If "the real world operates on a different set of rules than RMS's 'Free no matter what'", then why was RMS *ever* relevant? In the 1980s, when RMS was first developing the GPL and the GNU tools, was reality different? How could he have ever had any impact if he was totally out of touch with how reality?
Did Stallman's contribution *change* the reality since the 1980s? If so, are you suggesting that the man whose *ideas* changed reality would have nothing more to say about the situation today, and should just sit down and shut up? He once changed reality, but somehow since then he became out of touch?
It's wrong to take away the voting rights of anybody. Just ask them to step down from any position that puts them in a conflict of interest.
Here in Ohio in 2004, Ken Blackwell was the Secretary of State, who is in charge of running the elections. He was also the head of Bush/Cheney re-election campaign in Ohio. This is was a conflict of interest. He should have stepped down from one position or the other.
Similarly, if an executive of a company that makes voting machines is giving speeches in support of a candidate,
or writing in a fund-raising letter stating that he is "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year,", that is a conflict of interest. Either work for the company, or work for a candidate/party. Go ahead and vote. But don't campaign or participate in fund-raising events. To do make voting machines and actively campaign for a candidate or party is a conflict of interest.
The problem is that when a private company is making voting machines, there is no built-in parity of the system. With the old paper ballot system, representatives from *both* parties were physically present during the voting and the counting, to provide oversight. In the case of black-box machines controlled by a private corporation, they do not have to have representatives from both parties witness the development and implementation of the machines. This will lead to fraud and corruption.
I thought that the chart had meaning in the horizontal relationships -- that because English was next to Dutch, it was closer to Dutch than German, because German was seperated from Dutch by English. But you're right, the chart doesn't say whether or not horizontal spacing means anything.
"We know that neurons transmit information to each other, and we know, down to fairly meticulous levels of detail, how that transmission happens and what changes it causes at the other side."
That really doesn't tell us anything about mental phenomena. We don't know what that information is. We don't have a definition of a thought, emotion or memory at the nueron level. We just know that they have a level of activity that is correlated with some broad mental phenomena, like 'depression' or 'vision'.
Basically, we have a macro-level of *where* ( in what parts of the brain) thoughts and emotions are occuring. We have the micro-level of nueron activity. But we still are missing the entire middle of thought, emotion, and memory.
I think if one were going to argue that we have a good understanding how the mind works, they would have to claim that the mind really isn't about thoughts an emotions, contrary to our self-conscious intuition. That may be the case -- people seem to percieve a lot of things that don't really exist in reality, such as gods or ghosts. But it would take a lot of explaining to show that thoughts, emotions, and memory aren't real. I'm open to a compelling argument.
The evidence is very compelling.
I'll believe it when I have a conversation with a computer, or one shows that it can recognize faces -- when there is an artificial device that can handle a 'hard AI' problem. AFAIK, nueral networks can't ( or don't yet ) model the behavior of worms, which have the simplest nervous systems, IIRC.
Like I said, I am open to compelling evidence. I just haven't seen any yet.
I guess my point is that I'm interested in understanding what the actual underlying mechanism is. Even if synthetic, electronic nueral networks can emulate perfectly all of the behaviors that an organic nervous system can, I'm still interested in the organic nervous system in and of itself.
As a layperson, I'm still skeptical that the nueral network is the same 'type' of system that an organic nervous sytem is. I think your argument is that, in the same way that a solid state computer is qualitatively the same device as a vacuum-tube computer, a nueral network is qualitatively the same 'thing' as an organic nervous system. I'm not convinced; I'm open to conclusive evidence that it is or it isn't.
At this point, I have a hunch that the organic nervous system is a different type of system than a nueral network. I am well aware that this is just a funny feeling of mine, and I am totally open to abandoning my feeling in the face of compelling evidence. I terrible at math, but I've been reading about Goedel's theorem, which seems to imply that human minds can understand certain proofs that a turing machine cannot. Not that we haven't built a big enough, fast enough, or powerful enough computer, it's just that it is fundamentally impossible to build a computer that could ever do the things that a human mind can.
I am aware that I don't understand the math enough to make this claim myself, but I've read some debates, and to me, there is enough debate amongst experts that I can confidently say that the matter is not settled.
