If you want to give it several million years to evolve the world you describe might be ok
Yeah sure, I try to take a long-term view of things.
People are so short sighted; democracies can only plan one election cycle ahead (4, maybe 8 years), dictatorships only a generation ahead (if that, but usually more far-sighted than democracies).
Whenever people bleat about climate change and talk about the wonders of carbon sequestration I think about the hadrosaurs (duck-billed, herbivorous dinosaurs).
They lived in huge migratory herds. Their nesting grounds have been found; thousands of huge nests in which they laid their eggs. The hatchings grew at an enormous rate, becoming ready to accompany the adults on very long migratory walks within months of hatching.
The growth rate of these things really struck me; where does all that dinosaur muscle and bone come from? These are herbivores. These hatchlings must have been eating a lot of food.
The plants that provided them with that growth rate must, themselves, have had an enormous growth rate; the foliage at these nesting grounds must have been astounding.
I don't believe that there is any ecosystem in the world that we know today that could support these animals.
The world as we know it today is virtually a desert even though the surface of the Earth is 75% water. Theres plenty of water in the world today; the problem is the lack of carbon.
Plants and animals are made of carbon. The bulk of plant material (that isn't water) is made from carbon that is drawn out of the air. Animals turn that atmospheric carbon into muscle, bone and fat.
Vast tracts of forest and vegetation were buried in huge volcanic eruptions. Thats the trend on planet Earth; slowly over eons carbon is buried and taken out of circulation, thereby PREVENTING the growth of plants and animals.
Volcanic action will, very very slowly, leech that carbon back into the atmosphere but its so slow that eventually life on earth will become more and more carbon-impoverished.
What the planet Earth needs, in order to sustain life, is some agency to remove carbon from sequestration and to release that carbon into the atmosphere as methane and co2. Thats where we come in.
We should be PROUD to be nurturing the planet by releasing carbon back into circulation so that it can go to make plants and animals and keep this planet thriving.
I think that nothing has done more to harm the reputation of international Jewry than the actions of the state of Israel.
People around the world look at the actions of the nation "Israel" and they imagine that all Jews are part of this and support it. They see Jewish 'conspiracies' everywhere. I don't believe that the international monetary system is used and manipulated by secret covens of Jewish bankers. I happen to know for a fact that not all Jews even support the *existence* of the *political* state of Israel.
The nation which we know today as "Israel" is a geopolitical entity with an agenda which (I believe) it pushes very aggressively and arrogantly; as a nation-state its probably one of the more unpleasant ones on Earth today. But I don't believe that Judaism is 'about' geopolitics. But this is an image which those Israeli politicians encourage.
The problem, I believe, that many international Jews face today is that they are held responsible for the actions of the POLITICIANS of the NATION that calls itself "Israel". I do not believe that what these politicians do, they do for Judaism.
I think that these politicians are callously using Judaism, even the holocaust, to support and condone their own agendas. That would be so cynical and abusive of the memory of those that died in the holocaust that they deserve nothing but contempt.
I don't loathe and despise *all* of the people that live within the borders of or are citizens of the state of Israel; its not about the human beings, its about the politics.
Many states have ultra-nationalist problems. I loathe and despise ultra-nationalists. And it seems to me that in the case of the state of Israel, the ultra-nationalists are very much in charge.
People are not their nationalities; they are human beings regardless of which nation they have citizenship of. They should see one another in terms of their common shared humanity rather than in terms of nationalism which is an awful, divisive influence.
People confuse 'anti-semitism' with 'anti-jewish'; arabs are semites.
There are plenty of people living in and citizens of the state of Israel who are neither xenophobic nor racist. Its unfortunate that most of (BUT NOT ALL) of the Israelis I have known have been rather sadly rabid in their anti-semitism...
While I'm scientifically trained, I've got an arts degree and I am torn between those worlds.
I feel inclined toward the supernatural; I don't believe that knowledge (science) is infinitely helpful... feelings, intuition have more depth and are perhaps more infinite. If the known is a finite set, and the knowable is a countable infinity, the unknowable is like the set of real numbers, vast beyond measure. Computation, rationality, methodology is of little help in grasping that infinity. Yet somehow I feel that the organism, a kind of 'supernatural' is capable of dealing with that vastness.
There is a section at the end of The Golden Bough where Frazer draws a comparison between magic, religion and science and comes to the conclusion that science and magic have more in common than either do with religion.
Don't confuse the magical 'supernatural' with the religious 'supernatural', they are worlds apart.
