The Forbes article says most of their "grants" comes out of INCOME, not the original value of the $20+ billion donated. Meaning this is a stock preservation scheme. You think that $20 billion came in CASH? It was donated STOCK. Now the stock aint't there any more, it's CASH. Ergo, the stock that Bill CAN'T convert because of SEC rules is now CASH under control of his father.
Secondly, the DSLReports article points out that that CASH is being used to buy stock and CONTROL of other companies in which Gates has a financial, NOT charitable, interest.
The point of large foundations, as anybody with any clue knows, is not to pass money around, but to use their assets as CONTROL. Gates has obviously learned from the Rockefellers and others.
The amount of misinformation in your post is staggering - not surprising given its verbosity.
I am well aware that MS CLAIMS to be spending "billions" on R&D. What I am also painfully aware of is that there have absolutely NO RESULTS of these "billions". Which merely reinforces my point that they have NO CLUE how to spend money on R&D.
"Frankly, if they are following econ 101, they don't invest it in R&D because the returns on those investments is below the return of interest yielding investments."
This is horseshit. As you correctly state, it is "Economics 101" - the economics you are taught before you enter the real world, where R&D controls the future of the company - at least those companies who actually develop and try to sell technology - as opposed to MS who buys and steals their tech and then uses monopolistic tactics to control their market. If you look at the more successful tech companies, you see the more successful the company, the larger the R&D percentage. THIS is CORRECT "Economics 101."
"I hope no one, including you, would think a divident announced as a One time deal, and one that will eat through most of a companies cash, is likely to happen a second time."
What part of "morons" in my statement did you not comprehend? Are you claiming no one in the stock market is a moron? Interesting, if moronic, notion in itself.
"More likely, is people will buy the stock over the next 3 years of this happening to cash in on this dividend and the natural run up of a stock price during a buy back"
In other words, I am correct - people will buy the stock, keep the price up and those with the most stock benefit. Then when the dividends stop, X number of people will dump the stock and the morons will continue to hold it expecting more dividends "someday".
Exactly what I said.
"Every time I speak to my family in india"
Oh, please. Get a clue.
The rest of your piece reiterates the notion that the software industry is "mature". Not terribly interesting, since the term is mostly relevant to financial analyses of an industry, not the technology end, which is what I am concerned with.
There are MAJOR advancements to be made in software technology which can, properly done, turn over the entire Microsoft dominance within a few years (provided they are exploited by an intelligent company or even perhaps properly handled by the OSS community). Even some smaller more evolutionary advancements could, for example, propel Linux to further encroachment on the desktop.
My point was that if Bill Gates had some clue about computer technology, instead of contract law and marketing, MS would be steadily advancing the state of the art with its cash reserve, rather than pissing it away in PR moves.
"can you imagine more people being willing to decant their consciousnesses into such a vessel than are willing to undertake Zen discipline?"
Who said anything about "willing"? My point has been that no significant percentage of humans will be willing. Only a tiny percentage of people with Transhuman attitudes will. The rest are going to end up abandoned, dead, or transmogrified whether they like it or not.
Your suggestion that consciousness is not a physical artifact is total mysticism and completely unsupported by any evidence at all, so your notion that there is no evidence for replicating it in hardware is nonsense.
Re:uh,, Black and White anyone?
on
Game with God
·
· Score: 1
If you're in a military situation where you are so chronically short of supplies that you are in any danger of starvation, you have worse problems than starvation.
As the US military will discover in Iraq in due time.
The combat situations today do not devolve into long-term sieges like Massada. Starvation is not an issue.
OTOH, it is unlikely that anybody is going to have to pee on their MRE to use it when, as the article states, dirty water is quite adequate. And as I said, nobody is going to have to worry about long-term kidney damage because they aren't going to be doing this sort of thing for more than a few days, if that, before they either get killed by the enemy or are relieved.
LRRP, Rangers, Special Forces and SEALS are the only people likely to have to be in situations where the only access is to unclean water or no water. And again, this is unlikely to last more than a few days until their missions are accomplished or they're dead.
Now, in Iraq, where our patriotic morons are bunkered down in bases surrounded by an entire nation of enemies, when the mass national resistance starts in the next 6-12 months, they are going to find themselves without water, food, fuel, or ammo. But again, they are going to be evacuating the country hanging from helicopter rails rather than peeing on MREs.