I liken this period to the period shortly after the industrial revolution. The steam engine was replacing animal power, and the steam engine was the metaphor du jour for all of the functions of the mind and body. The first psychologists talked about pressure building up, releasing steam, blowing off steam, etc. People thought that we were going to be replaced by mechanical men that would run on steam or oil. The metaphor is pretty good, but it only works up to a point. In the end, the mind is not a steam engine, even though you can build a steam engine that does calculations. There is the computation aspect of human behavior that is similar to, but mind-bendingly different, from turning a few pistons.
Nowadays the latest breakthrough is the very fast solid-state electronic computer, which, when you come down to it, is just a turing machine. But it serves as the metaphor for the human mind. People seem to think that this really is it; if we just build a big enough and fast enough computer, it can completely emulate a human mind. My hunch is (and it is just a hunch) that this metaphor isn't the right one either, just like we will never build a steam engine that is like a human mind -- they aren't the same type of devices.
But I think we agree on one thing: I don't believe that intelligence or consciousness is a black box of mystery that is irreduceable. There is no ghost in the machine. One day we will figure out exactly how it works. I just happen to believe that we don't have that understanding today.
Brain hacks seem to be fundamentally different than computer hacks. Or, the brain seems to have a collection of hacks that we have almost no understanding of, in addition to the hacks that we do understand.
Ever since the advent of solid state electronics, it was said to be only a matter of time before robots would be sweeping, washing dishes, performing surgery, etc.
Things that we think are really simple, that even retarded people can do, like recognize a face or a voice, understand speech, move bipedally with grace (hell, with any number of legs -- 2, 4 or 6), pour a glass of water, etc. are *hard* for robots and AI. We don't even have a model for how these things work. Even really dumb animals like turkeys can run through their environments and successfully hunt and catch flying insects.
We do have robots that are getting good with articulation, like Asimo, but we still aren't sure whether they are using the same 'tricks' that organisms use. That is to say, they are a solution to the problem of bipedal motion, but we don't know if they are the same solution that the human mind is. I'm not sure that we have even a model of what solutions organisms use.
Meanwhile, things that we think are difficult, like playing chess, factoring polynomials, or other kinds of difficult math, are easy for a computer. Now we know that the brain can do complex math like trigonometry, in order to accomplish tasks like catching a ball. but that doesn't help the average person play chess or do complex math on paper. However, the average person excels at these hard AI problems, like having a conversation or pouring a glass of water.
Sure, doctors tend to be skeptical of disease characterizations that aren't (yet) backed up by hard science.
I've found that not only are they skeptical, they are outright hostile and think such treatments are dangerous, since they ostensibly prevent people from getting real treatment.
Forgive this stupid question, but I've heard that Dutch is the closest major language to English ( I understand technically Frisian is, but it's only spoken by a few people in Germany ). I'm assuming your native language is English. Does that help you with Dutch?
That's true, psychaiatrists do every day. But MDs don't really believe in this; they tend to treat it as quackery. Seriously. If you read the wikipedia article, you'll see that people see this as modern-day witchcraft. If you go to a back doctor complaining of back pain, they'll refer you to specialist after specialist, finally having you go through surgery.
I would argue that it is a meaningful question, becuase that's exactly the cause of Scott's disease. If you are a doctor and want to cure Scott, or, if you are Scott, and want to be cured, understanding *why* the muscles are paralysed and 'fixing' or changing paralysed muscles will cure the condition.
Or, we can just stop practicing medicine on people over 25, as you seem to suggest...?
Well, if this were a physical injury, we can measure it somehow. We can do an autopsy if possbile, get an Xray, a cat scan, or an MRI. Physical injury shows up as a structure that is differen than normal -- it has been damaged somehow.
For instance, when someone has a stroke, and it damages the speech center of their brain, we can do and MRI and we will find black spots of no activity amongst the bright, humming actions of the brain. If the stroke victim dies and they do an autopsy, they find brain tissue that has been dead for a long time, and physically appears different from the rest.
