It's called "perverting the course of justice" no matter which side of the isle an honest person stands. What kind of "impartial inquiry" allows the target to pick both the questions and the answers? - Nothing out of the ordinary though, it wasn't that long ago that Michael Chrichton was introduced to the US senate as a "climate expert".
Perhaps they've hired some skilled negotiators to play the two governments against each other for the best deal? Corporations do this sort of thing all the time when deciding where to situate their operations, Holden (GM) just got $250M to keep their factories here for a few more years.
So there is no such thing as a real good or bad, right? It's all just a matter of opinion, including the consequences.
Pretty much. As a concept, sure, most people have a similar set of inate 'morals', same as a wolf pack or pride of lions does. Knowing this doesn't change what I feel when I see something I consider good or bad anymore than knowing how my sense of smell works changes the scent of a rose. But these are all "gut feelings", which are by their very nature subjective. If you want to be trully objective then the very first thing you should do is question your own "gut feelings" about the subject at hand.
"Doing TheRightThing(TM) when you think nobody is watching" is the best definition of morality I know. Religion hijacks this by convincing you god is always watching.
My version of "independent" and "objective" at least recognises that "good" and "bad" are in the eye of the beholder, the only real constatnt is that there will always be groups who see things the opposite way to each other.
Honestly if I'm her I'd walked off the podium. Still... absolutely hilarious.
I would like to think my response would have been to stand to attention and salute, with my tounge visibly distorting my cheek. As it is, I think she starts looking a bit bewildered as it progresses, she's possibly sensing something is going on from the audience but is not sure what it is. There's also a good chance she doesn't speak english and since the two tunes are apparently quite similar may have thought it was just a very lame western-ised version of the real thing. Regardless of what was going on in her head, she certainly looks relived when it ends with an explosion of applause from the audience.
As a coder/IT guy/photographer/videographer, I am trained to look for flaws in my work (and others).
Ditto and I'm also in my 50's, but I find/fix bugs using traces and testing more easily than I do by proof-reading the code. The guy who sits next to me is the opposite, like you he finds them more easily by proof reading. And yes, once something is pointed out I can't help but see it.
Here in Australia the heat wave killed several times more people on black Saturday than the bushfires did. But considering the health of most of the victims, it's more acurate (if somewhat blunter) to say their lives were shortened by the heat wave.
The MS response basically says it's fixed in the latest version and they are not going to patch older versions. That kind of policy has been common practice in the software industry for a long time now. Fixing bugs in old versions is all cost unless you can sell them a support contract, fixing the bug by selling a copy of the latest version is all profit. Even with a support contract the likely answer from most software vendors would be "install the latest version".
Don't take this personally but I wonder if this is similar to what happens in Autistic people. An autisic brain interprets it sensory input at face value whereas a "normal" brain interprets it alongside what "should be" and tosses more of the noise away, making it literally non-existant to the owner of the "normal" brain. As the owner of a "normal" brain my comprehension of the written word is pretty good but my proof-reading sucks because my brain regularly auto-corrects mistakes and fails to inform me. As I understand it, the owner of an autistic brain has the opposite skill set
One word? What kind of math do you use? I count 4 words using traditional math and my fingers, -1.702e^9 words using copyright math and excell, and 11 words (including those in hidden dimentions) using a popular version of string theory.
It gets worse as you get older, I enjoyed Bill and Ben the flower pot men when I was a kid in the 60's. Looking at it now I can only assume my parents were slipping LSD into my cornflakes.
How can we hold our leaders accountable, if we don't know what they're up to?
What's wrong with the traditional method of taking their words with a grain of salt and holding them to account for their actions? Is this not the treatment you would expect for yourself?
You seem to be suggesting that only "normal" political structure's will work to keep a society from degenerating into chaos.
No, I'm telling you that humans build hierarchical societies, ALL non-hierarchical societies that have been built in the past have failed miserably. There is fuck all your's or anyone else's ideology can do to change what millions of years of evolution have made us. No matter what type of society you want to build it will be subserviant to this ancient part of human nature so you best be careful not to set up the conditions that will awaken the default master-slave behaviour that is deeply rooted within us all. Once you do set up those conditions humans will rapidly turn to their default fudal warlord society and any social engineer will have a hell of a time dragging them back out of it. This is why the communist experiments of the 20th century rapidly devolved into totalitarian governments, they created a power vacum in society that was just begging for a demagogue to fill it.
the 1%, and their willing toadies
Splitting society into "us and them" is an autonomic reflex of the master-slave dichotomy within you, your non-pyhcopathic wetware bios insists that you dehumanise the enemy long before you can start killing them for fun and profit. This doesn't mean you're evil or that you want to kill people, it means you're a human, doing what humans do.
