Another thing to consider is how "religious" people outside the western material world-view are. I bet if we had those documents, they would be chock full of references like "And Chak [the rain god] blessed the land and there was a great crop". This wasn't a religious text, but what they would consider a log of weather and harvest. The idea that a god brought rain was just how the world worked.
And of course, since this is the record of an empire, every thing done and tax paid would have been for the glory of the King -- a divine person, as all royalty were until relatively recently, a direct decedent of primordial celestial beings, a God on Earth. Of course, this would have been heresy, to pay any honor and respect to Mayan Gods or Kings, because they conflicted with the European God[s] and Kings, who were the rightful rulers.
Well, that's a point, but I think it's a sort of naive affect that smart people put on to say that the Spanish conquistadors might have found something they would have considered valuable. Of course, we really want to read those documents and understand the Maya better. That doesn't mean that the conquistadors did ( though a few of them may have ). They just wanted gold, slaves, and other imperial resources -- they were interested in sharing or having a Thanksgiving dinner, they wanted to conquer and dominate. Burning the books was a conscious effort on their part to destroy Mayan culture. They didn't have any sociological or anthropological interests.
...all the rest were burned because they could contain "Heresay"
Heresy.
(No one bothered to translate. Burn first ask questions later).
I think it was a pretty safe assumption that Mayan texts weren't going to be talking about salvation through Christ and the Holy Roman church. I don't agree with the burnings, but I don't think the Spanish erred in assuming they were going to find heresy in the texts.
...with the actual Drupal server locked down and disconnected from the internet.
How does the caching server get the original cache? Do you connect the actual server at some point, clear the cache, and let it answer requests, or do you push a cache?
Yeah, but honestly I trust a properly programmed machine a lot more than I do humans.
Those machines don't run on their own, you know. I think you can only trust a machine, properly programmed or not, as far as you can trust the person operating them.
See, you're not thinking like a creationist. A Domesticated Silver Fox is still a 'Fox', right? What they're looking to see is something more on the order of a bacterium becoming a human being. Something more dramatic, where an organism has a new organ, or a new limb, or radically altered body plan, would go far in convincing certain people.
Hey, thanks for the link to the Lensky information.
If you use fruit flies instead of mice, it would only take 1,150 years ( assuming they re-produce in two weeks ) .
It's really a shame. I think presenting the evidence of a fruit fly organism, and then some kind of diving descendent, along with a whole flip-book of the evolution, would be a great tool. Some people would never be convinced, for a lot of people in the middle, this would be a clincher. I would just love to see it for the heck of it! Knowing that a bacteria evolved to eat some other molecule or something like that just doesn't do it for me. ( Not that I'm a creationist; I just love seeing evidence that bashes you over the head like a 2x4 ).
Creationists have often been able to get away with the "microevolution exists, but macroevolution" -- meaning that yes, random gene mutations do happen, and are sometimes beneficial, but you never see a mouse turn into a bat.
I would like to see an experiment where some group of well-studied animals, both morphologically and genotypically, are put in a highly selective environment to try to force speciation, and see what the results are. Something like fruit flies in an environment where they could get access to food if they could learn how to swim or something like that. Over the generations, pull every dead fly out of the cage, and track the changes in genes and morphology as wings disappear, legs change, etc. etc.
I heard the same thing in an interview with Michael Lewis, who wrote Liar's Poker, about Wall Street CEOs in the 80s and 90s. The big bombshell that he dropped was that some CEOs were making bonuses upwards of one million dollars. He said that after he wrote that book, he would get letters from Ohio University students asking how they could get jobs like that.
What bothers me about this isn't the free internet. No, that part is pretty cool. What bothers me is the underlying political philosophy. What is a "right?" When do they start? Who creates them?
Do you mean literally? Basically, a society agrees ( not consciously, but at some point in the past ) on what the "rights" are, and claim they go back to the beginning of time, are ordained from God, or are natural and self-evident.