It's telling that most people are willing to attribute a mind to a physical human, but not to other animals, bugs, plants, etc.
I can tell that you are not from a Shamanistic culture:)
Although I guess that the phrase "most people" does, strictly speaking, refer to the *universal* majority of human beings and majority of human beings alive today are not from Shamanistic cultures... I guess...
Still, the view that animals, plants, inanimate objects do not have minds is a cultural thing which is *not* universal.
Theres a whole 'nuther world of human beings out there to whom 'mind' is something universal, something which their clothes or tools, animals, weather etc are seen to possess. I'm proud to be part of that 'other world'.
In fact I'm going to type this whole "Shaman song" in here, for posterity. I didn't write it, its ancient:
Everything that is is alive.
On a steep river bank theres a voice that speaks I've seen the master of that voice He bowed to me I spoke with him He answers all my questions.
Everything that is is alive.
Little grey bird little blue breast sings in his hollow bough she calls her spirits dances sings her shaman songs woodpecker on a tree thats his drum He's got a drumming nose and the tree shakes cries out like a drum when the axe bites its side. All these things answer my call.
Everything that is is alive.
The lantern walks around The walls of this tent have tongues even this bowl has its own true home. The hides asleep in their bags were up talking all night. Antlers on the graves rise up and circle the mounds while the dead themselves get up and go visit the living ones.
The military thinks of that as people throwing rocks over the fence - an annoyance to be dealt with, but not a serious enemy.
Unless its the Israeli military in which case someone throwing rocks over the fence is taken seriously enough to send some artillery rounds back at them... maybe with white phosphorous for good measure.
The ß character is certainly not deprecated in World of Warcraft; people use it all the time in the names of their characters, evidently they think its a 'B'.
Its especially funny when someone has, unfortunately, named their character something like ßillyßod. They (and most other WoW players) think its "BillyBod" but I delight in calling them 'SsillySsod' instead, because I can't be bothered typing ß on my keypad.
I don't think that anyone ever really dies; I hold to an immortalist philosophy.
If death is the end of experience then, well, thats not really something that you can experience.
My belief is that the process of experiencing an existance is not something that can end.
I do believe that one can have amnesia and forget ones past experiences, though I believe that such amnesia is always a temporary phenomenon. Eventually you will remember all that you have experienced, even if it takes billions of years.
So the 'experiencer' never actually experiences their own cessation of experience and from their perspective they never die, the 'experiencer' continues to experience after the 'death' of their body.
I look at it like this; I (the experiencer who is writing this) am just one of out of all of the infinite, countless possible 'selves' that make up my true self.
That 'true self' is the infinite collection of all of those individual selves, like this one.
What I am 'remembering' as my life experience is not so much the experience of this individual self, but rather that infinite self 'remembering' the experiences of one of its components.
Thus, if this individual self experiences, say, the catastrophic destruction of its body the true self simply leaves that one behind and takes up the 'rememberance' of another of its components.
From the perspective of my individual self, it has not ceased to experience because the experience of the individual self is non-different from the experience of the infinite self; it comes about through the experience of the infinite self.
From the perspective of other individual selves, perhaps the witnesses of the catastrophe which destroyed the body of that individual self of 'my true self', sure -- that body ceased to operate and that individual appeared to cease to exist.
But thats because these witnesses are individual selves confined in their experience to the same thread of existance in which that part of 'my true self' ceased to operate.
They cannot see beyond this world so they see the thread of experience of another self as being cut.
The experience of 'being me' in effect 'jumps the tracks' into another world of experience and carries on with no problem.
We are all ageless and eternal, infinite beings; infinity upon infinity. And we are all not just gods but God. The supreme personality is the combination of all of these infinite 'true selves'. And our destiny is to completely remember ourselves and all that we have done, all that we have experienced.
And at that point, we, I, God -- will know ourself and we, I, God will be complete.
Chris demonstrated country-of-origin detection based on passport RFID values. The same thing works with military IDs.
But could the detector be made discrete enough? Ie not require mains power, not require obvious antenna or other detection apparatus?
If so then... surely this is just fucking scary?
Or am I missing something here? Eg a bomb that goes off when theres enough US passport holders nearby. Or UK. Or whoever someone bears a grudge against.
People are going on with worries about identity theft or leakage of personal info via RFID tags and other people are going on about how thats just not a problem and not to worry. But if these things can be used to target specific groups with concealed bombs then takes it to a whole new level.