The one benifit I see from western democracy is that it has a tendency to turn real wars into a war of words, since, like religion, political ideology can bond disparate fudal tribes into the trully wonderous civilizations that surround us, problem is that humans (particulaly teenagers and young adults) have a hard time enjoying the fruits of civilization because the slave side of our wetware makes us believe we are insignificant and powerless (cough-monotheisim-cough) in such large tribes .
Your wasting your breath, at least half the people here know for certain that whenever government meets with anyone behind a closed door they are plotting against we the people. Closed door meetings have got nothing to do with speaking frankly and protecting sensitive commercial information. It a plot, a UN conspiracy...or something....but most of all it's an outrageous outrage that must be fought. Our method of attack is to buy plastic masks from our enemy, smash the windows of small merchants and steal their wares, and top it off by vandalising establishment web pages. Sure it's going to take a while to scorch the Earth where the establishment now stands, but overthrowing the status-quo is not the only thing we do, new releases don't just rip themselves you know.
Protesting against greed while wearing hollywood masks and shitting in the town square is going to be about as effective as flower power was at "solving" the same issues 40yrs ago. One of the largest internal migrations in the US was in the early 70's when the hippies left the cities in droves to establish communes that shunned political hierarchies and political alliances between members. Virtually none of the communes lasted more that a couple of years. Most people assume it was because of jelousy brought on by the "love thy neighbour" attitute to sex, but it was nothing of the sort. They failed because the lack of political structure created a power vacumn allowing the one slightly more agressive member of the group to rise to the top by brow beating individuals into submission one at a time, when that stopped working things got physical. Coincidently this was all around the same time that the Stanford prision experiments demonstrated that we all have an evil dictator lurking in our phyche just waiting for the opportunity to fill a political power vacum and we also all have a cowering slave in our phyche that given the right conditions will emerge and chose security over liberty.
In other words, the more things change, the more they stay the same.
The mayor hides the crime rate
council woman hesitates
Public gets irate, but forgets the vote date
Weatherman complaining, predicted sun, it's raining
Everyone's protesting, boyfriend keeps suggesting
you're not like all of the rest.
Garbage ain't collected, women ain't protected
Politicians using, people they're abusing
The mafia's getting bigger, like pollution in the river
And you tell me that this is where it's at.
Woke up this moming with an ache in my head
Splashed on my clothes as I spilled out of bed
Opened the window to listen to the news
But all I heard was the Establishment's Blues.
Gun sales are soaring, housewives find life boring
Divorce the only answer, smoking causes cancer This system's gonna fall soon, to an angry young tune
And that's a concrete cold fact.
The pope digs population, freedom from taxation
Teeny Bops are up tight, drinking at a stoplight
Miniskirt is flirting I can't stop so I'm hurting.
Spinster sells her hopeless chest.
Adultery plays the kitchen, bigot cops non-fiction
The little man gets shafted, sons and monies drafted
Living by a time piece, new war in the far east.
Can you pass the Rorschach test?
It's a hassle is an educated guess.
Well, frankly I couldn't care less.
- This Is Not A Song, Its An Outburst (AKA The Establishment Blues ); Rodriguez - 1970
Like the US, a lot of our older towns and suburbs are named after English places. It's like they ran out of place names in the 19th century, even the state that Penrith is in is called New South Wales.
When Murdoch runs around the planet meeting politicians for breakfast so he can berrate them about things like the BBC/ABC/SBS/etc, which he see as unfair competition from the government on the taxpayer's dime, or perhaps he cries on their shoulder about how google are stealing his lunch money, or maybe he just wants to watch them retive their overnight voice mail. I don't know?
Sadly, news about publishers "taxing" a toddler's storytime at the local library doesn't strike me as out of character for the publishing industry. The fact there are greedy people in the world doesn't suprise me anymore. What contines to suprise me into my 6th decade is how easily a rich man's rationalizations as to why the rest of us owe them a living are parrotted by useful idiots and turned into laws by the sycophants we choose to represent us at the breakast table.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree.
:)
Made my first pilgrimage to parkes and tidbinbilla as a kid, in the late sixties around the time of the moon landings
It's called "perverting the course of justice" no matter which side of the isle an honest person stands. What kind of "impartial inquiry" allows the target to pick both the questions and the answers? - Nothing out of the ordinary though, it wasn't that long ago that Michael Chrichton was introduced to the US senate as a "climate expert".
