Why is it that an electron orbiting the hydrogen atom doesn't accelerate? Acceleration into a different dimension - i.e. perpendicularly - is still acceleration, and normal electrons going circularly in a cyclotron do radiate. Yeah, it would mean an energy catastrophe, sooner or later it would have to give up juice, either potential or kinetic energy, and run out of it. So these day we just say - postulate - that it goes in circles but it's forbidden to accelerate thus radiate, but could we say "it doesn't go in circles", or more precisely, it doesn't accelerate at all? It doesn't shift dimensions?
Nature tolerates no infinites. Now blackholes may not be a place with division by zero, but stop before reaching infinity, and inside them exist a noninfinite, but different, mystical kind of world where obviously our laws of physics don't operate. However we're still dealing with black holes, big bangs, and such, like people 500 years ago dealt with the sky - if you get a really long ladder, you can surely climb up to that ceiling, and knock on heaven's door? What happens when you walk to the edge of Earth/World? Do you fall down?
How about we don't have nations? We have different people, like we have different dogs, some with spots and patches, some uniform color, some tall, some short, some with big furs, some with no hair, under one nation?
Sex is perverted. Humans are nowhere close to what salmons or black widows do. How about let's spread humanity, and cure the salmons genetically, so they live out a happy, fulfilling life, instead of plain dying, after they fuck? Longevity, as Martin Luther King yearned, longevity...
You have a say on how human beings should be, because it affects you when others are hurt, raped, murdered, kids mistreated. There is also a fine balance between how much you should really be affected by the liberty of others, instead of just letting them to be the way they want to be. How about we make all sharks and tigers vegetarians? As far as humans are concerned, how do you know japanese women don't get off on the way they are treated and mistreated? Maybe if you were too kind to them, they would never work up a climax? You know, besides security and love, some women also love being handled rough. It gets them off, and getting them off is important. Sometimes you have to be mean and cruel to show love.
Philip Morris is now called the Altria group. What a lame way to escape responsibility of a tainted image. Well, not so easy, I'll go around being a loudmouth making sure everyone knows the new name. What's in it for me? Well, some things are just not right, and if nobody speaks up, then what happens?
By building a titanium dome/bubble, from the raw materials found there, using sunshine/present nukular minerals as an energy source. This tripple layer titanium dome with spring loaded fish-scales, just like your matress has it, will bounce off most meteorites hitting it, since the atmosphere is too thin to burn them the big meteorites up. If you are unlucky that a really big meteorite falls on your dome, well, tough luck. You can't live life by never taking a walk outside, in fear of getting hit by lightning, though if you're even remotely related to boy-scoutism, your chances of getting struck by electricity or lightning go up astronomically.
Good luck to cutting small business expenses by shortening the intellectual property term limits. You think if patents expire in 10 years instead of 20, businesses won't be just as quick to pollute the system up that keep the just expired technologies under bay, with new patents? Instead of x amount of patents in 20 years that a small business needs to review in fear of infringement, now they have to review 2x patents in 10 years. 6 million USPTO patents in 2005? Try 12 million, in 2008. It's all about jobs, patents and intellectual property provide jobs to lawyers, programmers, and people, to keep the economy going. IP laws are meant to keep us from solutions like reinstituting telephone switchboard ladies, to give everyone something to do and be able to feed. Wouldn't you rather be a lawyer, an IP portfolio manager, a systems analyst, than a button pusher, or a switchboard operator? How do you measure the worth of your intellectual activities? I was actually offered a way to make a living, well, more like shoved down my throat, by continually rewriting software every few years, because it's job security. It's all about jobs and the economy man, because when it stops, when the last drop of oil is gone, and the quarterly growth of waste generation can't be kept up, Heaven save us all.
We're on the planet together, according to Stallman and Linus. But have you ever heard of the survival of the fittest? That's how Microsoft works, internally - they let the biggest testosterone bags outcompete each other for a spot, and out distills something wonderful - perfection.
Hey, remember life before computers? If they introduce this DRM bullshit, you don't actually have to buy it. You can buy the old stuff on ebay, while it lasts, then when that runs out, you might as well just pick up a book to read. Until public libraries are outlawed and you can no longer buy paper books, because they only come on DRM disposable-sticks 3-times-readable on your MS Notepad(tm) - saving trees(tm). After reading the text 3 times, you must repurchase the 'content', the 'property', but wow, you get a 15% discount on any repurchases! Save today by repurchasing stuff you bought yesterday! You can only save buy buying! It's like, uh, free money! One of my coworker's wife bough 2 pure bred puppies at 500 bux a piece, telling him how much she saved, when they go for 1500 a piece! Wow! Gee, you only saved 2x(1500-500)=$2000, but imagine how much you would have saved if you bought 10 puppies! Wee!