Spasmodic Dysphonia cannot be a problem with the muscles or the peripheral nerves that control them because the person can sing. If there were physical injury to the nerves or muscles, the person couldn't sing, whisper, or do any kind of speaking activity -- or they all should be affected equally. If your speech were slurred, your singing should be slurred. If you can't speak, you shouldn't be able to sing.
So the problem must be in the brain. If Scott had had a stroke, they would do an MRI and identify the exact areas of the brain that had died from the lack of blood. But Scott didn't say anything like that. Instead, he called it a 'wiring problem' in his brain. I take it that means that there wasn't any lack of activity in his brain (i.e. no dark areas in the MRI), but somehow it just wasn't happening. If you look at TMS, the two sound awfully similar.
There are simliar phenomena such as people who go blind as a result of witnesses tramatic events such as war. All physical tests show that their eyes and vision parts of the brain are working -- in fact, they can pass simple visual test, showing that their vision works ( I forget specifically what those tests were). But, they just don't see, presumably as a reaction to whatever horrible scenes they witness. I think the case I read about was some South Asian villager who had witnessed a bloddy massacre.
From Scott's description, it sounds like this could be a manifestation of Tension Myositis Syndrome. TMS is a diagnosis developed by Dr. John Sarno that describes persistent headache, back and muscle pain that is not explained by injury and is resistant to treatment as caused by blocking painful emotion. The brain creates a distraction of physical pain by robbing muscles of oxygen so that the person doesn't have to deal with difficult or socially unacceptable emotions (resentment at the needs of a newborn, stress of a new job, caring for aging parents, etc).
Here are two facts that align with TMS:
it doesn't have a well-described physical mechanism -- i.e. doctor's don't understand specifically the physical mechanism of the diease
the fact that it is a phenomena of the muscles align with other TMS diagnoses -- in this case paralysation instead of oxygen deprivation.
Now before any of you claim that the two are mutually contradictory, understand this: the doctors don't have any explanation for *why* Scott's muscles are paralysed. They just are. They have no reason or cause not to be working; they just don't. There is no diease, such as injury, bacteria, virus, or anything that would have paralysed these otherwise working muscles. They just aren't working. But, the person can sing.
The fact that Scott was able to work his way out of it through self-hypnosis, visualization, and practice, seems to indicate that it was something in the mind. Sarno's course of treatment for TMS includes such activities. He also recommends psychotherapy for dealing with emotions.
In fact, in Sarno's recent book _The Divided Mind_, he recounts a story about a famous turn-of-the-century hypnotist who was able to cure a person's muteness, while they were under hypnosis.
I'm not in favor of going to herbs and drumming for medicine. But it seems to me that emotional issues causing physical problems are an unexplored and undertreated area of modern American medicine.
The problem with electronic voting hacks is that a single person can change entire elections, in very little time, without leaving any evidence at all.
With paper ballots, you have to come up with a lot of other ballots if you want to stuff the ballot. That takes time, material, and co-conspirators. If you want to destroy ballots, you have to take them out of the box and get rid of them. You might shred, burn, bury them, or throw them in a river. That takes time, and leaves evidence and possibly witnesses. If you want to destroy enough ballots to change an election, you will probably also need co-conspirators, and will need to avoid witnesses.
So anything you do to change a paper election will take a lot of time, resources, and manpower, where as an electronic theft of an entire election is almost instantaneous, with no witness and no evidence *.
Switching computer hardware isn't the major life change that joining a cult where your every movement is monitored is.
"Never looked back" to me says "completely satisfied" or "can't find any reason to look for alternatives" or "haven't missed anything from my previous situation" or even "see no reason to change". If it's that good, it's that good. We shouldn't have to expend the energy and time to critically examine our OS choices as we do religion. It's just a computer for crying out loud.
Basically "never looked back" is a good enough endorsement for me from someone who doesn't take operating systems as seriously as they do a religion.
By definition, a neutral country is "not with us". Bush said, "If you're not with us, you're against us." Ergo, a neutral nation, which is not with us, is against us.
You have to look at this in the context of diplomacy and international politics.
Every country knows that the US has the most powerful military in the world. They are all well aware that US has a contingency plan for every conceivable military incident -- occupying Canada, fighting North Korea etc. The world governments don't need to be told this by Bush.