Microsoft is aware that everybody on the planet (except the moron Windows trolls on/.) hates their guts. Why else do half the states in the country (and half the countries in the world) file lawsuits against their ass? (And all of Asia backs their own version of Linux?)
Also, if you give away a big stock benefit, what happens? Morons buy your stock hoping it will happen again. This keeps your stock price up.
And the assholes who own most of the stock retain their wealth. Otherwise they might lose a few percentage points. Perish forbid.
And all it cost them was giving away the company's R&D (and/or acquisition) nest egg.
Which cost them nothing because they have NO FUCKING CLUE how to spend it on R&D ANYWAY!
And they can't buy anybody because everybody else would rather die than work for Microsoft!
So this is the clearest example of assholes running a company into the ground since, well, SCO.
The CORRECT thing to do would be to spend that $50 billion (or at least as much of it as could be controlled - $50 billion is a LOT of money to control) on significant R&D. This would improve MS's chances of being even more profitable in the future, and thus an even better stock pick.
But no, the morons in management can't think that rationally. That's why they're managers. They don't think, they control.
And now the morons on/. will try to give me "lessons" in "economics" (which they "learned" selling lemonade) and corporate "responsibility to investors" (which they learned from Microsoft).
Allow me to save you the effort. Shove it where the sun doesn't shine.
The only non-rational monkey in this conversation is yourself.
Your "joke" is not the least bit funny, either. Apparently your "point" - such as it is - is that there is no such thing as "utopia". Given my opinion of humans, no doubt that is correct.
Furthermore, I never said anything about "utopia" and couldn't care less.
The rest of your statements are complete nonsense.
Last I heard the percentages were mostly favorable, but a higher percentage than I am comfortable with reported imperfect correction and a higher percentage that I am comfortable with reported worsening vision. Combined the percentages were not good (although still far less than the success percentages).
In my view, when the percentage of perfect correction hits 98% or higher, I would consider it. Right now, IIRC, it is nowhere near that.
I agree that there are various mental disciplines that can be used to alleviate the problem to a certain degree. Zen and Taoist meditation, for example.
The problem, however, is the vast bulk of humanity is never going to adopt these practices. Certainly not anytime in the foreseeable future.
Which leaves technology as the only way out.
And "consciousness" is an imprecise term, so suggesting that altering it will only produce the same sort of problems is entirely speculative.
I (and numerous science-fiction writers) can easily imagine a sentient entity constructed to not react with fear to every stimulus.
Well, I'm tempted to say, "By George! I think he's got it!"
Since that's likely how it will turn out, thanks to human nature, not Transhuman purpose. Contrary to my usual bloodthirsty pronouncements, any rational Transhuman has to hope that extermination is not the final answer. I would prefer either transmogrification of humans into Transhumans (whether they like it or not, initially) or a scenario where Transhumans simply abandon humans to their own fate and go elsewhere.
However, one can hope that merely determining how the brain functions, and how to disconnect or otherwise eliminate the unnecessary biochemical interference with rational thought and conceptualization might be sufficient to produce a species that is not driven entirely by fear and reproductive drives.
Nanotech should make this feasible in the next several decades.
I'm simply pessimistic enough now not to assume that the end result of a "di-morphic split" between humans and Transhumans will be peacefully resolved. Most Transhumans tend to be Pollyannas in this regard, believing that simple education and reason will prevail. I say, "Hah! When has this ever occurred in human history?"
Like I said, you don't start thinking about it later. The proper attitude has to be inculcated in the society from the beginning.
Which means as part of your normal life, you have already acquired the weapons and equipment (made by people who supply that market), and learned what you need to know (taught by people who specialize in that knowledge), to deal with the issue of any level of coercion.
This is what the United States Constitution meant by a "well-regulated militia" and how the original United States actually functioned. Of course, this was under the rubric of a "government" but there is nothing preventing a cooperative citizenry from doing it on their own.
Except of course human nature.
Which is why it's irrelevant, really, to discuss it, since it isn't going to happen. Not because it couldn't be done, but because humans just can't get it together enough to do it.
Not familiar with the reference. Hang on while I Google.