Perhaps they've hired some skilled negotiators to play the two governments against each other for the best deal? Corporations do this sort of thing all the time when deciding where to situate their operations, Holden (GM) just got $250M to keep their factories here for a few more years.
I'm smart and I don't like his movies, therefore the hundred's of millions of people who do enjoy his movies must be tasteless morons. /sarcasm
One of my first cars was a HR Holden, one hand on the wheel, the other on the gearstick to stop it popping out of thitd gear.
So there is no such thing as a real good or bad, right? It's all just a matter of opinion, including the consequences.
Pretty much. As a concept, sure, most people have a similar set of inate 'morals', same as a wolf pack or pride of lions does. Knowing this doesn't change what I feel when I see something I consider good or bad anymore than knowing how my sense of smell works changes the scent of a rose. But these are all "gut feelings", which are by their very nature subjective. If you want to be trully objective then the very first thing you should do is question your own "gut feelings" about the subject at hand.
It's only marginally above sea level, so the atmosphere is too thick for proffesionals. It is however a wonderful sight for the unaided eye.
"Doing TheRightThing(TM) when you think nobody is watching" is the best definition of morality I know. Religion hijacks this by convincing you god is always watching.
My version of "independent" and "objective" at least recognises that "good" and "bad" are in the eye of the beholder, the only real constatnt is that there will always be groups who see things the opposite way to each other.
unless it was used for sinful activities
Problem is, there are multiple and conflicting lists of "sinful activities" enforced by various sects.
Idle is like a box of BubbaGump shrimp, you never know what you're going to get. - Appologies to Tom Hanks.
Honestly if I'm her I'd walked off the podium. Still... absolutely hilarious.
I would like to think my response would have been to stand to attention and salute, with my tounge visibly distorting my cheek. As it is, I think she starts looking a bit bewildered as it progresses, she's possibly sensing something is going on from the audience but is not sure what it is. There's also a good chance she doesn't speak english and since the two tunes are apparently quite similar may have thought it was just a very lame western-ised version of the real thing. Regardless of what was going on in her head, she certainly looks relived when it ends with an explosion of applause from the audience.
As a coder/IT guy/photographer/videographer, I am trained to look for flaws in my work (and others).
Ditto and I'm also in my 50's, but I find/fix bugs using traces and testing more easily than I do by proof-reading the code. The guy who sits next to me is the opposite, like you he finds them more easily by proof reading. And yes, once something is pointed out I can't help but see it.
Here in Australia the heat wave killed several times more people on black Saturday than the bushfires did. But considering the health of most of the victims, it's more acurate (if somewhat blunter) to say their lives were shortened by the heat wave.
The MS response basically says it's fixed in the latest version and they are not going to patch older versions. That kind of policy has been common practice in the software industry for a long time now. Fixing bugs in old versions is all cost unless you can sell them a support contract, fixing the bug by selling a copy of the latest version is all profit. Even with a support contract the likely answer from most software vendors would be "install the latest version".
I don't remeber romper room from my own childhood but my kids loved it almost as much as they loved the "hit me with a Sambot chip" ad.
Don't take this personally but I wonder if this is similar to what happens in Autistic people. An autisic brain interprets it sensory input at face value whereas a "normal" brain interprets it alongside what "should be" and tosses more of the noise away, making it literally non-existant to the owner of the "normal" brain. As the owner of a "normal" brain my comprehension of the written word is pretty good but my proof-reading sucks because my brain regularly auto-corrects mistakes and fails to inform me. As I understand it, the owner of an autistic brain has the opposite skill set
One word? What kind of math do you use? I count 4 words using traditional math and my fingers, -1.702e^9 words using copyright math and excell, and 11 words (including those in hidden dimentions) using a popular version of string theory.
It gets worse as you get older, I enjoyed Bill and Ben the flower pot men when I was a kid in the 60's. Looking at it now I can only assume my parents were slipping LSD into my cornflakes.
Ok, to summarise my post, "We didn't start the fire".
How can we hold our leaders accountable, if we don't know what they're up to?
What's wrong with the traditional method of taking their words with a grain of salt and holding them to account for their actions? Is this not the treatment you would expect for yourself?
You seem to be suggesting that only "normal" political structure's will work to keep a society from degenerating into chaos.
