The second world does have some high end labor, at least.
So the skipping can and does happen. Indeed, arguably most 3rd world countries have been first world or 2nd world at some time, and have simply fallen to larger nations -- and pay tribute, via the IMF, equal to most of their production.
Ummm.... America should take a lesson. At one time, the Middle East was very much the center of the world, culturally, militarily, educationally, and even (quite long ago) technologically. There isn't a lot that corruption can't destroy, and a "taking" attitude (as opposed to a building attitude) breeds corruption like crazy.
My brother worked for a US IT company, and they came around with such a horror contract.
In the past, my brother simply crosses out the offending parts, and signs it. He then points out that (a) the provisions are illegal by court rules, (b) the company is foolish to be making contracts that are unenforceable, and (c) he would be foolish to sign things that are confusingly unenforceable that he doesn't intend to follow.
Essentially, too much confusion is bad for business.
The company, the last time, came back by saying that it is required in the terms of their bank loans. My brother, being aware that they are in a financial morass, tends to believe it.
It remains very interesting that the banks, not content with seizing the companies, would appear to be attempting to get documents that would seize the workers as slaves, too -- even though the current laws forbid that. I can't help but notice how, in Argentina, the banks were very successful at changing the laws; thus, I tend to think that there may be some kind of a plan in the works.
On the good side, the Bible has a ton to say about people who think they can do this and survive their own stupid power mongering. Since I have yet to see the wisdom in the Bible be wrong in the long term, I rather expect that (at best) I don't really understand what is going on, or (at worst) our illustrious banker owners will face the consequences inherent in their decisions. Meanwhile, though, I and my brother will take lousy jobs rather than sign false contracts.
.... all time patent thief: Edison, and the Incandescent Lightbulb.
Quoted, interestingly, as saying that Tesla would never be a great inventor, "because he doesn't know how to steal."
Now go to Scientific American -- you'll have to do some research, but I'm thinking it was around 1982 or so -- and you will find that in his notebook he has pasted on one page an article about how a British man had successfully made a long-lasting lightbulb by using a strand of carbon fiber. On the next page, Edison has written "It Works!"
Now look up patent history on the lightbulb. Edison fought him into *poverty* over that patent, and eventually won an agreement that the British man would get the patent in Britain, and Edison would get the patent for the rest of the world. That same story has played out again and again; there are companies that do nothing but patent ideas they think are coming, and then later go and hit the real developers over the head for money.
Patent law *discourages* innovation; it doesn't encourage innovation.
Patents as squeezing out small businesses: Spend $13 and buy "The Incredible Secret Money Machine" by Don Lancaster (also author of The CMOS Cookbook). Or go to www.tinaja.com for a web-based version of the same. He points out that patents are easy for the big players to squeeze by, simply through finding historical artwork that looks similar -- if you have the money to do a good search. At the same time, they are deadly for a small business to work with. That is, if you get a patent, and a big company steals it, you will be bankrupted fighting them, even if they are completely in the wrong. My experience has been as he described: that patents are not the way to go. Competitiveness is.
Triviality of some patents: http://www.infoworld.com/articles/hn/xml/00/12/15/ 001215hnbtprodigy.xml?p=br&s=5
Clear evidence of an oligopoly? Consider BT's 15000 patents, one of which they discovered was the hyperlink.
Patents as anticompetitive device: Encyclopedia of Britannica. Look at the history of patents. They were used historically to benefit friends of the throne, in conjunction with copyrights which were used to censor. Note that this does not fall under common law.
Patents as anticompetitive, and economically disasterous: Look at what the drug companies are doing, prohibiting "parallel importation" of drugs -- meaning that they set a price of $13/dose in one country, $2/dose in another, and people are not allowed to go to the $2 country to get the cheaper medicine, nor to import it from the cheaper source. This is just a means to bleed countries white.
Patents as against natural law: point out that when governments try to legislate the impossible, they lose respect and drive civil disorder. One of the impossible things about patents is that it claims that once you release an idea, you can control what other people do with it. This is more obvious with the copyright actually, as people violate them all the time (witness Kazaa! -- though I don't do this). But when you have laws that benefit those of ill intent, you drive social decay.
I doubt that any of this will have positive effect -- the large corporations are too good at subverting justice. But not to worry -- evil empires don't last long.