Oh, okay, Poul Anderson. Haven't read the story. The blurb I saw says the "Exaltationists" want to change the time-line to make themselves gods or otherwise release chaos in the universe.
Sounds like Dr. Who's "Master" character. That was his motivation.
He's also one of two sources where I got my "Master of Transhumanism" handle, so I guess that's appropriate. He's always been one of my favorite characters in fiction.
Not entirely, though, since I view time-travel as one of the few real "impossibilities" in the universe.
Most "Transhumanists" you'll encounter, however, tend to be more "Humanist" than "Trans". Most of them are the result of a commingling between Libertarians and geeks. The Extropians, for example, tend to constantly refuse to be equated with Libertarians but there's plenty of influence in their political and social stances, that's obvious.
I am more of a confluence between anarchism, and the sort of philosophy you get from Nietzsche, Aleister Crowley, Tim Leary, Robert Anton Wilson, Alan Harrington and others - with a healthy dose of science fiction and comic book supervillains thrown in for excitement.
The definition of anarchy does not imply not USING coercion on people. It implies not INITIATING coercion on people, which is significantly different. Any true anarchist recognizes the necessity of self defense.
As for disengaging and creating one's own reality, that depends on how you do it. For most "vonuans" - as this form of anarchism used to be called - this is a fruitless exercise which ends up restricting life options. You end up acting like a rabbit looking for a hole to hide in to avoid the fox.
If, however, you have the technology, this might be feasible. Getting that level of technology today implies quite a bit of money and research - neither of which most anarchists have in any abundance.
The state only has a monopoly on violence because competing forces have not arisen. The reason they have not arisen is brainwashing of the public - and this brainwashing applies to the average so-called "anarchist" as well. And that brainwashing is easy because the average primate is conditioned by his evolutionary history to acquiesce in a dominance/submission hierarchy.
Radical Transhumans are not so afflicted.
I agree that the "Tai Chi" method is more effective than confronting the state head on. Which is why I don't do that anymore - at least until I have adequate technology. However, "more" effective is not the same as being "adequately effective".
The "armchair anarchists" are essentially irrelevant in this world - as indeed are "incarcerated anarchists".
Here's another example of "information and culture control":
Continental: Complaints Led to Drop-'Doonesbury' Poll
By Dave Astor Published: July 21, 2004 11:50 AM EST, updated at 1:20 PM
NEW YORK A poll that resulted in a vote to drop "Doonesbury" was defended by the head of a Sunday-comics consortium.
"It was not a political statement of any kind," Continental Features President Van Wilkerson told E&P. "I personally don't have an opinion about 'Doonesbury' one way or another."
Wilkerson said he conducted the survey because Garry Trudeau's comic "created more controversy than other strips." In the poll e-mail he sent Continental's newspaper clients this spring, Wilkerson wrote: "(I)t is my feeling that a change in one of the features is required. I have fielded numerous complaints about 'Doonesbury' in the past and feel it is time to drop this feature and add another in its place.... If the majority of the group favors a replacement, you will be expected to accept that change."
Of the 38 papers that run the Continental-produced Sunday comics section, 21 wanted to drop "Doonesbury," 15 wanted to keep it, and two had no opinion or preference. "I wouldn't call the vote [to drop 'Doonesbury'] overwhelming, but it was a majority opinion," Wilkerson said.
One of the 15 papers, The Anniston (Ala.) Star (Click for QuikCap), expressed public dismay with the vote yesterday -- saying the decision amounted to censorship. In an E&P interview after that article appeared, Star Executive Editor Troy Turner said: "Sure, 'Doonesbury' causes editors headaches from time to time, but there is a proven readership for it. Newspapers need to think of readers first, or they will continue to struggle."
Turner added that he doesn't recall Continental doing polls about any of the other 22 comics in its package; "Doonesbury" was singled out. Wilkerson acknowledged that the survey was out of the norm.
The Continental head said he doesn't know exactly when "Doonesbury" will leave the package; he's currently polling clients to see if they want to replace it with "Agnes," "Get Fuzzy," "Pickles," "Zits," or another comic.
If Continental does pull "Doonesbury" from the package, "we will find a way to run it in the Sunday paper," said Star Editorial Page Editor Bob Davis. He noted that the Star already publishes the daily "Doonesbury" in an unusual locale: the back page of the "A" section.