When you get up in front of the public and start talking about war and defending yourself. When you come out and say things in a public forum, to the media, instead of privately, through diplomatic channels, that has a meaning all in itself in international politics. It's beligerent and aggressive. The purpose of this message isn't to inform -- Bush isn't saying anything that everybody doesn't already know. It's to threaten an intimidate. It's an escalation of hostility. It's saying that we are abandoning the peaceful use of space, unilaterally, and starting to arm up. We're not doing this in response to any nation or any event; we are doing this because we damn well want to. And I'm doing it in public; no one can stop me.
It is just like when you're in a bar and the guy next to you starts talking about beating the shit out of you. It's inappropriate and uncalled for. There's no reason for him to start saying that. There's a problem when someone starts talking like that, when there isn't any reason for them to do so.
There are currently no Hitlers taking over space. There are no weapons in space, either aimed in space, or aimed at us from space. There is nothing going on up there that Bush needs to react to.
Its like youre in a bar, and the guy next to you says "If you ever sneak into my house, I will shoot you and then beat the shit out of you. Do you understand me? Fuck with me and I will seriously fuck you up!" Meanwhile, youre just sitting there, having a beer, minding your own business. Why is this guy talking about beating you up? Why is he afraid of you breaking in? Why is he imagining you fucking with him? Its a beligerent, hostile action. He is over-reacting to a situation that is totally in his mind.
Same with the Bush administration. They literally made shit up as a pretext to invade Iraq, which is now a de facto clusterfuck. The whole world saw this and understands it. Now Bush is getting all high and mighty about blowing shit up in space. Not only has he foolishly over-reacted to a situation that *was not a threat*, he just hasnt learned his lesson -- he wants to also invade Iran.
Slashdot Mirror
"buddhaunderthetree writes, 'Five years ago today Slashdot was introduced to the iPod and the reviews were mixed to say the least.'"
So can we call this blurb 'Re-mixed Reviews?
I don't understand your logic.
If "the real world operates on a different set of rules than RMS's 'Free no matter what'", then why was RMS *ever* relevant? In the 1980s, when RMS was first developing the GPL and the GNU tools, was reality different? How could he have ever had any impact if he was totally out of touch with how reality?
Did Stallman's contribution *change* the reality since the 1980s? If so, are you suggesting that the man whose *ideas* changed reality would have nothing more to say about the situation today, and should just sit down and shut up? He once changed reality, but somehow since then he became out of touch?
It's wrong to take away the voting rights of anybody. Just ask them to step down from any position that puts them in a conflict of interest.
Here in Ohio in 2004, Ken Blackwell was the Secretary of State, who is in charge of running the elections. He was also the head of Bush/Cheney re-election campaign in Ohio. This is was a conflict of interest. He should have stepped down from one position or the other.
Similarly, if an executive of a company that makes voting machines is giving speeches in support of a candidate, or writing in a fund-raising letter stating that he is "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year,", that is a conflict of interest. Either work for the company, or work for a candidate/party. Go ahead and vote. But don't campaign or participate in fund-raising events. To do make voting machines and actively campaign for a candidate or party is a conflict of interest.
The problem is that when a private company is making voting machines, there is no built-in parity of the system. With the old paper ballot system, representatives from *both* parties were physically present during the voting and the counting, to provide oversight. In the case of black-box machines controlled by a private corporation, they do not have to have representatives from both parties witness the development and implementation of the machines. This will lead to fraud and corruption.
Are you aware that the character 'ß' is pronounced 'beta'? So in essence, what you have written is 'BETAeta' -- kind of like writing 3hree or 4our.
I thought that the chart had meaning in the horizontal relationships -- that because English was next to Dutch, it was closer to Dutch than German, because German was seperated from Dutch by English. But you're right, the chart doesn't say whether or not horizontal spacing means anything.
"We know that neurons transmit information to each other, and we know, down to fairly meticulous levels of detail, how that transmission happens and what changes it causes at the other side."
That really doesn't tell us anything about mental phenomena. We don't know what that information is. We don't have a definition of a thought, emotion or memory at the nueron level. We just know that they have a level of activity that is correlated with some broad mental phenomena, like 'depression' or 'vision'.