Back in 95 I wrote a 3D panel-drawing program, but the Binary Spatial Partition code was in C, and on a 25MHz 486 was just too slow. So I decided to write my own practice OS.
Well, I didn't get that far, but I *did* make a neat little 4-k program called "Machine Shop". Machine Shop rode on top of DOS (really only needed BIOS), and would handle virtual memory functions, but also made it easy to make modular algorithms and modular data sets, swapping them to the hard disk in an intelligent fashion as memory was needed. One neat thing was that it used IRET to call in both directions. That is, if you wanted to call a Machine Shop function, you set your variables and used IRET. When Machine Shop wanted to call the app, it set its variables and gave an IRET. It worked fine, but was nonconventional. It was just a way to make sure that the same call was always used, and was easy to identify.
One other characteristic was that each module also came with its own documentation (input, output, data specs, algorithm, and what it does).
Once you get the modular down, then spec changes really aren't a problem.
--> Oh... and DOS Debug was awesome. I didn't have the money for MASM, so I did my ASM programming with DOS Debug. When I decided I wanted a few variables, I just wrote a substitution algorithm, and combined that with.BAT files to make my own microassembler. It worked nicely, but took a few minutes.
[Caveat: IANAL, L="leg://washington.dc.Lobbyist"] It seems to me that this is done all the time for things like NAFTA, WTO, and who knows what else -- specifically because legislators almost never even bother to read the bills they sponsor.
A group of wealthy whatevers (often not businessmen, so much as a club) set up a "commission" to debate the laws, with the assumption that the laws should be passed once they come up with it.
Then they submit the laws to a Congressional committee, and get the ball rolling. The Congressmen debate it based upon what they are told to say in their "talking points", but don't bother to read it.
If the group is really good, I suspect that they might seed the ground by *also* providing the opposition side with straw-man talking points, but that probably happens very little in real life.
But it won't work for you that way, unless you and your friends all regularly give large amounts of money to the Congressmen, and thus actually have their ear. The most you can do is go to your Congressman's town meeting, and "petition your government". Which is not nothing, but it's not nearly as good as being able to author your own legislation.
... that they are trying to program playing patterns as well as actual openings and direct responses.
It seems to me that the best way of storing such information is still the good old pointer tree, much the same way as Huffman encoding trees are built.
Couple of things --
(1) Stephen King died exactly this way back in November.
(2) Stephen King lives alternately in Fla (his home) and sometimes vacations in Britain, from what I've heard
(3) No news of this on any of the Stephen King websites
(4) I'm sure that any fans of his Dark Tower series *already* miss him (Hey, publishers, would you hurry up with "Wolves of...." already?]
Did you by any chance happen to read the Tolkein trilogy? If you had, you would know that the trilogy doesn't end at the first book.
[ listen closely -- you'll hear millions of slashdotters saying...duh...]
So the movie pretty much follows the first book of the trilogy.
I suggest you read the books. But start at The Hobbit. It makes a wonderful prequel to the series.
The Hobbit (prequel to LOTR) The Fellowhip of the Rings (LOTR I) The Two Towers (LOTR II) The Return of the King (LOTR III) Silmarillon (History, trivia of Tolkein's midworld. As fun as reading an encyclopedia upsidedown and backwards word by word, in my opinion, but if you *really* want to learn to read Elfin runecharacters, and know the history...)
In the Bible, there is a prohibition against attempting to "accelerate" (force forward in time) God's processes. In such a way, it was not acceptable for Jews to return after the Babylonian exile before God's time; rather, they were to go to Babylon, work for the good of Babylon, and await God's timing for their return. The same might be noted of Moses striking the rock twice, or even the children worshipping the golden calf. In each case, they were impatient with God's timing, to their own sorrow.
Considering that Israel has to fight the Palestinians, and there do not appear to be any valid prophets at the moment, how exactly do Israelis determine *what is God's time* for their return from this 2000-year dispersion, and what might simply their own attempt to force the issue (based on fears, nationalism, hope, and such)?
And how might the issue of rebuilding the temple (or not) fit into all this, if at all (or is that a different question entirely)?
Third world is *our* fault, not theirs
on
Project Eden
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· Score: 1
It seems to me that you are saying that in the name of environmentalism we should wipe out the Aracuna Indians, the Maori aborigines, and essentially anyone else who isn't a rich European/American novo-colonialist.