As previously reported, Star Publisher H. Brandt Ayers e-mailed Wilkerson to say he and his paper's editors "strongly object to an obviously political effort to silence a minority point of view. For years, my New Deal father bore the opposition views of Orphan Annie and Daddy Warbucks, and I believe he would have fought an effort to silence them a by a simple majority vote. This is wrong, offensive to First Amendment freedoms."
"Doonesbury" -- which appears in more than 1,400 papers via Universal Press Syndicate -- has made a lot of news this year with strong criticism of President Bush and the Iraq war. In one sequence, Trudeau offered $10,000 to anyone who could prove Bush served in the Alabama National Guard. And, in an ongoing story line, the B.D. character lost a leg in Iraq and is dealing with the aftermath of that devastating injury.
The 38 papers running the package from Salisbury, N.C.-based Continental are predominately located in the Southeast.
Dave Astor (dastor@editorandpublisher.com) is senior editor for E&P.
Slashdot Mirror
Get a clue.
/. nerdboys have no clue.
The Forbes article says most of their "grants" comes out of INCOME, not the original value of the $20+ billion donated. Meaning this is a stock preservation scheme. You think that $20 billion came in CASH? It was donated STOCK. Now the stock aint't there any more, it's CASH. Ergo, the stock that Bill CAN'T convert because of SEC rules is now CASH under control of his father.
Secondly, the DSLReports article points out that that CASH is being used to buy stock and CONTROL of other companies in which Gates has a financial, NOT charitable, interest.
The point of large foundations, as anybody with any clue knows, is not to pass money around, but to use their assets as CONTROL. Gates has obviously learned from the Rockefellers and others.
Only
Cover or whatever, she sang it. What part of that don't you comprehend?
/. nerds? Really?
/. nerd boys?
There's a difference between gay men and
Maybe it's because gay men are more involved in reality that
The amount of misinformation in your post is staggering - not surprising given its verbosity.
I am well aware that MS CLAIMS to be spending "billions" on R&D. What I am also painfully aware of is that there have absolutely NO RESULTS of these "billions". Which merely reinforces my point that they have NO CLUE how to spend money on R&D.
"Frankly, if they are following econ 101, they don't invest it in R&D because the returns on those investments is below the return of interest yielding investments."
This is horseshit. As you correctly state, it is "Economics 101" - the economics you are taught before you enter the real world, where R&D controls the future of the company - at least those companies who actually develop and try to sell technology - as opposed to MS who buys and steals their tech and then uses monopolistic tactics to control their market. If you look at the more successful tech companies, you see the more successful the company, the larger the R&D percentage. THIS is CORRECT "Economics 101."
"I hope no one, including you, would think a divident announced as a One time deal, and one that will eat through most of a companies cash, is likely to happen a second time."
What part of "morons" in my statement did you not comprehend? Are you claiming no one in the stock market is a moron? Interesting, if moronic, notion in itself.
"More likely, is people will buy the stock over the next 3 years of this happening to cash in on this dividend and the natural run up of a stock price during a buy back"
In other words, I am correct - people will buy the stock, keep the price up and those with the most stock benefit. Then when the dividends stop, X number of people will dump the stock and the morons will continue to hold it expecting more dividends "someday".
Exactly what I said.
"Every time I speak to my family in india"
Oh, please. Get a clue.
The rest of your piece reiterates the notion that the software industry is "mature". Not terribly interesting, since the term is mostly relevant to financial analyses of an industry, not the technology end, which is what I am concerned with.
There are MAJOR advancements to be made in software technology which can, properly done, turn over the entire Microsoft dominance within a few years (provided they are exploited by an intelligent company or even perhaps properly handled by the OSS community). Even some smaller more evolutionary advancements could, for example, propel Linux to further encroachment on the desktop.
My point was that if Bill Gates had some clue about computer technology, instead of contract law and marketing, MS would be steadily advancing the state of the art with its cash reserve, rather than pissing it away in PR moves.
Nothing in your post contradicts this fact.
"can you imagine more people being willing to decant their consciousnesses into such a vessel than are willing to undertake Zen discipline?"
Who said anything about "willing"? My point has been that no significant percentage of humans will be willing. Only a tiny percentage of people with Transhuman attitudes will. The rest are going to end up abandoned, dead, or transmogrified whether they like it or not.