1. Is it possible to detect, from the RFID tag, at a distance, the presence of a US passport and to distinguish a US passport from other passports fitted with RFID tags? 2. Is it possible to determine roughly how many US passports are within range? 3. Is it possible to engineer such an RFID tag detector into the detonator of an explosive device while keeping said explosive device small enough and low powered enough to be easily concealable? (ie doesn't need mains electricity nor obvious antenna).
I am just asking the question, I have no wish to see US passport holders blown to bits; but there *are* people who *would*.
I've been with Linux since about 1991/2, my first distribution was Soft Landings (SLS). I've built Linux From Scratch and worked with Gentoo. For the last 10 years I've been a Debian sysadmin.
Now I've reached a point where I'm never going to (want to) install another Debian system ever again and am trying to convince my employer to go with RHEL. Sure for a hobbyist Debian, Gentoo etc may be fine, or if you work somewhere that has an engineering team; but as sole sysadmin in a busy hosting and development environment you want support and to, in effect, outsource a lot of the engineering work.
Give me a 'polished distro' over 'unpolished' any time.
Watergate wasn't even a real scandal; it was dressed up to look like a scandal by politicians who felt they needed to give the appearance of upholding moral standards (when in fact, as politicians, they had none to begin with).
Jean Baudrillard in his book "Simulations" explains it very nicely. Watergate was a simulation of a scandal.
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder how many people turned 42 today?
I like this.
One would say to an obvious liar:
"I can see your falsies from here, they stand out a mile!"
or:
"Your truth is like a really obvious boob-job"
Thanks for your support.
I think its very sad that people hate Jews when what they really have a problem with is Zionism and ultra-nationalism.
People need to get some perspective; people on both sides of this conflict.
If you want to give it several million years to evolve the world you describe might be ok
Yeah sure, I try to take a long-term view of things.
People are so short sighted; democracies can only plan one election cycle ahead (4, maybe 8 years), dictatorships only a generation ahead (if that, but usually more far-sighted than democracies).
You got to see the big picture!
Whenever people bleat about climate change and talk about the wonders of carbon sequestration I think about the hadrosaurs (duck-billed, herbivorous dinosaurs).
They lived in huge migratory herds. Their nesting grounds have been found; thousands of huge nests in which they laid their eggs. The hatchings grew at an enormous rate, becoming ready to accompany the adults on very long migratory walks within months of hatching.
The growth rate of these things really struck me; where does all that dinosaur muscle and bone come from? These are herbivores. These hatchlings must have been eating a lot of food.
The plants that provided them with that growth rate must, themselves, have had an enormous growth rate; the foliage at these nesting grounds must have been astounding.
I don't believe that there is any ecosystem in the world that we know today that could support these animals.
The world as we know it today is virtually a desert even though the surface of the Earth is 75% water. Theres plenty of water in the world today; the problem is the lack of carbon.
Plants and animals are made of carbon. The bulk of plant material (that isn't water) is made from carbon that is drawn out of the air. Animals turn that atmospheric carbon into muscle, bone and fat.
Vast tracts of forest and vegetation were buried in huge volcanic eruptions. Thats the trend on planet Earth; slowly over eons carbon is buried and taken out of circulation, thereby PREVENTING the growth of plants and animals.
Volcanic action will, very very slowly, leech that carbon back into the atmosphere but its so slow that eventually life on earth will become more and more carbon-impoverished.
What the planet Earth needs, in order to sustain life, is some agency to remove carbon from sequestration and to release that carbon into the atmosphere as methane and co2. Thats where we come in.
We should be PROUD to be nurturing the planet by releasing carbon back into circulation so that it can go to make plants and animals and keep this planet thriving.
I think that nothing has done more to harm the reputation of international Jewry than the actions of the state of Israel.
People around the world look at the actions of the nation "Israel" and they imagine that all Jews are part of this and support it. They see Jewish 'conspiracies' everywhere. I don't believe that the international monetary system is used and manipulated by secret covens of Jewish bankers. I happen to know for a fact that not all Jews even support the *existence* of the *political* state of Israel.
The nation which we know today as "Israel" is a geopolitical entity with an agenda which (I believe) it pushes very aggressively and arrogantly; as a nation-state its probably one of the more unpleasant ones on Earth today. But I don't believe that Judaism is 'about' geopolitics. But this is an image which those Israeli politicians encourage.
The problem, I believe, that many international Jews face today is that they are held responsible for the actions of the POLITICIANS of the NATION that calls itself "Israel". I do not believe that what these politicians do, they do for Judaism.