According to what Jefferson laid out in the Declaration of Independence, rights are inborn into the nature of each person. They are endowed to everyone by their Creator. The distinction here is critical. Rights are inherent in the nature of the human being and an integral part of human dignity -- they are not given by a government. A government cannot give or abolish rights. A person has rights regardless of what his government says. A government can only protect or infringe them.
I don't know if you know this, but Finland is not Britain or the US, and is not part of the Anglo-Saxon legal tradition. They have their own body of law and conception of rights. One of them that you might find quaint and disturbing, but feels quite right and self-evident to Scandinavians* is called "jokamiehenoikeus" ( Every-man's Right ): the freedom to travel anywhere, at any time, even on someone else's private property -- and camp, swim, boat, fish, pick berries or mushrooms, even hunt -- as long as you share some of the meat of any kills you make with the owners of the land.
Everyman's Right goes back into pre-history. Much older than Locke, Paine, or Jefferson.
Actually, while researching this for this post, wikipedia says that a similar right exists in Britain, so there is a tradition of it in Anglo-Saxon law. If laws are endowed by the Creator, and are eternal, as you seem to imply ( if we have a right to broadband now, we must have had it in the past, which means that rights are eternal ), why do you think the Founding Fathers neglected to mention this God-given self-evident right? Too obvious?
What's interesting is that wikipedia claims that feudalism and serfdom in continental Europe led to the gradual erosion of Everyman's Right. Since this economic order never really took hold in Scandinavia, people were free to enjoy their God-given rights, while their brethren were being deprived of their natural rights by the concept of... private property?
Anywho the point I'm trying to make is that if you want to complain about Americans being fuzzy on their understanding of rights in the Anglo-Saxon tradition, don't use the rights of Finland as an example. That reasoning is a little bit fuzzy in and of itself.
* Some Finns will claim that they are not Scandinavian. It's a whole discussion unto itself.
From a Progressive's point of view, Finland is far ahead -- while we are still debating "the right" to health care, they've declared the right to speedy Internet access. To the Founding Fathers point, that all rot: "When we get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe, we shall become as corrupt as Europe," -- wrote Thomas Jefferson at about same time...
What's funny is that in the 200-250 years since Thomas Jefferson had written that passge, Europe has thrown off the yoke of nobility and monarchs, and enjoys relative representational government, free media, free or cheap education ( one of Jefferson's goals was universal education, which is why he established a free university ). Many of these blessings are enumerated in European constitutions, such as the right to an education, the right to food, shelter, etc.
Meanwhile in the US, our economic security is being flushed down the toilet by corporations who are reneging on their contracts, such as pensions, and our representatives are completely bought by those same corporations, who've somehow garnered themselves the rights of a natural person under the constitution. The shoe is on the other foot. Maybe the Founding Father's noble experiment has failed.
Yes, but these are only of suspected criminals. What you want to know is the odds that two random people share fingerprint characteristics -- or rather, what are the chances that some innocent person gets framed because their fingerprints happen to match the actual criminal's.
In other words, there's a selection bias in the fingerprint database.
Also one might keep in mind that what we consider standards of living here in America, such as postal delivery, telephone lines, electricity, etc. were made available in rural places by government mandate. Much like what is happening in Finland with this broadband push.
No, you cannot, because that's not really what it is. It's just a bet placed on the value of a stock, really. "Investing" means putting your money towards a goal that will hopefully be profitable, like funding someone's business venture or building a home. Day trading does not provide capital for the few days or even seconds that a trader holds that stock -- or even a put option.
Why don't we just buy a television transmitter and have it broadcast this kind of video 24 hours a day? I dunno how well sheepfucking plays with the locals, but if there's any kind of personally identifiable info, maybe we can ridicule some of these guys to death. Uhm, if there're TVs. Otherwise we could distribute leaflets with choice video stills on them.