Your suggestion that consciousness is not a physical artifact is total mysticism and completely unsupported by any evidence at all, so your notion that there is no evidence for replicating it in hardware is nonsense.
You still here?
You're the idiot. It's a stock laundering scheme, nothing more.
See my post elsewhere in this thread for links to Forbes and DSLReports articles.
No, he's giving it to his father to manage in his "Foundation" - which is a stock laundering scheme.
How much of that $3 billion will ever actually be given out by said Foundation?
Go here and learn something.
Or here for more analysis.
If you're in a military situation where you are so chronically short of supplies that you are in any danger of starvation, you have worse problems than starvation.
As the US military will discover in Iraq in due time.
The combat situations today do not devolve into long-term sieges like Massada. Starvation is not an issue.
OTOH, it is unlikely that anybody is going to have to pee on their MRE to use it when, as the article states, dirty water is quite adequate. And as I said, nobody is going to have to worry about long-term kidney damage because they aren't going to be doing this sort of thing for more than a few days, if that, before they either get killed by the enemy or are relieved.
LRRP, Rangers, Special Forces and SEALS are the only people likely to have to be in situations where the only access is to unclean water or no water. And again, this is unlikely to last more than a few days until their missions are accomplished or they're dead.
Now, in Iraq, where our patriotic morons are bunkered down in bases surrounded by an entire nation of enemies, when the mass national resistance starts in the next 6-12 months, they are going to find themselves without water, food, fuel, or ammo. But again, they are going to be evacuating the country hanging from helicopter rails rather than peeing on MREs.
It's a fucking PR MOVE!
/.) hates their guts. Why else do half the states in the country (and half the countries in the world) file lawsuits against their ass? (And all of Asia backs their own version of Linux?)
/. will try to give me "lessons" in "economics" (which they "learned" selling lemonade) and corporate "responsibility to investors" (which they learned from Microsoft).
Microsoft is aware that everybody on the planet (except the moron Windows trolls on
Also, if you give away a big stock benefit, what happens? Morons buy your stock hoping it will happen again. This keeps your stock price up.
And the assholes who own most of the stock retain their wealth. Otherwise they might lose a few percentage points. Perish forbid.
And all it cost them was giving away the company's R&D (and/or acquisition) nest egg.
Which cost them nothing because they have NO FUCKING CLUE how to spend it on R&D ANYWAY!
And they can't buy anybody because everybody else would rather die than work for Microsoft!
So this is the clearest example of assholes running a company into the ground since, well, SCO.
The CORRECT thing to do would be to spend that $50 billion (or at least as much of it as could be controlled - $50 billion is a LOT of money to control) on significant R&D. This would improve MS's chances of being even more profitable in the future, and thus an even better stock pick.
But no, the morons in management can't think that rationally. That's why they're managers. They don't think, they control.
And now the morons on
Allow me to save you the effort. Shove it where the sun doesn't shine.
Your doctor lied.
Unless they have dramatically improved the odds in the last couple years, the percentages are way less than 98%.
Also, the studies show people who get lasik for near-sightedness end up being far-sighted and need corrective lenses within ten years or so.
Sorry, virtually everything you said was drivel.
The only non-rational monkey in this conversation is yourself.
Your "joke" is not the least bit funny, either. Apparently your "point" - such as it is - is that there is no such thing as "utopia". Given my opinion of humans, no doubt that is correct.
Furthermore, I never said anything about "utopia" and couldn't care less.
The rest of your statements are complete nonsense.
There are studies available.
You need to find out what the percentages are.
Last I heard the percentages were mostly favorable, but a higher percentage than I am comfortable with reported imperfect correction and a higher percentage that I am comfortable with reported worsening vision. Combined the percentages were not good (although still far less than the success percentages).
In my view, when the percentage of perfect correction hits 98% or higher, I would consider it. Right now, IIRC, it is nowhere near that.
Yeah, like I'm going to install a Yahoo ANYTHING!
Dude.
The last time I tried to install a Yahoo anything, it crashed Windows 98 and I had to restore the Registry.
And saying IE has popup blocking because of a third party software add-on is ridiculous.
I can say IE has popup blocking on my machine - because I use Opera.
IE is crap.