No, I'm telling you that humans build hierarchical societies, ALL non-hierarchical societies that have been built in the past have failed miserably. There is fuck all your's or anyone else's ideology can do to change what millions of years of evolution have made us. No matter what type of society you want to build it will be subserviant to this ancient part of human nature so you best be careful not to set up the conditions that will awaken the default master-slave behaviour that is deeply rooted within us all. Once you do set up those conditions humans will rapidly turn to their default fudal warlord society and any social engineer will have a hell of a time dragging them back out of it. This is why the communist experiments of the 20th century rapidly devolved into totalitarian governments, they created a power vacum in society that was just begging for a demagogue to fill it.
the 1%, and their willing toadies
Splitting society into "us and them" is an autonomic reflex of the master-slave dichotomy within you, your non-pyhcopathic wetware bios insists that you dehumanise the enemy long before you can start killing them for fun and profit. This doesn't mean you're evil or that you want to kill people, it means you're a human, doing what humans do.
The one benifit I see from western democracy is that it has a tendency to turn real wars into a war of words, since, like religion, political ideology can bond disparate fudal tribes into the trully wonderous civilizations that surround us, problem is that humans (particulaly teenagers and young adults) have a hard time enjoying the fruits of civilization because the slave side of our wetware makes us believe we are insignificant and powerless (cough-monotheisim-cough) in such large tribes .
Your wasting your breath, at least half the people here know for certain that whenever government meets with anyone behind a closed door they are plotting against we the people. Closed door meetings have got nothing to do with speaking frankly and protecting sensitive commercial information. It a plot, a UN conspiracy...or something....but most of all it's an outrageous outrage that must be fought. Our method of attack is to buy plastic masks from our enemy, smash the windows of small merchants and steal their wares, and top it off by vandalising establishment web pages. Sure it's going to take a while to scorch the Earth where the establishment now stands, but overthrowing the status-quo is not the only thing we do, new releases don't just rip themselves you know.
Protesting against greed while wearing hollywood masks and shitting in the town square is going to be about as effective as flower power was at "solving" the same issues 40yrs ago. One of the largest internal migrations in the US was in the early 70's when the hippies left the cities in droves to establish communes that shunned political hierarchies and political alliances between members. Virtually none of the communes lasted more that a couple of years. Most people assume it was because of jelousy brought on by the "love thy neighbour" attitute to sex, but it was nothing of the sort. They failed because the lack of political structure created a power vacumn allowing the one slightly more agressive member of the group to rise to the top by brow beating individuals into submission one at a time, when that stopped working things got physical. Coincidently this was all around the same time that the Stanford prision experiments demonstrated that we all have an evil dictator lurking in our phyche just waiting for the opportunity to fill a political power vacum and we also all have a cowering slave in our phyche that given the right conditions will emerge and chose security over liberty.
In other words, the more things change, the more they stay the same.
The mayor hides the crime rate
council woman hesitates
Public gets irate, but forgets the vote date
Weatherman complaining, predicted sun, it's raining
Everyone's protesting, boyfriend keeps suggesting
you're not like all of the rest.
Garbage ain't collected, women ain't protected
Politicians using, people they're abusing
The mafia's getting bigger, like pollution in the river
And you tell me that this is where it's at.
Woke up this moming with an ache in my head
Splashed on my clothes as I spilled out of bed
Opened the window to listen to the news
But all I heard was the Establishment's Blues.
Gun sales are soaring, housewives find life boring
Divorce the only answer, smoking causes cancer
This system's gonna fall soon, to an angry young tune
And that's a concrete cold fact.
The pope digs population, freedom from taxation
Teeny Bops are up tight, drinking at a stoplight
Miniskirt is flirting I can't stop so I'm hurting.
Spinster sells her hopeless chest.
Adultery plays the kitchen, bigot cops non-fiction
The little man gets shafted, sons and monies drafted
Living by a time piece, new war in the far east.
Can you pass the Rorschach test?
It's a hassle is an educated guess.
Well, frankly I couldn't care less.
- This Is Not A Song, Its An Outburst (AKA The Establishment Blues ); Rodriguez - 1970
Like the US, a lot of our older towns and suburbs are named after English places. It's like they ran out of place names in the 19th century, even the state that Penrith is in is called New South Wales.
When Murdoch runs around the planet meeting politicians for breakfast so he can berrate them about things like the BBC/ABC/SBS/etc, which he see as unfair competition from the government on the taxpayer's dime, or perhaps he cries on their shoulder about how google are stealing his lunch money, or maybe he just wants to watch them retive their overnight voice mail. I don't know?
Sadly, news about publishers "taxing" a toddler's storytime at the local library doesn't strike me as out of character for the publishing industry. The fact there are greedy people in the world doesn't suprise me anymore. What contines to suprise me into my 6th decade is how easily a rich man's rationalizations as to why the rest of us owe them a living are parrotted by useful idiots and turned into laws by the sycophants we choose to represent us at the breakast table.