I call it novo-colonialism, because all the IMF is, is a perfection of last century's colonialism -- taking the profits unjustly so that we can spend it all on our wasteful living, while keeping the natives enslaved, all without any risk to ourselves [that was the major problem, the last century. Too many boxer-rebellions, too many battles in which we forgot the screwdrivers to the ammo boxes.]
Quite frankly, though, if bioweapons are developed, they most likely won't be developed by the 3rd world, and they most likely won't be used on the third world. They'll be aimed by the 2nd place nation at the 1st place nation, or vice versa.
I, for one, honestly hope that we don't develop them, that we never use such things, and that we simply start acting a little more responsibly.
As a final comment, please don't let a difficult situation drive you despair, and in turn to evil.
Murderous thoughts are evil.
What I mean by my Subject title is that the first generation of stars produced the heavier elements that we see today in their death throes. That is, the shock wave blasts created pockets of fusion that created lumps of Nickel, carbon, oxygen, and so on.
But those stars were giants, and -- even if life had developed out of hydrogen -- the shockwave blasts would surely have killed off that round of life. Not only that, but that first generation of stars was relatively short-lived, so there was less time available to develop life, out of less complexity. [If it did develop, I would suspect that it would develop within the stars rather than within the H2 gas clouds, and would be massively energetic, but would have been bound to the stars... but that's neither here nor there.]
Our own sun is relatively young in the 2nd generation of stars, as I understand. What that means is that -- relatively speaking -- we are probably among the first generation of life of our type to be produced. That means that alien cultures, though they may be more advanced than us, probably won't find us (or vice versa) for a while.
That being said, if we ever do get instructions for building a machine a la Sagan's "Contact", then unless we completely understand the machine, DON'T DO IT.
From what we've seen of computers, there exists a great potential for real-world virus machines (turing machines?) that could entirely coopt and/or destroy our culture, and then start beaming virus instructions elsewhere into space.
Remember Disney, and their little issue with cheating the copyright holders?
The copyright holders went to yank permission to Winnie the Pooh, and *surprise* Disney said that though the contract only licensed it, they were taking it to be assigned. Thus, they continue with Winnie the Pooh.
It seems that copyrights only benefit the big bullies. Who do, admittedly, like the status quo.
I'm getting tired of theft being supported in the name of capitalism. Capitalism is good, theft is not. But when a country uses mass socialism [the US *does*], and wrongfully takes freedoms from its citizens and gives the benefits, unearned, to corporations, I am pretty sure that that is called fascism [as opposed to Naziism, a particularly horrid brand of fascism.]
Anyhow, I used to be a conservative libertarian. I guess I still am, but my liberal uncle did manage to convince me that America was more fascist than anything. Definitely not free-market, anyhow. But it wasn't just my uncle. It was the WTO, the putting down of the riots, the isolation of the leaders *in every location* from their people, the WTO/NAFTA laws that are anything *but* free trade, but benefit specific favorite-son companies, and America being at the head of it all.
It was also Waco, Danny P. Scott ['92, LA Times], Harry Lamplugh, Vicki Weaver, the drug seizure laws [the father of a friend of mine, a junkyard owner, had $5000 seized from him while on a purchase trip. No charges, just seizure]... It's the anti-imigrant laws, the imported farmworkers who must work for Mexican minimum wage on our farms, the drug war, the use of prison labor, the use of God's name to uphold the president's decisions for war [is that backwards or what?]
It's the high taxes, the huge number of laws, and -- now, more, but significant before -- the constant fear that Americans feel, especially of the IRS, but in general of their government.
It's how the government defines every part of life.
Okay, I looked at your site, and read the first half -- I'll read the second half later.
Here are my thoughts so far:
(1) Switch to Linux. Linux can also handle real-time camera input for at least some cameras, and since it is open-source, you can get more info. None of this closed-source magician act.
(2) To properly gain "blob" object recognition, you need to take two subsequent photographs, subtract them, and then take the 2-D FFT using small blocks (say, 32). The position of high values in the output of each FFT will tell you approximate movement vectors. You then take the movement vectors to map how blocks of pixels move. Then you identify the blocks of pixels in a recursive prediction function in order to identify those pixels that move together, and those that don't.
(3) To extend this, you also need to allow for transformations (such as when a person turns their body.)
So you also have to map how pixel blocks respond in more ways than just moving.