An OS Service Pack is supposed to fix problems with the OS and possibly add additional features.
It is not supposed to break applications.
Period.
If it does, it is defective and needs to be recalled and fixed.
"also upgraded the machines of about 10 friends to SP2 RC2"
Just as a curiosity, why are you upgrading other peoples' machines with a Release Candidate?
You like living dangerously or losing friends?
Yeah, right, "real" men handcode their own OS in assembler.
Or maybe Forth.
Reminds me of Tori Amo's song, "Real Men": "But sometimes we wonder who the 'real men' are?"
I agree that there are various mental disciplines that can be used to alleviate the problem to a certain degree. Zen and Taoist meditation, for example.
The problem, however, is the vast bulk of humanity is never going to adopt these practices. Certainly not anytime in the foreseeable future.
Which leaves technology as the only way out.
And "consciousness" is an imprecise term, so suggesting that altering it will only produce the same sort of problems is entirely speculative.
I (and numerous science-fiction writers) can easily imagine a sentient entity constructed to not react with fear to every stimulus.
Well, I'm tempted to say, "By George! I think he's got it!"
Since that's likely how it will turn out, thanks to human nature, not Transhuman purpose. Contrary to my usual bloodthirsty pronouncements, any rational Transhuman has to hope that extermination is not the final answer. I would prefer either transmogrification of humans into Transhumans (whether they like it or not, initially) or a scenario where Transhumans simply abandon humans to their own fate and go elsewhere.
However, one can hope that merely determining how the brain functions, and how to disconnect or otherwise eliminate the unnecessary biochemical interference with rational thought and conceptualization might be sufficient to produce a species that is not driven entirely by fear and reproductive drives.
Nanotech should make this feasible in the next several decades.
I'm simply pessimistic enough now not to assume that the end result of a "di-morphic split" between humans and Transhumans will be peacefully resolved. Most Transhumans tend to be Pollyannas in this regard, believing that simple education and reason will prevail. I say, "Hah! When has this ever occurred in human history?"
As we anarchists like to say, "Don't vote. It only encourages them".
And "No matter who you vote for, the government gets into office."
If you want real change in this country, you need a lot more than just voting for Tweedledum or Tweedledee.
Wrong.
Like I said, you don't start thinking about it later. The proper attitude has to be inculcated in the society from the beginning.
Which means as part of your normal life, you have already acquired the weapons and equipment (made by people who supply that market), and learned what you need to know (taught by people who specialize in that knowledge), to deal with the issue of any level of coercion.
This is what the United States Constitution meant by a "well-regulated militia" and how the original United States actually functioned. Of course, this was under the rubric of a "government" but there is nothing preventing a cooperative citizenry from doing it on their own.
Except of course human nature.
Which is why it's irrelevant, really, to discuss it, since it isn't going to happen. Not because it couldn't be done, but because humans just can't get it together enough to do it.
Not familiar with the reference. Hang on while I Google.
Oh, okay, Poul Anderson. Haven't read the story. The blurb I saw says the "Exaltationists" want to change the time-line to make themselves gods or otherwise release chaos in the universe.
Sounds like Dr. Who's "Master" character. That was his motivation.
He's also one of two sources where I got my "Master of Transhumanism" handle, so I guess that's appropriate. He's always been one of my favorite characters in fiction.
Not entirely, though, since I view time-travel as one of the few real "impossibilities" in the universe.
Most "Transhumanists" you'll encounter, however, tend to be more "Humanist" than "Trans". Most of them are the result of a commingling between Libertarians and geeks. The Extropians, for example, tend to constantly refuse to be equated with Libertarians but there's plenty of influence in their political and social stances, that's obvious.
I am more of a confluence between anarchism, and the sort of philosophy you get from Nietzsche, Aleister Crowley, Tim Leary, Robert Anton Wilson, Alan Harrington and others - with a healthy dose of science fiction and comic book supervillains thrown in for excitement.
Yes, it is nice to see some serious discussion of anarchism for a change.
I'm surprised at how many posters actually seem to have SOME clue about it, even if not much clue.
Yes, I was referring to the European definition of these terms, as I thought I made clear.
A lot of people don't know that these terms in Europe are (or were, I'm not sure about contemporary Europe) the reverse of their usage in the US.