At least you'll still be able to do your taxes on a tree-paper and wood-pencil, I mean black ink pen, including the multiplications! (woa, no calculator!), even if they mandate extra taxes for noncomputer taxreturns. There is always the plow and a horse you can go back to, grow your own food, if they let you, because good luck finding non-gm engineered seeds that germinate, and good luck shaking off the lawyers suing you from your non-official, non-gm-engineered seeds cross-polinating the FDA approved 'safe', 'secure' 'nonterrorist' crops a mile down the road, whose seeds if you used them this year, you couldn't save some from the harvest, and sow come next year, because you'd be in violation of your Monsanto License Agreement for your genetically engineered seeds. It's not the seed that's the property, it's the "technology!" Yeah. Bend over - touch your toes - technology. Maybe you think you can find peace with the eskimos, maybe them and their dogs will be left alone, free, but even they will have to build their igloos from officially approved "secure" iceblocks by the UN building inspectors, because, should a tourist visit them with the igloo collapsing, that'd be too much risk. Your igloo-insurance agent is at yer service by the way. Talk about when seals get extinct because of a "mysterious" disease, and to "save" them Monsanto comes up with a new, radical cure, that genetically engineers them all, "protects them" from a virus that jumped species, but unfortunately this means that you have to purchase a license and pay Monsanto for every seal you eat. What you say? Bend over, touch your toes, here comes this wonderful technology-property, receive it with all your heart, or more exactly, all your...
As far as science is concerned, it only cares about proofs. There are fossils, there is current living biosphere, where you get to connect the dots, come up with a theory through induction, then verify your theory's predicting power. In case you happen unto something that disproves your theory, you go back and reexamine it. What can I predict from intelligent design? That whatever else I look at next will also be a sign of intelligent design? Duh... I'll give you the concept of Foo, the world is because of Foo, life is because of Foo. Predicting power? Anything else you come across, you guessed it, it's a sign of Foo. Duh..
Sure, the Universe was created by GooGoo the Frog, currently living on bottom of the Lake Chiwauwa, nobody can see him, that's his undercover outfit he takes, but if he's threatened, he jumps two galaxies and hides under the molten sulfur volcano, on a planet near Sirius. What kind of benefit does this theory give me? Predictable power? Proof? Darwinistic evolution does not try to explain how the universe is, it only explains how life and the animal world is. It can predict what happens to life under circumstances, and it can explain the past, without arbitrarily summoning magic. Show me proof it's wrong. Sure, I can't show proof that your magic intelligent design is wrong, because it's outside of scope, just like my GooGoo the Frog theory. Anything's possible. Anything. That's a correct scientific mentallity to take on, to keep an open mind. But just cuz it's possible, we don't put it into science books as something accepted.
I grew up watching a 20 minute daily-weekly science-news show on tv, called "Delta," from about age 4. I didn't understand half the crap, but the images, the divers and beautiful fish, the astronomical bodies, the stars, the bubble chamber traces, were amazing, especially to a child filled with curiosity. And that deep, monotone male voice alternating with a soft female voice, describing it all, in non-hyped, yet amicable rigor, it all just sinks into you, the language, the attitudes, the terminology. Star Trek has some language that sinks, too bad it's filled with yes-sir yes-maam drone mentality that negates automatic doubt and makes the fans go to reunions saluting each other. Also, there are just way too many scientifically unfeasible and incorrent things in Star Trek. Still, by 5 years old one forms a superego, a personality, that's hard to change after they are 20. There is a last chance before full puberty hits, but the seeds of science start very very young. Something like age 2. But you can't force this kind of stuff, all you can do is offer, and let it happen. You also don't have to lower it to the level of kids, it's alright if they don't understand, understanding of language isn't sudden either, you pick it up when it all finally falls into places. But such a science show doesn't even fit into a million-channel tv with 30 shopping channels, and all other channels interrupting your attention every 30 milliseconds with a "buy now buy now" screams "because 30 doctors recommend it." It sinks into the very fiber of kids, and they go around like drones, unable to think for themselves. Half hearted "let's do science" shows because we wanna be cool, that just doesn't work. Teaching science itself is a wax-on, wax-off process, unless it's constantly there, in the background, like a daily snack, it's not gonna sink in. You only get political news, sports news, and a lot of 'financial interest' messages - such as the following is a paid advertisement, WWWX is not responsible for the content of this show. Then you get to listen to the scientific benefits of fish oil extract from Iceland, or the benefits of the new NASA-foam bed on the straightness of your spine, and lower back. Shoe sole inserts are also provent to cure all migranes. If you allow this stuff on tv, forget the whole thing. It takes a lot of painstaking labor to build a tower, but so little to destroy it. The Pentagon needs to decide what they actually want - a mass of consumer drones that can be blindly directed in any direction, or a mass of rationally thinking human beings, that can properly analyze issues, who might kick them out of their comfy power position, demanding real accountability. Funny, ehh, you can't be a world superpower without scientists, but you can't be in charge of a world superpower if you do have scientists. How do you get both? That is the question, hmmm...