(4) If you are finding it too expensive to live, come to a 2nd world country. (See www.escapeartist.com). Then hire your programmers *there*.
... of the lot.
Take a look at the posts *attacking* Gould vs. *supporting* him.
Or, take a look at how the different theories -- volcanos, KT-layer, and such. The scientists don't change their views to match the evidence, rather, they just die off.
And one of the biggest factors in what is populer among the "new" theories is people like J. Gould, and the BBC / PBS educational system.
All that would be fine, if truth were addressed. But one of the things about BBC / PBS is that they do very little fact checking. Not too long ago, we were watching a very impressive documentary about a volcano that exploded in the area of Indonesia in the 1300s, and how it caused a great cold spell as far away as Scotland (thermonuclear-type winter). There were legends among the Chinese about a dragon and a roar, and a darkening of the sky... and there were lots of quotes.
Well, quote after quote, my father kept saying, "that's not correct..." and then he said "wait. " He went and got a magazine that was specifically quoted, opened it up, rewound the tape, and then contrasted how the show gave the exact opposite statement from the magazine it "quoted".
All nicely done in the *form* of a scientific documentary, but nothing but claptrap dogma.
Unfortunately, these shows drive people to become members of one "scientific community" or another, but it leaves them with dogmatic feelings about falsehoods as if they were true.
Let's see. Take the Silicon Dioxide, melt it down, and get glass. Set nice thick panels of the stuff up
and put greenhouses underneath.
Take the Serpentine (a rock with lots of water in it) and break it down for water. Take the rest of it, and manufacture Nickle - Iron - Titanium steel.
Use the titanium steel to make razor blades, and stack the razor blades on top of steam tubes to make solar collectors (razor blades make a great blackbody).
Set up chip manufacturing to make small computers, automate this entire process. Now, put the solar collecctors on a rotatable axis above the green houses, and control how much sunlight comes in. Extra sunlight gets collected as electric power. So now you have a pestilence-free food production facility that also produces lots of electric power.
Use the electric power to set up a microwave relay station, or to produce rocketry chemicals, or to process the food into high efficiency "food pills" to feed the Chinese below.
The list goes on, but I'm sure you get the idea.
That's what *can* be done with the resources. Actually, it's just the tip of the iceberg.
I truly think that China *should* give their people more freedom [democracy is symptomatic of that, but as seen in America, does not necessarily imply freedom]. Moreover, I think that China has a better chance of succeeding both politically and moonbase-wise, if they do give their people more freedom.
But I don't think they will.
That being said, whether or not they give their people freedom, I hope they do succeed in putting up a moonbase.
The reason for this is that freedom tends to thrive when people can leave -- thus, one of the greatest recent blows to freedom is that we have run out of frontiers. Once the "takers" can fix their victims in place, then they tend to rule. But when their victims can leave, then they actually have to provide their victims with enough incentive to stay [read freedom] that they can benefit at least partially.
Thus, the opening of America helped the cause of freedom greatly in many European countries.
Thus, the problem of reducing freedoms may fix itself, if we gain a new frontier.
I truly hope that China will do this. Yes, it means that the moonbase will be populated under the control of a very *unfree* government. But resources will build there, and eventually there it will be possible to populate the moon, the asteroid belt, and later Mars, Jupiter's moons, and so on. The order of magnitude of the territory available is stunning -- and it is all packed with the most useful resource known to man.
My goodness! I have been fighting to find a way to outlaw Microwave Ovens to bring back the good old traditional wood stove. The answer is now in sight!!!!
In combination with the DMCP, the chips in library books can *also* be microwaved.
All we need is a test case -- for a few people to microwave their library books, and then describe how to do it to bypass library book-theft controls. At that point, the DMCP will kick in, and lawsuits can be levied against the companies that produce microwave ovens [not to mention microwave transmission radio dishes and cell phones, which could concievably be used in the same way, though only with modification devices.]
You guys are GENIUSES!!!
Thank you one, thank you all. It is great to be a citizen of the WORLD'S GREATEST (ONLY) EMPIRE. I can now force everyone to live the way I want them to live. This is wonderful.
----advisory---- (please, this is irony and political commentary on the DMCP and the "control everything" mentality, and is thus related to the topic at hand. This is not trolling.)
I wonder what is special about 900k mph -- that's 1/745 the speed of light.