Yeah, what a great way to win hearts and minds in a conservative, backwater country. Some innocent herdsman who has weird sexual interests guests stoned to death or something like that. Meanwhile religious leaders can say, "See what Americans have brought here? They are broadcasting the most vile acts imaginable."
Oh, I forgot, all Muslims are terrorists. Hwo modded this insightful? This is obviously a joke -- I hope.
Is this device a radio wave camera? I've been looking for a way to get a 2-D image of radio waves. Am I correct in thinking that the wave output from an antenna is a 1-dimensional output ( two if you count time ) ? I'd like to try to get pictures of wave interference
Yeah, but what if, god forbid, lightning strikes and blows all your electronics, a hurricane, tornado, or tree fall strikes your office, it burns down, etc. etc. I see a benefit to off-site storage, and the easiest way to do that is electronically. You may not want to use a cloud service as your way of creating and accessing business data, but you do want *some* kind of cloud storage.
And this is *not* instead of local backup, this is in addition to.
He probably could have gone on Letterman, ran for class president, and started his own highly successful blog, if his parents wouldn't have been total morons and instead had helped him the right way.
Sheesus. The proper thing to do in response to this is go on Letterman? Haven't we seen time and time again that fame makes people go crazy, especially the younger they are when they become famous?
How about a proper response being going about a normal life, not trying to sue people, become a Highly Successful Bloggist, or get on David Letterman?
Forgive us for writing conversationally instead of composing brilliantly-punctuated prose for your reading pleasure
Conversationally!? What does ".." sound like? You use it in conversation?
Dude, it's a piece punctuation op just made up. It's not a mistake, they used it over and over again in places where conventional punctuation would have been just fine. Communication breaks down when parties introduce symbols that aren't shared;)
Hell yes! Ok.. maybe slight bit of hyperbole (ehe.. that tickled) but when I was in high school we tore "The Great Gatsby" apart line by line. The teacher we had could take just about any poor innocent sentence and explain how it was actually a metaphor for the fall of the American dream and the prevalence of materialism in our society. I honestly think if Scott Fitzgerald had sat in on one of these classes.. he would have laughed his ass off.
This is a fun myth, where a tyrannical and illegitimate expert gets shown up by the legitimate expert, who is actually aligned with the victim of the tyrant -- a kind of Robin Hood story, where King Richard, the Just Ruler, returns and deposes terrible Sheriff, who had persecuted the good Robin Hood.
I don't think Fitzgerald would have laughed at the class. Wikipedia says this about Fitzgerald in Princeton University:
"There he became friends with future critics and writers Edmund Wilson (Class of 1916) and John Peale Bishop (Class of 1917), and wrote for the Princeton Triangle Club." Hm, hanging out with writers and critics... !
When you look at the lives of these authors, you find that they're steeped in this "lit crit" culture that you feel sucks the life out of literature. In fact, it's what creates great literature, the books you enjoy reading. It's kind of like learning about boolean logic to understand video games. I don't need to know it to enjoy the hell out of Megaman, and in fact, if I dislike math, it's actually tedious and the relationship isn't immediately obvious. Literature analysis sucks the fun out of reading for some people, for others, it's an incredible process to 'peer under the hood' of how storytelling functions. To each his own.
This two-period hybrid full-stop/ellipses you use strikes me as emblematic of your perspective on literature and literary classes.
No offense.. but it sounds like this course is going to be just like most English courses..
Well no shit. You go to school to learn, which is Hard Work, not to goof off or be entertained. If students just want to read good books, they can read themselves without taking the class.
.. or writing a 10 page essay on what the author _REALLY_ meant when he said "John walked briskly across the street"..
Has that ever really happened? Ever?
You can (and people have) turn just about any paragraph in that book into a masters thesis
Likewise, this? Somebody wrote a master's thesis about a *paragraph* from 1984? And even more than one person has done this?
Slashdot Mirror
Another thing to consider is how "religious" people outside the western material world-view are. I bet if we had those documents, they would be chock full of references like "And Chak [the rain god] blessed the land and there was a great crop". This wasn't a religious text, but what they would consider a log of weather and harvest. The idea that a god brought rain was just how the world worked.