Basically, we have a macro-level of *where* ( in what parts of the brain) thoughts and emotions are occuring. We have the micro-level of nueron activity. But we still are missing the entire middle of thought, emotion, and memory.
I think if one were going to argue that we have a good understanding how the mind works, they would have to claim that the mind really isn't about thoughts an emotions, contrary to our self-conscious intuition. That may be the case -- people seem to percieve a lot of things that don't really exist in reality, such as gods or ghosts. But it would take a lot of explaining to show that thoughts, emotions, and memory aren't real. I'm open to a compelling argument.
The evidence is very compelling.
I'll believe it when I have a conversation with a computer, or one shows that it can recognize faces -- when there is an artificial device that can handle a 'hard AI' problem. AFAIK, nueral networks can't ( or don't yet ) model the behavior of worms, which have the simplest nervous systems, IIRC.
Like I said, I am open to compelling evidence. I just haven't seen any yet.
This chart claims that Dutch is closer to English.
Have you seen any Dutch? To me, it looks like English with a lot of 'j's thrown in.
I guess my point is that I'm interested in understanding what the actual underlying mechanism is. Even if synthetic, electronic nueral networks can emulate perfectly all of the behaviors that an organic nervous system can, I'm still interested in the organic nervous system in and of itself.
As a layperson, I'm still skeptical that the nueral network is the same 'type' of system that an organic nervous sytem is. I think your argument is that, in the same way that a solid state computer is qualitatively the same device as a vacuum-tube computer, a nueral network is qualitatively the same 'thing' as an organic nervous system. I'm not convinced; I'm open to conclusive evidence that it is or it isn't.
At this point, I have a hunch that the organic nervous system is a different type of system than a nueral network. I am well aware that this is just a funny feeling of mine, and I am totally open to abandoning my feeling in the face of compelling evidence. I terrible at math, but I've been reading about Goedel's theorem, which seems to imply that human minds can understand certain proofs that a turing machine cannot. Not that we haven't built a big enough, fast enough, or powerful enough computer, it's just that it is fundamentally impossible to build a computer that could ever do the things that a human mind can.
I am aware that I don't understand the math enough to make this claim myself, but I've read some debates, and to me, there is enough debate amongst experts that I can confidently say that the matter is not settled.
I liken this period to the period shortly after the industrial revolution. The steam engine was replacing animal power, and the steam engine was the metaphor du jour for all of the functions of the mind and body. The first psychologists talked about pressure building up, releasing steam, blowing off steam, etc. People thought that we were going to be replaced by mechanical men that would run on steam or oil. The metaphor is pretty good, but it only works up to a point. In the end, the mind is not a steam engine, even though you can build a steam engine that does calculations. There is the computation aspect of human behavior that is similar to, but mind-bendingly different, from turning a few pistons.
Nowadays the latest breakthrough is the very fast solid-state electronic computer, which, when you come down to it, is just a turing machine. But it serves as the metaphor for the human mind. People seem to think that this really is it; if we just build a big enough and fast enough computer, it can completely emulate a human mind. My hunch is (and it is just a hunch) that this metaphor isn't the right one either, just like we will never build a steam engine that is like a human mind -- they aren't the same type of devices.
But I think we agree on one thing: I don't believe that intelligence or consciousness is a black box of mystery that is irreduceable. There is no ghost in the machine. One day we will figure out exactly how it works. I just happen to believe that we don't have that understanding today.
Brain hacks seem to be fundamentally different than computer hacks. Or, the brain seems to have a collection of hacks that we have almost no understanding of, in addition to the hacks that we do understand.
Ever since the advent of solid state electronics, it was said to be only a matter of time before robots would be sweeping, washing dishes, performing surgery, etc.
Things that we think are really simple, that even retarded people can do, like recognize a face or a voice, understand speech, move bipedally with grace (hell, with any number of legs -- 2, 4 or 6), pour a glass of water, etc. are *hard* for robots and AI. We don't even have a model for how these things work. Even really dumb animals like turkeys can run through their environments and successfully hunt and catch flying insects.
We do have robots that are getting good with articulation, like Asimo, but we still aren't sure whether they are using the same 'tricks' that organisms use. That is to say, they are a solution to the problem of bipedal motion, but we don't know if they are the same solution that the human mind is. I'm not sure that we have even a model of what solutions organisms use.