It looks to me like they looked for earthquakes spaced apart at that distance-time proportion, and then concluded that such earthquakes were caused by the strangelets. Unless I am mistaken, that implies that our earth would be moving at 1/745 through whatever field caused the strangelets to form.
Now, I could see the case made for looking at particles travelling at a significant sizeable fraction of the speed of light, but this is nowhere close to that. Why, then, 900kmph? Does it have to do with their mass and stability, and if so, why do they assume that 900kmph particles will necessarily be a strangelets as opposed to a different kind of particle?
This science doesn't look well-explained -- or if well explained, doesn't look valid.
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The second world does have some high end labor, at least.
So the skipping can and does happen. Indeed, arguably most 3rd world countries have been first world or 2nd world at some time, and have simply fallen to larger nations -- and pay tribute, via the IMF, equal to most of their production.
Ummm.... America should take a lesson. At one time, the Middle East was very much the center of the world, culturally, militarily, educationally, and even (quite long ago) technologically.
There isn't a lot that corruption can't destroy, and a "taking" attitude (as opposed to a building attitude) breeds corruption like crazy.
My brother worked for a US IT company, and they came around with such a horror contract. In the past, my brother simply crosses out the offending parts, and signs it. He then points out that (a) the provisions are illegal by court rules, (b) the company is foolish to be making contracts that are unenforceable, and (c) he would be foolish to sign things that are confusingly unenforceable that he doesn't intend to follow. Essentially, too much confusion is bad for business. The company, the last time, came back by saying that it is required in the terms of their bank loans. My brother, being aware that they are in a financial morass, tends to believe it. It remains very interesting that the banks, not content with seizing the companies, would appear to be attempting to get documents that would seize the workers as slaves, too -- even though the current laws forbid that. I can't help but notice how, in Argentina, the banks were very successful at changing the laws; thus, I tend to think that there may be some kind of a plan in the works. On the good side, the Bible has a ton to say about people who think they can do this and survive their own stupid power mongering. Since I have yet to see the wisdom in the Bible be wrong in the long term, I rather expect that (at best) I don't really understand what is going on, or (at worst) our illustrious banker owners will face the consequences inherent in their decisions. Meanwhile, though, I and my brother will take lousy jobs rather than sign false contracts.
.... all time patent thief: Edison, and the Incandescent Lightbulb. Quoted, interestingly, as saying that Tesla would never be a great inventor, "because he doesn't know how to steal." Now go to Scientific American -- you'll have to do some research, but I'm thinking it was around 1982 or so -- and you will find that in his notebook he has pasted on one page an article about how a British man had successfully made a long-lasting lightbulb by using a strand of carbon fiber. On the next page, Edison has written "It Works!" Now look up patent history on the lightbulb. Edison fought him into *poverty* over that patent, and eventually won an agreement that the British man would get the patent in Britain, and Edison would get the patent for the rest of the world. That same story has played out again and again; there are companies that do nothing but patent ideas they think are coming, and then later go and hit the real developers over the head for money. Patent law *discourages* innovation; it doesn't encourage innovation.
Patents as squeezing out small businesses: Spend $13 and buy "The Incredible Secret Money Machine" by Don Lancaster (also author of The CMOS Cookbook). Or go to www.tinaja.com for a web-based version of the same. He points out that patents are easy for the big players to squeeze by, simply through finding historical artwork that looks similar -- if you have the money to do a good search. At the same time, they are deadly for a small business to work with. That is, if you get a patent, and a big company steals it, you will be bankrupted fighting them, even if they are completely in the wrong. My experience has been as he described: that patents are not the way to go. Competitiveness is. Triviality of some patents: http://www.infoworld.com/articles/hn/xml/00/12/15/ 001215hnbtprodigy.xml?p=br&s=5
Clear evidence of an oligopoly? Consider BT's 15000 patents, one of which they discovered was the hyperlink.
Patents as anticompetitive device: Encyclopedia of Britannica. Look at the history of patents. They were used historically to benefit friends of the throne, in conjunction with copyrights which were used to censor. Note that this does not fall under common law.
Patents as anticompetitive, and economically disasterous: Look at what the drug companies are doing, prohibiting "parallel importation" of drugs -- meaning that they set a price of $13/dose in one country, $2/dose in another, and people are not allowed to go to the $2 country to get the cheaper medicine, nor to import it from the cheaper source. This is just a means to bleed countries white.