And of course, since this is the record of an empire, every thing done and tax paid would have been for the glory of the King -- a divine person, as all royalty were until relatively recently, a direct decedent of primordial celestial beings, a God on Earth. Of course, this would have been heresy, to pay any honor and respect to Mayan Gods or Kings, because they conflicted with the European God[s] and Kings, who were the rightful rulers.
Well, that's a point, but I think it's a sort of naive affect that smart people put on to say that the Spanish conquistadors might have found something they would have considered valuable. Of course, we really want to read those documents and understand the Maya better. That doesn't mean that the conquistadors did ( though a few of them may have ). They just wanted gold, slaves, and other imperial resources -- they were interested in sharing or having a Thanksgiving dinner, they wanted to conquer and dominate. Burning the books was a conscious effort on their part to destroy Mayan culture. They didn't have any sociological or anthropological interests.
...all the rest were burned because they could contain "Heresay"
Heresy.
(No one bothered to translate. Burn first ask questions later).
I think it was a pretty safe assumption that Mayan texts weren't going to be talking about salvation through Christ and the Holy Roman church. I don't agree with the burnings, but I don't think the Spanish erred in assuming they were going to find heresy in the texts.
...with the actual Drupal server locked down and disconnected from the internet.
How does the caching server get the original cache? Do you connect the actual server at some point, clear the cache, and let it answer requests, or do you push a cache?
Yeah, but honestly I trust a properly programmed machine a lot more than I do humans.
Those machines don't run on their own, you know. I think you can only trust a machine, properly programmed or not, as far as you can trust the person operating them.
See, you're not thinking like a creationist. A Domesticated Silver Fox is still a 'Fox', right? What they're looking to see is something more on the order of a bacterium becoming a human being. Something more dramatic, where an organism has a new organ, or a new limb, or radically altered body plan, would go far in convincing certain people.
Hey, thanks for the link to the Lensky information.
If you use fruit flies instead of mice, it would only take 1,150 years ( assuming they re-produce in two weeks ) .
It's really a shame. I think presenting the evidence of a fruit fly organism, and then some kind of diving descendent, along with a whole flip-book of the evolution, would be a great tool. Some people would never be convinced, for a lot of people in the middle, this would be a clincher. I would just love to see it for the heck of it! Knowing that a bacteria evolved to eat some other molecule or something like that just doesn't do it for me. ( Not that I'm a creationist; I just love seeing evidence that bashes you over the head like a 2x4 ).
What do they do in winter? Wouldn't they freeze to death?
Creationists have often been able to get away with the "microevolution exists, but macroevolution" -- meaning that yes, random gene mutations do happen, and are sometimes beneficial, but you never see a mouse turn into a bat.
I would like to see an experiment where some group of well-studied animals, both morphologically and genotypically, are put in a highly selective environment to try to force speciation, and see what the results are. Something like fruit flies in an environment where they could get access to food if they could learn how to swim or something like that. Over the generations, pull every dead fly out of the cage, and track the changes in genes and morphology as wings disappear, legs change, etc. etc.
I heard the same thing in an interview with Michael Lewis, who wrote Liar's Poker, about Wall Street CEOs in the 80s and 90s. The big bombshell that he dropped was that some CEOs were making bonuses upwards of one million dollars. He said that after he wrote that book, he would get letters from Ohio University students asking how they could get jobs like that.
What bothers me about this isn't the free internet. No, that part is pretty cool. What bothers me is the underlying political philosophy. What is a "right?" When do they start? Who creates them?
Do you mean literally? Basically, a society agrees ( not consciously, but at some point in the past ) on what the "rights" are, and claim they go back to the beginning of time, are ordained from God, or are natural and self-evident.