Meanwhile, things that we think are difficult, like playing chess, factoring polynomials, or other kinds of difficult math, are easy for a computer. Now we know that the brain can do complex math like trigonometry, in order to accomplish tasks like catching a ball. but that doesn't help the average person play chess or do complex math on paper. However, the average person excels at these hard AI problems, like having a conversation or pouring a glass of water.
Psychiatrists are MDs.
Sorry, I meant GPs.
Sure, doctors tend to be skeptical of disease characterizations that aren't (yet) backed up by hard science.
I've found that not only are they skeptical, they are outright hostile and think such treatments are dangerous, since they ostensibly prevent people from getting real treatment.
The failures themselves won't go out and fix themselves.
Average people, like you and me, need to demand change from our representatives.
How many slashdot posts have you made about electronic voting machines? How many letters have you written to your representatives?
Forgive this stupid question, but I've heard that Dutch is the closest major language to English ( I understand technically Frisian is, but it's only spoken by a few people in Germany ). I'm assuming your native language is English. Does that help you with Dutch?
That's true, psychaiatrists do every day. But MDs don't really believe in this; they tend to treat it as quackery. Seriously. If you read the wikipedia article, you'll see that people see this as modern-day witchcraft. If you go to a back doctor complaining of back pain, they'll refer you to specialist after specialist, finally having you go through surgery.
I would argue that it is a meaningful question, becuase that's exactly the cause of Scott's disease. If you are a doctor and want to cure Scott, or, if you are Scott, and want to be cured, understanding *why* the muscles are paralysed and 'fixing' or changing paralysed muscles will cure the condition.
Or, we can just stop practicing medicine on people over 25, as you seem to suggest...?
Well, if this were a physical injury, we can measure it somehow. We can do an autopsy if possbile, get an Xray, a cat scan, or an MRI. Physical injury shows up as a structure that is differen than normal -- it has been damaged somehow.
For instance, when someone has a stroke, and it damages the speech center of their brain, we can do and MRI and we will find black spots of no activity amongst the bright, humming actions of the brain. If the stroke victim dies and they do an autopsy, they find brain tissue that has been dead for a long time, and physically appears different from the rest.
Spasmodic Dysphonia cannot be a problem with the muscles or the peripheral nerves that control them because the person can sing. If there were physical injury to the nerves or muscles, the person couldn't sing, whisper, or do any kind of speaking activity -- or they all should be affected equally. If your speech were slurred, your singing should be slurred. If you can't speak, you shouldn't be able to sing.
So the problem must be in the brain. If Scott had had a stroke, they would do an MRI and identify the exact areas of the brain that had died from the lack of blood. But Scott didn't say anything like that. Instead, he called it a 'wiring problem' in his brain. I take it that means that there wasn't any lack of activity in his brain (i.e. no dark areas in the MRI), but somehow it just wasn't happening. If you look at TMS, the two sound awfully similar.
There are simliar phenomena such as people who go blind as a result of witnesses tramatic events such as war. All physical tests show that their eyes and vision parts of the brain are working -- in fact, they can pass simple visual test, showing that their vision works ( I forget specifically what those tests were). But, they just don't see, presumably as a reaction to whatever horrible scenes they witness. I think the case I read about was some South Asian villager who had witnessed a bloddy massacre.
Here are two facts that align with TMS:
- it doesn't have a well-described physical mechanism -- i.e. doctor's don't understand specifically the physical mechanism of the diease
- the fact that it is a phenomena of the muscles align with other TMS diagnoses -- in this case paralysation instead of oxygen deprivation.
Now before any of you claim that the two are mutually contradictory, understand this: the doctors don't have any explanation for *why* Scott's muscles are paralysed. They just are. They have no reason or cause not to be working; they just don't. There is no diease, such as injury, bacteria, virus, or anything that would have paralysed these otherwise working muscles. They just aren't working. But, the person can sing.The fact that Scott was able to work his way out of it through self-hypnosis, visualization, and practice, seems to indicate that it was something in the mind. Sarno's course of treatment for TMS includes such activities. He also recommends psychotherapy for dealing with emotions.