Patents as against natural law: point out that when governments try to legislate the impossible, they lose respect and drive civil disorder. One of the impossible things about patents is that it claims that once you release an idea, you can control what other people do with it. This is more obvious with the copyright actually, as people violate them all the time (witness Kazaa! -- though I don't do this). But when you have laws that benefit those of ill intent, you drive social decay.
I doubt that any of this will have positive effect -- the large corporations are too good at subverting justice. But not to worry -- evil empires don't last long.
Back in 95 I wrote a 3D panel-drawing program, but the Binary Spatial Partition code was in C, and on a 25MHz 486 was just too slow. So I decided to write my own practice OS. Well, I didn't get that far, but I *did* make a neat little 4-k program called "Machine Shop". Machine Shop rode on top of DOS (really only needed BIOS), and would handle virtual memory functions, but also made it easy to make modular algorithms and modular data sets, swapping them to the hard disk in an intelligent fashion as memory was needed. One neat thing was that it used IRET to call in both directions. That is, if you wanted to call a Machine Shop function, you set your variables and used IRET. When Machine Shop wanted to call the app, it set its variables and gave an IRET. It worked fine, but was nonconventional. It was just a way to make sure that the same call was always used, and was easy to identify. One other characteristic was that each module also came with its own documentation (input, output, data specs, algorithm, and what it does). Once you get the modular down, then spec changes really aren't a problem. --> Oh... and DOS Debug was awesome. I didn't have the money for MASM, so I did my ASM programming with DOS Debug. When I decided I wanted a few variables, I just wrote a substitution algorithm, and combined that with .BAT files to make my own microassembler. It worked nicely, but took a few minutes.
[Caveat: IANAL, L="leg://washington.dc.Lobbyist"]
It seems to me that this is done all the time for things like NAFTA, WTO, and who knows what else -- specifically because legislators almost never even bother to read the bills they sponsor.
A group of wealthy whatevers (often not businessmen, so much as a club) set up a "commission" to debate the laws, with the assumption that the laws should be passed once they come up with it.
Then they submit the laws to a Congressional committee, and get the ball rolling. The Congressmen debate it based upon what they are told to say in their "talking points", but don't bother to read it.
If the group is really good, I suspect that they might seed the ground by *also* providing the opposition side with straw-man talking points, but that probably happens very little in real life.
But it won't work for you that way, unless you and your friends all regularly give large amounts of money to the Congressmen, and thus actually have their ear. The most you can do is go to your Congressman's town meeting, and "petition your government". Which is not nothing, but it's not nearly as good as being able to author your own legislation.
------
[/Caveat]
... that they are trying to program playing patterns as well as actual openings and direct responses. It seems to me that the best way of storing such information is still the good old pointer tree, much the same way as Huffman encoding trees are built.
Couple of things -- (1) Stephen King died exactly this way back in November. (2) Stephen King lives alternately in Fla (his home) and sometimes vacations in Britain, from what I've heard (3) No news of this on any of the Stephen King websites (4) I'm sure that any fans of his Dark Tower series *already* miss him (Hey, publishers, would you hurry up with "Wolves of ...." already?]
We should have tennis without technology?
Well, I guess it's back to the board --
not drawing board, but tennis board.
Did you by any chance happen to read the Tolkein trilogy? If you had, you would know that the trilogy doesn't end at the first book.
...duh...]
[ listen closely -- you'll hear millions of slashdotters saying
So the movie pretty much follows the first book of the trilogy.
I suggest you read the books. But start at The Hobbit. It makes a wonderful prequel to the series.
The Hobbit (prequel to LOTR)
The Fellowhip of the Rings (LOTR I)
The Two Towers (LOTR II)
The Return of the King (LOTR III)
Silmarillon (History, trivia of Tolkein's midworld. As fun as reading an encyclopedia upsidedown and backwards word by word, in my opinion, but if you *really* want to learn to read Elfin runecharacters, and know the history...)
In the Bible, there is a prohibition against attempting to "accelerate" (force forward in time) God's processes. In such a way, it was not acceptable for Jews to return after the Babylonian exile before God's time; rather, they were to go to Babylon, work for the good of Babylon, and await God's timing for their return. The same might be noted of Moses striking the rock twice, or even the children worshipping the golden calf. In each case, they were impatient with God's timing, to their own sorrow.