According to what Jefferson laid out in the Declaration of Independence, rights are inborn into the nature of each person. They are endowed to everyone by their Creator. The distinction here is critical. Rights are inherent in the nature of the human being and an integral part of human dignity -- they are not given by a government. A government cannot give or abolish rights. A person has rights regardless of what his government says. A government can only protect or infringe them.
I don't know if you know this, but Finland is not Britain or the US, and is not part of the Anglo-Saxon legal tradition. They have their own body of law and conception of rights. One of them that you might find quaint and disturbing, but feels quite right and self-evident to Scandinavians* is called "jokamiehenoikeus" ( Every-man's Right ): the freedom to travel anywhere, at any time, even on someone else's private property -- and camp, swim, boat, fish, pick berries or mushrooms, even hunt -- as long as you share some of the meat of any kills you make with the owners of the land.
Everyman's Right goes back into pre-history. Much older than Locke, Paine, or Jefferson.
Actually, while researching this for this post, wikipedia says that a similar right exists in Britain, so there is a tradition of it in Anglo-Saxon law. If laws are endowed by the Creator, and are eternal, as you seem to imply ( if we have a right to broadband now, we must have had it in the past, which means that rights are eternal ), why do you think the Founding Fathers neglected to mention this God-given self-evident right? Too obvious?
What's interesting is that wikipedia claims that feudalism and serfdom in continental Europe led to the gradual erosion of Everyman's Right. Since this economic order never really took hold in Scandinavia, people were free to enjoy their God-given rights, while their brethren were being deprived of their natural rights by the concept of... private property?
Anywho the point I'm trying to make is that if you want to complain about Americans being fuzzy on their understanding of rights in the Anglo-Saxon tradition, don't use the rights of Finland as an example. That reasoning is a little bit fuzzy in and of itself. * Some Finns will claim that they are not Scandinavian. It's a whole discussion unto itself.
From a Progressive's point of view, Finland is far ahead -- while we are still debating "the right" to health care, they've declared the right to speedy Internet access. To the Founding Fathers point, that all rot: "When we get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe, we shall become as corrupt as Europe," -- wrote Thomas Jefferson at about same time...
What's funny is that in the 200-250 years since Thomas Jefferson had written that passge, Europe has thrown off the yoke of nobility and monarchs, and enjoys relative representational government, free media, free or cheap education ( one of Jefferson's goals was universal education, which is why he established a free university ). Many of these blessings are enumerated in European constitutions, such as the right to an education, the right to food, shelter, etc.
Meanwhile in the US, our economic security is being flushed down the toilet by corporations who are reneging on their contracts, such as pensions, and our representatives are completely bought by those same corporations, who've somehow garnered themselves the rights of a natural person under the constitution. The shoe is on the other foot. Maybe the Founding Father's noble experiment has failed.
Yes, but these are only of suspected criminals. What you want to know is the odds that two random people share fingerprint characteristics -- or rather, what are the chances that some innocent person gets framed because their fingerprints happen to match the actual criminal's.
In other words, there's a selection bias in the fingerprint database.
Also one might keep in mind that what we consider standards of living here in America, such as postal delivery, telephone lines, electricity, etc. were made available in rural places by government mandate. Much like what is happening in Finland with this broadband push.
You can think of it as short term investing.
No, you cannot, because that's not really what it is. It's just a bet placed on the value of a stock, really. "Investing" means putting your money towards a goal that will hopefully be profitable, like funding someone's business venture or building a home. Day trading does not provide capital for the few days or even seconds that a trader holds that stock -- or even a put option.
It is not investing in any sense.
I'll still buy Macs, but I will NEVER do any other kinds of business with them again.
Why would you still buy Macs, if you feel that strongly about Apple?
Maybe because he's making a business decision, and not holding an emotional grudge.
You gotta wait a few more years for the Mayan calendar to expire in 2012 and the awakening happens. Funny how that worked out, huh?
Why don't we just buy a television transmitter and have it broadcast this kind of video 24 hours a day? I dunno how well sheepfucking plays with the locals, but if there's any kind of personally identifiable info, maybe we can ridicule some of these guys to death. Uhm, if there're TVs. Otherwise we could distribute leaflets with choice video stills on them.
