything's context. Cue the zen koans; you can't puzzle this out with the simple matrix of genes - IQ - culture - class.
What took you so long? I had mine up and running in less that 30 minutes for the time I burnt the iso. OK, it was more like four. I had to find out about it, download it, burn it, read about it, pull out the old pc and look it over, find a second nic and put it in, install, fiddle. I actually had to read the documentation, it's more involved than Tomato and I ran into a couple of glitches (ok I'll turn in my geek card now). It was a project, and I timed from actual start to finish... and I got lucky hearing and learning about Tomato, so that went quickly.
I'm sure you're eliding some of the actual time you spent, people usually do.
Linksys WRT54GL: $60 Tomato firmware update, plus config: 2 hours.
Oldie but goodie PC: $60 + energy hogging linux, smoothwall: 5 hours router: $40 + config time.
Difference in function: negligible for almost any home user... except the frankenlinksys will run for hours on a UPS, let you tweak your wireless output, cost less TCO, be silent, last longer, take less space, less brainpower, and less time, and be generally a more elegant and efficient solution for the OP.
Slashdot Mirror
Uh, no. It would be truly remarkable that a person could fly. Wait... that a person could appear floating in space at a distance... wait... that a person could survive being immolated in fire... wait... that we could control the energies of the atom... wait. That we could observe the beginnings of the universe... That groups of people could come together simultaneously from all parts of the globe to meet and communicate their opinions, without travelling. We could call it a forum!
You are using non-secret institutions to represent the entire government. Government is not a monolith, is it a heterogeneous collection of different institutions of varying degrees of competence, from the postal service to black ops and everything in between. The vast and incomprehensibly wealthy US gov is probably the most complex set of institutions on the planet.
By definition, you don't know anything about black ops, other than the gaping hole left by tens or even hundreds of billions of dollars in camouflaged funding. Senators on the right committees only have the right to know that they exist, nothing more. There's a measure of competence for you: they are knowable only by their absence in the public record.
Is it any surprise that the levels of security and embedded operations have been complexifying steadily since projects like Manhattan or Operation Paperclip? Given the sound evidence of secrecy, vast wealth and power and mandate, the warnings of Ike, and the traditions established in WWII, just what do you expect?
Also, consider this: given the choice between survival of certain loved ones and keeping a secret, which would you choose? Secrets aren't hard to manage if you operate by a different code.
As for the "Thanks for your custom!" Americans tend to think that US English is correct as opposed to England English. Ludicrous, I know, but it's the truth. I'm an American, but I actually did know the phrase. I learned it from "The Prisoner".
That's saddening, because it means you didn't learn it from the vast body of texts known as "literature," though you appear to be literate.
Ya I know... but I'm canadian, we [s]ay 'snarky', eh, and affect a vague phony queenie accent when we want to invoke elitism... ahh, stet, you wouldn't understand, it's a colony thing.
"It IS vaguely rude. It's also elitist and [s]narky.
There. How could I resist?
Me, I like Chinese food a lot
Someone once asked me to characterize Canadian food. After some thought, it occurred to me that the one thing that is available pretty much everywhere, in every small town, is a canadian version of the chinese diner, serving puffy battered shrimp, gristly sweet and sour pork and fried rice and fortune cookies for dessert. It really unifies the country, and it's not coincidental that they're particularly likely anywhere the railroad goes, because chinese semi-indentured workers were imported to build it.
So: anglicized cantonese food is the hallmark of canadian cuisine.
There's something very satisfying about counting paper ballots and watching it done. It's simple, clean, and easy to get right, and you can keep going right through a power outage. The whole e-voting thing is mystifying... why would citizens give up such basic checks and balances?
"Malt does more than Milton can
To justify God's ways to Man"
Without the ability to install properly open code, I suggest a good security patch, like zen, or some other semi-mystical skepticism.
You don't have a very good grasp of the depth of oral traditions, or how complex a "primitive" system of knowledge is.
Our distant stone age ancestors weren't stupid; they just had different, but nevertheless sophisticated, information.
I just am guessing that these folk are living a life similar to the paleolithic, but it's likely, based on similar tribes, the evidence of their tech, etc. My point is that we can't afford to confirm it just yet. We need to stabilize the region, develop appropriate protocols for contact, and approach very carefully. We are NOT ready for contact.
We're simply unprepared to do it properly. I'm advocating waiting until we figure out how to actually give them a choice: no plague, no cargo cult, no seduction, no bribery, no greed, no propaganda or manifest destiny; just the facts. But who will present the facts of modern life to them in a relatively objective manner? Anthropologists have been struggling with this since Stanley Diamond's liberation anthropology proposals 45 years ago, and the James Clifford crowd haven't sorted it out yet. If the experts can't figure it out, our brightest and best, WTF can a slashdot thread accomplish? I say leave them alone until we actually grow up somewhat as a civilization. We're still sadly primitive, by our own standards.