In fact, in Sarno's recent book _The Divided Mind_, he recounts a story about a famous turn-of-the-century hypnotist who was able to cure a person's muteness, while they were under hypnosis.
I'm not in favor of going to herbs and drumming for medicine. But it seems to me that emotional issues causing physical problems are an unexplored and undertreated area of modern American medicine.
The problem with electronic voting hacks is that a single person can change entire elections, in very little time, without leaving any evidence at all.
With paper ballots, you have to come up with a lot of other ballots if you want to stuff the ballot. That takes time, material, and co-conspirators. If you want to destroy ballots, you have to take them out of the box and get rid of them. You might shred, burn, bury them, or throw them in a river. That takes time, and leaves evidence and possibly witnesses. If you want to destroy enough ballots to change an election, you will probably also need co-conspirators, and will need to avoid witnesses.
So anything you do to change a paper election will take a lot of time, resources, and manpower, where as an electronic theft of an entire election is almost instantaneous, with no witness and no evidence *.
* Aside from exit polling.
Switching computer hardware isn't the major life change that joining a cult where your every movement is monitored is.
"Never looked back" to me says "completely satisfied" or "can't find any reason to look for alternatives" or "haven't missed anything from my previous situation" or even "see no reason to change". If it's that good, it's that good. We shouldn't have to expend the energy and time to critically examine our OS choices as we do religion. It's just a computer for crying out loud.
Basically "never looked back" is a good enough endorsement for me from someone who doesn't take operating systems as seriously as they do a religion.
Sort of like Monty Python's Life of Brian, where male actors were playing women who were dressed as men so they could stone someone.
An MMORPG set in the world of Shakespeare, where all the world's a stage?
:D
Can we have a play within a play, ala Hamlet, within an MMORPG?
By definition, a neutral country is "not with us". Bush said, "If you're not with us, you're against us." Ergo, a neutral nation, which is not with us, is against us.
You have to look at this in the context of diplomacy and international politics.
Every country knows that the US has the most powerful military in the world. They are all well aware that US has a contingency plan for every conceivable military incident -- occupying Canada, fighting North Korea etc. The world governments don't need to be told this by Bush.
When you get up in front of the public and start talking about war and defending yourself. When you come out and say things in a public forum, to the media, instead of privately, through diplomatic channels, that has a meaning all in itself in international politics. It's beligerent and aggressive. The purpose of this message isn't to inform -- Bush isn't saying anything that everybody doesn't already know. It's to threaten an intimidate. It's an escalation of hostility. It's saying that we are abandoning the peaceful use of space, unilaterally, and starting to arm up. We're not doing this in response to any nation or any event; we are doing this because we damn well want to. And I'm doing it in public; no one can stop me.
It is just like when you're in a bar and the guy next to you starts talking about beating the shit out of you. It's inappropriate and uncalled for. There's no reason for him to start saying that. There's a problem when someone starts talking like that, when there isn't any reason for them to do so.
Because its a hostile, threatening act.
There are currently no Hitlers taking over space. There are no weapons in space, either aimed in space, or aimed at us from space. There is nothing going on up there that Bush needs to react to.
Its like youre in a bar, and the guy next to you says "If you ever sneak into my house, I will shoot you and then beat the shit out of you. Do you understand me? Fuck with me and I will seriously fuck you up!" Meanwhile, youre just sitting there, having a beer, minding your own business. Why is this guy talking about beating you up? Why is he afraid of you breaking in? Why is he imagining you fucking with him? Its a beligerent, hostile action. He is over-reacting to a situation that is totally in his mind.
Same with the Bush administration. They literally made shit up as a pretext to invade Iraq, which is now a de facto clusterfuck. The whole world saw this and understands it. Now Bush is getting all high and mighty about blowing shit up in space. Not only has he foolishly over-reacted to a situation that *was not a threat*, he just hasnt learned his lesson -- he wants to also invade Iran.
Low fat diets? Have you ever been to a Dim Sum? Or a Chinese carry-out place?
"Last but not least, your complaint is ignorant because not only is there no such thing as a race for news..."
No such thing as a "race for news"? Why do they call it "news" then? Because it's new information, not old? I think there is a race for news.