Considering that Israel has to fight the Palestinians, and there do not appear to be any valid prophets at the moment, how exactly do Israelis determine *what is God's time* for their return from this 2000-year dispersion, and what might simply their own attempt to force the issue (based on fears, nationalism, hope, and such)?
And how might the issue of rebuilding the temple (or not) fit into all this, if at all (or is that a different question entirely)?
It seems to me that you are saying that in the name of environmentalism we should wipe out the Aracuna Indians, the Maori aborigines, and essentially anyone else who isn't a rich European/American novo-colonialist. I call it novo-colonialism, because all the IMF is, is a perfection of last century's colonialism -- taking the profits unjustly so that we can spend it all on our wasteful living, while keeping the natives enslaved, all without any risk to ourselves [that was the major problem, the last century. Too many boxer-rebellions, too many battles in which we forgot the screwdrivers to the ammo boxes.] Quite frankly, though, if bioweapons are developed, they most likely won't be developed by the 3rd world, and they most likely won't be used on the third world. They'll be aimed by the 2nd place nation at the 1st place nation, or vice versa. I, for one, honestly hope that we don't develop them, that we never use such things, and that we simply start acting a little more responsibly. As a final comment, please don't let a difficult situation drive you despair, and in turn to evil. Murderous thoughts are evil.
What I mean by my Subject title is that the first generation of stars produced the heavier elements that we see today in their death throes. That is, the shock wave blasts created pockets of fusion that created lumps of Nickel, carbon, oxygen, and so on. But those stars were giants, and -- even if life had developed out of hydrogen -- the shockwave blasts would surely have killed off that round of life. Not only that, but that first generation of stars was relatively short-lived, so there was less time available to develop life, out of less complexity. [If it did develop, I would suspect that it would develop within the stars rather than within the H2 gas clouds, and would be massively energetic, but would have been bound to the stars... but that's neither here nor there.] Our own sun is relatively young in the 2nd generation of stars, as I understand. What that means is that -- relatively speaking -- we are probably among the first generation of life of our type to be produced. That means that alien cultures, though they may be more advanced than us, probably won't find us (or vice versa) for a while. That being said, if we ever do get instructions for building a machine a la Sagan's "Contact", then unless we completely understand the machine, DON'T DO IT. From what we've seen of computers, there exists a great potential for real-world virus machines (turing machines?) that could entirely coopt and/or destroy our culture, and then start beaming virus instructions elsewhere into space.
Remember Disney, and their little issue with cheating the copyright holders?
The copyright holders went to yank permission to Winnie the Pooh, and *surprise*
Disney said that though the contract only licensed it, they were taking it to be assigned. Thus,
they continue with Winnie the Pooh.
It seems that copyrights only benefit the big bullies. Who do, admittedly, like the status quo.
I'm getting tired of theft being supported in the name of capitalism. Capitalism is good, theft is not. But when a country uses mass socialism [the US *does*], and wrongfully takes freedoms from its citizens and gives the benefits, unearned, to corporations, I am pretty sure that that is called fascism [as opposed to Naziism, a particularly horrid brand of fascism.]
Anyhow, I used to be a conservative libertarian. I guess I still am, but my liberal uncle did manage to convince me that America was more fascist than anything. Definitely not free-market, anyhow. But it wasn't just my uncle. It was the WTO, the putting down of the riots, the isolation of the leaders *in every location* from their people, the WTO/NAFTA laws that are anything *but* free trade, but benefit specific favorite-son companies, and America being at the head of it all.
It was also Waco, Danny P. Scott ['92, LA Times], Harry Lamplugh, Vicki Weaver, the drug seizure laws [the father of a friend of mine, a junkyard owner, had $5000 seized from him while on a purchase trip. No charges, just seizure]... It's the anti-imigrant laws, the imported farmworkers who must work for Mexican minimum wage on our farms, the drug war, the use of prison labor, the use of God's name to uphold the president's decisions for war [is that backwards or what?]
It's the high taxes, the huge number of laws, and -- now, more, but significant before -- the constant fear that Americans feel, especially of the IRS, but in general of their government.
It's how the government defines every part of life.
So I guess it wasn't just my uncle after all.
But those copyrights have to go.