This is either utterly incompetent or more threatening than terrorism. The ones we really have to worry about are pathological, and aren't going to show that craziness outwardly. Ultimately, this isn't based on real risks.
completely free of internal restraints, and your unhampered liberty to do just as you please, with no pangs of conscience, is conveniently invisible to the world.That's from a typical definition of psychopath. Basically, a skilled liar right down to the subconscious, someone this camera system would never catch.
Catching actually dangerous sociopaths (rather than, say, annoying jerks) requires sociocultural skills, not geometry. This will just make life more miserable for the decent folk.
Let's not forget that these people represent a kind of norm. This biological form that we take right now more or less developed during the long Stone Age -- i.e. most of our unwritten history is in that way of life. It means that the roots of our culture, and perhaps the way our brains are organised, draw sustenance from this long period.
We need these people to be just who they are, unchanged, for our own understanding of ourselves.
The problem is the ethics of contact: do we withhold the benefits of civilization? Is modernization a fair process? It's easy to dismiss a preservationist approach as romanticizing the savage, from your abstracted armchair reality. But, live with tribal peoples for a while, and you realize that short of modern medicine and food surpluses, not only is it not so bad, it has distinct advantages as a lifestyle, and is not so different from our own.
Whatever. I expect them to be overrun, poisoned, shot, and assimilated, then held up as an example of the superiority of civilization.
Marx and Engels don't actually corner the market ('scuse the pun) in 21st century thinking about social power.
Current theory in power relations is heavily influenced by Foucault and structuralists and scholars like Frederic Jameson, and systems theorists like Bateson. Remember, context is everything, so that a person in one situation and moment can be abusing their power, and in the next be the abused, due to a shift in the 'story' or rules. The narratives of oppression, such as slavery or settler-aboriginal, are pretty persistent, and run through modern society in complex ways. Some people actually still think that way, and try to spread their ideas. Usually, the oppressed in any situation contributes to their own oppression through all kinds of denial, or unstrategic resistance. Privilege is often denied in polite situations to disguise embarassing responsibilities, which makes it harder to clear things up.
Ideology is like halitosis: it's someone else's problem.
I have this great photo of my spouse at 9.5 months pregnant in the pub hoisting a glass of stout... with the midwives. An hour later, our son was born.
At that very late stage of pregnancy a proper dose of nutritious alcohol isn't a bad thing, in fact it was just the thing to induce labour. But you should have seen the looks on the faces of the other customers! Especially as she put down the nearly empty glass, and got up to walk to the car, saying "it's time, aaah, go go go!"
Alcohol at any dose is primarily risky when the nervous system is forming, during the first trimester of pregnancy. After that, be very very careful, and at the end, it can be an aid. Like most things medicinal, it isn't cut and dry, and any laws to the contrary might have endangered our son, who needed to come out that day.
I come from middle-class privilege (relatively--hard circumstances, broken family, stress and hellish problems, but enough money). My sister is of average intelligence but uneducated, and not curious; worked hard, got lucky, and could retire at age 40. I'm brainy in a weird way, sometimes scary smart to others, but hampered in other (nerdly) ways by that. I'm not interested in wealth, and have always been debtless but nearly broke.
Anyone comparing us would point to me as more "intelligent" yet not as smart as her. I concur, she's the smart one.
There's canny, there's clever, there's deep, there's skilled, there's insightful, there's eidetic memory, there's a bevy of words to describe intelligence. Likewise, there are many markers of success, and everything's context. Cue the zen koans; you can't puzzle this out with the simple matrix of genes - IQ - culture - class.
I had to find out about it, download it, burn it, read about it, pull out the old pc and look it over, find a second nic and put it in, install, fiddle. I actually had to read the documentation, it's more involved than Tomato and I ran into a couple of glitches (ok I'll turn in my geek card now). It was a project, and I timed from actual start to finish... and I got lucky hearing and learning about Tomato, so that went quickly.
I'm sure you're eliding some of the actual time you spent, people usually do.
Linksys WRT54GL: $60
Tomato firmware update, plus config: 2 hours.
Oldie but goodie PC: $60 + energy hogging
linux, smoothwall: 5 hours
router: $40 + config time.
Difference in function: negligible for almost any home user... except the frankenlinksys will run for hours on a UPS, let you tweak your wireless output, cost less TCO, be silent, last longer, take less space, less brainpower, and less time, and be generally a more elegant and efficient solution for the OP.
Oh yeah, and it's still linux.