The definition of anarchy does not imply not USING coercion on people. It implies not INITIATING coercion on people, which is significantly different. Any true anarchist recognizes the necessity of self defense.
As for disengaging and creating one's own reality, that depends on how you do it. For most "vonuans" - as this form of anarchism used to be called - this is a fruitless exercise which ends up restricting life options. You end up acting like a rabbit looking for a hole to hide in to avoid the fox.
If, however, you have the technology, this might be feasible. Getting that level of technology today implies quite a bit of money and research - neither of which most anarchists have in any abundance.
The state only has a monopoly on violence because competing forces have not arisen. The reason they have not arisen is brainwashing of the public - and this brainwashing applies to the average so-called "anarchist" as well. And that brainwashing is easy because the average primate is conditioned by his evolutionary history to acquiesce in a dominance/submission hierarchy.
Radical Transhumans are not so afflicted.
I agree that the "Tai Chi" method is more effective than confronting the state head on. Which is why I don't do that anymore - at least until I have adequate technology. However, "more" effective is not the same as being "adequately effective".
The "armchair anarchists" are essentially irrelevant in this world - as indeed are "incarcerated anarchists".
But I am no longer incarcerated.
Here's another example of "information and culture control":
... If the majority of the group favors a replacement, you will be expected to accept that change."
Continental: Complaints Led to Drop-'Doonesbury' Poll
By Dave Astor
Published: July 21, 2004 11:50 AM EST, updated at 1:20 PM
NEW YORK A poll that resulted in a vote to drop "Doonesbury" was defended by the head of a Sunday-comics consortium.
"It was not a political statement of any kind," Continental Features President Van Wilkerson told E&P. "I personally don't have an opinion about 'Doonesbury' one way or another."
Wilkerson said he conducted the survey because Garry Trudeau's comic "created more controversy than other strips." In the poll e-mail he sent Continental's newspaper clients this spring, Wilkerson wrote: "(I)t is my feeling that a change in one of the features is required. I have fielded numerous complaints about 'Doonesbury' in the past and feel it is time to drop this feature and add another in its place.
Of the 38 papers that run the Continental-produced Sunday comics section, 21 wanted to drop "Doonesbury," 15 wanted to keep it, and two had no opinion or preference. "I wouldn't call the vote [to drop 'Doonesbury'] overwhelming, but it was a majority opinion," Wilkerson said.
One of the 15 papers, The Anniston (Ala.) Star (Click for QuikCap), expressed public dismay with the vote yesterday -- saying the decision amounted to censorship. In an E&P interview after that article appeared, Star Executive Editor Troy Turner said: "Sure, 'Doonesbury' causes editors headaches from time to time, but there is a proven readership for it. Newspapers need to think of readers first, or they will continue to struggle."
Turner added that he doesn't recall Continental doing polls about any of the other 22 comics in its package; "Doonesbury" was singled out. Wilkerson acknowledged that the survey was out of the norm.
The Continental head said he doesn't know exactly when "Doonesbury" will leave the package; he's currently polling clients to see if they want to replace it with "Agnes," "Get Fuzzy," "Pickles," "Zits," or another comic.
If Continental does pull "Doonesbury" from the package, "we will find a way to run it in the Sunday paper," said Star Editorial Page Editor Bob Davis. He noted that the Star already publishes the daily "Doonesbury" in an unusual locale: the back page of the "A" section.
As previously reported, Star Publisher H. Brandt Ayers e-mailed Wilkerson to say he and his paper's editors "strongly object to an obviously political effort to silence a minority point of view. For years, my New Deal father bore the opposition views of Orphan Annie and Daddy Warbucks, and I believe he would have fought an effort to silence them a by a simple majority vote. This is wrong, offensive to First Amendment freedoms."
"Doonesbury" -- which appears in more than 1,400 papers via Universal Press Syndicate -- has made a lot of news this year with strong criticism of President Bush and the Iraq war. In one sequence, Trudeau offered $10,000 to anyone who could prove Bush served in the Alabama National Guard. And, in an ongoing story line, the B.D. character lost a leg in Iraq and is dealing with the aftermath of that devastating injury.
The 38 papers running the package from Salisbury, N.C.-based Continental are predominately located in the Southeast.
Dave Astor (dastor@editorandpublisher.com) is senior editor for E&P.