I think that these politicians are callously using Judaism, even the holocaust, to support and condone their own agendas. That would be so cynical and abusive of the memory of those that died in the holocaust that they deserve nothing but contempt.
I don't loathe and despise *all* of the people that live within the borders of or are citizens of the state of Israel; its not about the human beings, its about the politics.
Many states have ultra-nationalist problems. I loathe and despise ultra-nationalists. And it seems to me that in the case of the state of Israel, the ultra-nationalists are very much in charge.
People are not their nationalities; they are human beings regardless of which nation they have citizenship of. They should see one another in terms of their common shared humanity rather than in terms of nationalism which is an awful, divisive influence.
People confuse 'anti-semitism' with 'anti-jewish'; arabs are semites.
There are plenty of people living in and citizens of the state of Israel who are neither xenophobic nor racist. Its unfortunate that most of (BUT NOT ALL) of the Israelis I have known have been rather sadly rabid in their anti-semitism...
While I'm scientifically trained, I've got an arts degree and I am torn between those worlds.
I feel inclined toward the supernatural; I don't believe that knowledge (science) is infinitely helpful... feelings, intuition have more depth and are perhaps more infinite. If the known is a finite set, and the knowable is a countable infinity, the unknowable is like the set of real numbers, vast beyond measure. Computation, rationality, methodology is of little help in grasping that infinity. Yet somehow I feel that the organism, a kind of 'supernatural' is capable of dealing with that vastness.
There is a section at the end of The Golden Bough where Frazer draws a comparison between magic, religion and science and comes to the conclusion that science and magic have more in common than either do with religion.
Don't confuse the magical 'supernatural' with the religious 'supernatural', they are worlds apart.
So the Jews are motivated, capable, willing, and utter fucking idiots who reveal everything in easter eggs in the program.
As much as I loathe and despise the state of Israel, I think its entirely inappropriate to equate "Jew" with "Israeli".
There are plenty of nice, tolerant Jews that I have known whereas virtually all of the Israelis I have known have been racist and xenophobic.
It's telling that most people are willing to attribute a mind to a physical human, but not to other animals, bugs, plants, etc.
I can tell that you are not from a Shamanistic culture :)
Although I guess that the phrase "most people" does, strictly speaking, refer to the *universal* majority of human beings and majority of human beings alive today are not from Shamanistic cultures... I guess...
Still, the view that animals, plants, inanimate objects do not have minds is a cultural thing which is *not* universal.
Theres a whole 'nuther world of human beings out there to whom 'mind' is something universal, something which their clothes or tools, animals, weather etc are seen to possess. I'm proud to be part of that 'other world'.
In fact I'm going to type this whole "Shaman song" in here, for posterity. I didn't write it, its ancient:
Everything that is
is alive.
On a steep river bank
theres a voice that speaks
I've seen the master of that voice
He bowed to me
I spoke with him
He answers all my questions.
Everything that is
is alive.
Little grey bird
little blue breast
sings in his hollow bough
she calls her spirits dances
sings her shaman songs
woodpecker on a tree
thats his drum
He's got a drumming nose
and the tree shakes
cries out like a drum
when the axe bites its side.
All these things answer my call.
Everything that is
is alive.
The lantern walks around
The walls of this tent have tongues
even this bowl has its own true home.
The hides asleep in their bags
were up talking all night.
Antlers on the graves
rise up and circle the mounds
while the dead themselves get up
and go visit the living ones.
From the same time, my dad told me he used to roam the countryside around his aunt's place in Violet Town for days, living on rabbit.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbit_starvation
Man cannot live on rabbit alone.
If there are enough rabbits, the people eat till their stomachs are distended; but no matter how much they eat they feel unsatisfied.
I just said "more than the USA" not that it was "very" innovative.
I get the feeling that China values innovation far more than the USA does.
Disclaimer: I enjoy writing for iOS devices. It's fun!
Had many apps rejected?
The military thinks of that as people throwing rocks over the fence - an annoyance to be dealt with, but not a serious enemy.
Unless its the Israeli military in which case someone throwing rocks over the fence is taken seriously enough to send some artillery rounds back at them... maybe with white phosphorous for good measure.
They finally got them to start breeding
See, this is the main problem with almost all NZ native species that are 'endangered', that is to say they just don't seem to want to breed.
Conservation efforts are constantly running up against this; the damn things just don't seem to want to fuck and make babies.
They seem to just want to lie down and die out.
I say LET THEM.