Yeah, what a great way to win hearts and minds in a conservative, backwater country. Some innocent herdsman who has weird sexual interests guests stoned to death or something like that. Meanwhile religious leaders can say, "See what Americans have brought here? They are broadcasting the most vile acts imaginable."
Oh, I forgot, all Muslims are terrorists. Hwo modded this insightful? This is obviously a joke -- I hope.
Is this device a radio wave camera? I've been looking for a way to get a 2-D image of radio waves. Am I correct in thinking that the wave output from an antenna is a 1-dimensional output ( two if you count time ) ? I'd like to try to get pictures of wave interference
Yeah, but what if, god forbid, lightning strikes and blows all your electronics, a hurricane, tornado, or tree fall strikes your office, it burns down, etc. etc. I see a benefit to off-site storage, and the easiest way to do that is electronically. You may not want to use a cloud service as your way of creating and accessing business data, but you do want *some* kind of cloud storage.
And this is *not* instead of local backup, this is in addition to.
He probably could have gone on Letterman, ran for class president, and started his own highly successful blog, if his parents wouldn't have been total morons and instead had helped him the right way.
Sheesus. The proper thing to do in response to this is go on Letterman? Haven't we seen time and time again that fame makes people go crazy, especially the younger they are when they become famous?
How about a proper response being going about a normal life, not trying to sue people, become a Highly Successful Bloggist, or get on David Letterman?
Disabling javascript can make the voices go away...?
Forgive us for writing conversationally instead of composing brilliantly-punctuated prose for your reading pleasure
Conversationally!? What does ".." sound like? You use it in conversation?
;)
Dude, it's a piece punctuation op just made up. It's not a mistake, they used it over and over again in places where conventional punctuation would have been just fine. Communication breaks down when parties introduce symbols that aren't shared
Hell yes! Ok.. maybe slight bit of hyperbole (ehe.. that tickled) but when I was in high school we tore "The Great Gatsby" apart line by line. The teacher we had could take just about any poor innocent sentence and explain how it was actually a metaphor for the fall of the American dream and the prevalence of materialism in our society. I honestly think if Scott Fitzgerald had sat in on one of these classes.. he would have laughed his ass off.
This is a fun myth, where a tyrannical and illegitimate expert gets shown up by the legitimate expert, who is actually aligned with the victim of the tyrant -- a kind of Robin Hood story, where King Richard, the Just Ruler, returns and deposes terrible Sheriff, who had persecuted the good Robin Hood.
I don't think Fitzgerald would have laughed at the class. Wikipedia says this about Fitzgerald in Princeton University: "There he became friends with future critics and writers Edmund Wilson (Class of 1916) and John Peale Bishop (Class of 1917), and wrote for the Princeton Triangle Club." Hm, hanging out with writers and critics... !
When you look at the lives of these authors, you find that they're steeped in this "lit crit" culture that you feel sucks the life out of literature. In fact, it's what creates great literature, the books you enjoy reading. It's kind of like learning about boolean logic to understand video games. I don't need to know it to enjoy the hell out of Megaman, and in fact, if I dislike math, it's actually tedious and the relationship isn't immediately obvious. Literature analysis sucks the fun out of reading for some people, for others, it's an incredible process to 'peer under the hood' of how storytelling functions. To each his own.
No offense .. but it sounds like this course is going to be just like most English courses..
Well no shit. You go to school to learn, which is Hard Work, not to goof off or be entertained. If students just want to read good books, they can read themselves without taking the class.
.. or writing a 10 page essay on what the author _REALLY_ meant when he said "John walked briskly across the street"..
Has that ever really happened? Ever?
You can (and people have) turn just about any paragraph in that book into a masters thesis
Likewise, this? Somebody wrote a master's thesis about a *paragraph* from 1984? And even more than one person has done this?