Okay, I looked at your site, and read the first half -- I'll read the second half later. Here are my thoughts so far: (1) Switch to Linux. Linux can also handle real-time camera input for at least some cameras, and since it is open-source, you can get more info. None of this closed-source magician act. (2) To properly gain "blob" object recognition, you need to take two subsequent photographs, subtract them, and then take the 2-D FFT using small blocks (say, 32). The position of high values in the output of each FFT will tell you approximate movement vectors. You then take the movement vectors to map how blocks of pixels move. Then you identify the blocks of pixels in a recursive prediction function in order to identify those pixels that move together, and those that don't. (3) To extend this, you also need to allow for transformations (such as when a person turns their body.) So you also have to map how pixel blocks respond in more ways than just moving. (4) If you are finding it too expensive to live, come to a 2nd world country. (See www.escapeartist.com). Then hire your programmers *there*.
N/T means no text.
Let's see. Take the Silicon Dioxide, melt it down, and get glass. Set nice thick panels of the stuff up and put greenhouses underneath. Take the Serpentine (a rock with lots of water in it) and break it down for water. Take the rest of it, and manufacture Nickle - Iron - Titanium steel. Use the titanium steel to make razor blades, and stack the razor blades on top of steam tubes to make solar collectors (razor blades make a great blackbody). Set up chip manufacturing to make small computers, automate this entire process. Now, put the solar collecctors on a rotatable axis above the green houses, and control how much sunlight comes in. Extra sunlight gets collected as electric power. So now you have a pestilence-free food production facility that also produces lots of electric power. Use the electric power to set up a microwave relay station, or to produce rocketry chemicals, or to process the food into high efficiency "food pills" to feed the Chinese below. The list goes on, but I'm sure you get the idea. That's what *can* be done with the resources. Actually, it's just the tip of the iceberg.
I truly think that China *should* give their people more freedom [democracy is symptomatic of that, but as seen in America, does not necessarily imply freedom]. Moreover, I think that China has a better chance of succeeding both politically and moonbase-wise, if they do give their people more freedom.
But I don't think they will.
That being said, whether or not they give their people freedom, I hope they do succeed in putting up a moonbase.
The reason for this is that freedom tends to thrive when people can leave -- thus, one of the greatest recent blows to freedom is that we have run out of frontiers. Once the "takers" can fix their victims in place, then they tend to rule. But when their victims can leave, then they actually have to provide their victims with enough incentive to stay [read freedom] that they can benefit at least partially.
Thus, the opening of America helped the cause of freedom greatly in many European countries.
Thus, the problem of reducing freedoms may fix itself, if we gain a new frontier.
I truly hope that China will do this. Yes, it means that the moonbase will be populated under the control of a very *unfree* government. But resources will build there, and eventually there it will be possible to populate the moon, the asteroid belt, and later Mars, Jupiter's moons, and so on. The order of magnitude of the territory available is stunning -- and it is all packed with the most useful resource known to man.
Freedom.
My goodness! I have been fighting to find a way to outlaw Microwave Ovens to bring back the good old traditional wood stove. The answer is now in sight!!!!
In combination with the DMCP, the chips in library books can *also* be microwaved.
All we need is a test case -- for a few people to microwave their library books, and then describe how to do it to bypass library book-theft controls. At that point, the DMCP will kick in, and lawsuits can be levied against the companies that produce microwave ovens [not to mention microwave transmission radio dishes and cell phones, which could concievably be used in the same way, though only with modification devices.]
You guys are GENIUSES!!!
Thank you one, thank you all. It is great to be a citizen of the WORLD'S GREATEST (ONLY) EMPIRE. I can now force everyone to live the way I want them to live. This is wonderful.
----advisory----
(please, this is irony and political commentary on the DMCP and the "control everything" mentality, and is thus related to the topic at hand. This is not trolling.)
I wonder what is special about 900k mph -- that's 1/745 the speed of light.
It looks to me like they looked for earthquakes spaced apart at that distance-time proportion, and then concluded that such earthquakes were caused by the strangelets. Unless I am mistaken, that implies that our earth would be moving at 1/745 through whatever field caused the strangelets to form.
Now, I could see the case made for looking at particles travelling at a significant sizeable fraction of the speed of light, but this is nowhere close to that. Why, then, 900kmph? Does it have to do with their mass and stability, and if so, why do they assume that 900kmph particles will necessarily be a strangelets as opposed to a different kind of particle?
This science doesn't look well-explained -- or if well explained, doesn't look valid.