The ß character is certainly not deprecated in World of Warcraft; people use it all the time in the names of their characters, evidently they think its a 'B'.
Its especially funny when someone has, unfortunately, named their character something like ßillyßod. They (and most other WoW players) think its "BillyBod" but I delight in calling them 'SsillySsod' instead, because I can't be bothered typing ß on my keypad.
You are still experiencing in dreams, even in the dreamless sleep.
Look up 'advaita vedanta'
I don't think that anyone ever really dies; I hold to an immortalist philosophy.
If death is the end of experience then, well, thats not really something that you can experience.
My belief is that the process of experiencing an existance is not something that can end.
I do believe that one can have amnesia and forget ones past experiences, though I believe that such amnesia is always a temporary phenomenon. Eventually you will remember all that you have experienced, even if it takes billions of years.
So the 'experiencer' never actually experiences their own cessation of experience and from their perspective they never die,
the 'experiencer' continues to experience after the 'death' of their body.
I look at it like this; I (the experiencer who is writing this) am just one of out of all of the infinite, countless possible 'selves' that make up my true self.
That 'true self' is the infinite collection of all of those individual selves, like this one.
What I am 'remembering' as my life experience is not so much the experience of this individual self, but rather that infinite self 'remembering' the experiences of one of its components.
Thus, if this individual self experiences, say, the catastrophic destruction of its body the true self simply leaves that one behind and takes up the 'rememberance' of another of its components.
From the perspective of my individual self, it has not ceased to experience because the experience of the individual self is non-different from the experience of the infinite self; it comes about through the experience of the infinite self.
From the perspective of other individual selves, perhaps the witnesses of the catastrophe which destroyed the body of that individual self of 'my true self', sure -- that body ceased to operate and that individual appeared to cease to exist.
But thats because these witnesses are individual selves confined in their experience to the same thread of existance in which that part of 'my true self' ceased to operate.
They cannot see beyond this world so they see the thread of experience of another self as being cut.
The experience of 'being me' in effect 'jumps the tracks' into another world of experience and carries on with no problem.
We are all ageless and eternal, infinite beings; infinity upon infinity. And we are all not just gods but God. The supreme personality is the combination of all of these infinite 'true selves'. And our destiny is to completely remember ourselves and all that we have done, all that we have experienced.
And at that point, we, I, God -- will know ourself and we, I, God will be complete.
Chris demonstrated country-of-origin detection based on passport RFID values. The same thing works with military IDs.
But could the detector be made discrete enough? Ie not require mains power, not require obvious antenna or other detection apparatus?
If so then... surely this is just fucking scary?
Or am I missing something here? Eg a bomb that goes off when theres enough US passport holders nearby. Or UK. Or whoever someone bears a grudge against.
People are going on with worries about identity theft or leakage of personal info via RFID tags and other people are going on about how thats just not a problem and not to worry. But if these things can be used to target specific groups with concealed bombs then takes it to a whole new level.
Ok how about this.
US passports contain RFID tags.
1. Is it possible to detect, from the RFID tag, at a distance, the presence of a US passport and to distinguish a US passport from other passports fitted with RFID tags?
2. Is it possible to determine roughly how many US passports are within range?
3. Is it possible to engineer such an RFID tag detector into the detonator of an explosive device while keeping said explosive device small enough and low powered enough to be easily concealable? (ie doesn't need mains electricity nor obvious antenna).
I am just asking the question, I have no wish to see US passport holders blown to bits; but there *are* people who *would*.
I've been with Linux since about 1991/2, my first distribution was Soft Landings (SLS). I've built Linux From Scratch and worked with Gentoo. For the last 10 years I've been a Debian sysadmin.
Now I've reached a point where I'm never going to (want to) install another Debian system ever again and am trying to convince my employer to go with RHEL. Sure for a hobbyist Debian, Gentoo etc may be fine, or if you work somewhere that has an engineering team; but as sole sysadmin in a busy hosting and development environment you want support and to, in effect, outsource a lot of the engineering work.
Give me a 'polished distro' over 'unpolished' any time.
No that was after Watergate; Nixon et al got into trouble over the followup, not over Watergate itself.
Watergate wasn't even a real scandal; it was dressed up to look like a scandal by politicians who felt they needed to give the appearance of upholding moral standards (when in fact, as politicians, they had none to begin with).
Jean Baudrillard in his book "Simulations" explains it very nicely. Watergate was a simulation of a scandal.
If only it were as simple to do 'apt-get --purge remove debian'