The 'wax on, wax off' should be a constant mantra in scientific programs, and a single episode that ignores this, would commit a capital sin. You can find ways to inject that wisdom, just like there was a way in the karate kid. Success should not always come so easy. Sometimes you just simply luck out, but most things are elbow grease and persistence. Some CSI episodes show persistence very well. They still need a few episodes where they don't win, where the case isn't solved, but gets shelved. Quite a few of them. Then you come back, episodes later, where one clue somewhere suddenly releases an avalanche of things, so you can pull out your old files, and solve one of them, out of the 20 sitting there, put a few mark on 5 that are not quite solved yet, but there is progress. That's reality, and without such frustrating losses, the moments of success aren't that sweet, your tastebuts get numb from too much stimulation.
There is a way to combat these things. I don't know if you'd consider it good. It's called absolute power. It's been done throughout history. I'm talking about the Ramesess the Pharaoh, Solomon the Wise, Emperor Hirohito, Queen Elizabeth. Not all of them were Neros, just like not every Bush or Nixon ends up being a Washington or Lincoln. Do you think Bush with his absolute power is the answer to the problems the US faces? Someone said democracy is the idea that people know what they want, and get it good and hard too. Sometimes it seems that benevolent dictators, who were raised up and practically bred to giving their life to being leaders, do a better job than elected representatives, who dedicated their life to be Hollywood actors. It's not how the guy got to be in charge, but how he leads, what counts. What kind of decisions he makes is what matter. You could luck out and get an awesome dictator, like Solomon, or, it can go the other way, you can elect a complete idiot, like... It's not like either way is a guarantee toward selecting great leaders. Still, with absolute power, when things get out of hand, such as with Nero, there are no checks and balances, no feedback mechanism. Any control systems science with its transfer functions will tell you about feedback coupling - it's the only practical way to stability. Unlike with an absolute power system, in a distributed power system, the president, congress, and judicial system can pick at each other, govern and moderate each other's powers, provide feedback. Community can provide feedback. Yes, the feedback can be perverted and abused, but it's one layer safer than not having any feedback. Just like a fence can be jumped, or a locked door circumvented, but at least it's a layer of protection, it's better than gates wide open inviting a flood.
In fact, let me go back on absolute power being a possible solution to a sytem-abuse, because there never has been a successful absolute power, absolute at the core. That kind of thing always leads to self destruction. Anyone on completely on their own is quickly a Napoleon or Nero. The successful absolute power dictators were always ones who were not absolute at the core. They were just a face, a voice of some kind of consensus from a balance of opinions. For instance emperor Hirohito, or actually his premier, he only sat at the 6-general meetings, never interrupting, just listening, until they could come to a consensus, at which point the monarch would simply approve. That was the tradition, the custom, or the system wouldn't have made it past a century. Very seldom did the monarch have to interject, and push his own agenda. But he was trained enough to do that, to bring himself to interject where it mattered, to resign, when his people were suffering. He was raised to 'care.' It would actually have been wrong to hear that as a consensus suggestion from his advisors, to resign.
Ramesess would have been nobody without the balance of voices, the priests behind his back. 15 year old kid making it on his own? Yeah right. The ones actually doing the decision making were the priests, based on thousand year old wisdoms written on clay and papyrus. You could say papyrus was what led Egypt, not the pharaoh. It was a collective wisdom, accumulated knowledge stemming not from within, from inside a single ego, but filtered through many checks and balances. You could call it a refined feedback-transfer-function written on papyrus. I'm sure most great leaders were just faces, a front, a public image, to a sophisticated decision making machinery behind them. Even Nixon or Bush, are just fronts. Ultimately how the world fares comes down to these faceless Egyptian high Priests running the show from behind that scenes, not to single people. When these high priests have faces, such as senators, congressmen, court justices, you call it a functioning democracy. Unfortunately, these days the high priests themselves have been perverted into faces, fronts, they don't bring themselves to the table, instea
"After killing a spider, how lonely I feel in the cold of night!" - well, you should have thought about that, before you made that slap. Karma is a bitch, ain't it? If you remember, Netscape was a commercialization attempt of a gov't funded NCSA Mosaic. How far did it go? Nowhere, because, to quote someone, here comes the 300 lb gorilla, and the zookeeper is asleep with his stun-gun.
It's a lot healthier when you get to devote your life to your hobby, and get to make a living at it.
Unfortunately not many people can do that. Still, you should be able to take pride in what you do. I worked in a pizza place, and the worker next to me put his heart into making that pizza. And let me tell you, it was so damn good. There is nothing more important than authenticity in your daily activities, whatever that may be. Nothing is more horrible than having to do what you hate doing. You know, some farmers actually like getting up early, going out in the fields, and smelling the fresh air, and being joyful of a rich harvest. If you love your job, and it's on your mind after you leave work that should be a wonderful thing. Your workplace should be flexible to properly raise your family, properly function as a member of a society, keep you a mentally sane person, in fact, they should be mandated to care about you. Once you hire a worker, you should accept some level of responsibility in them, just like when you tame an animal, you become responsible for them. When you have to resort to firing them, you should feel the biggest shame. Don't tame, don't hire, if you can't honestly say that you'll do your best to improve and help that person, while he helps you.
If you have a job, that, once you step outside the door, you'd rather forget, it's a sorry world you live in. Unfortunately, in such a sorry world, you got the proper answer. Cut it off, switch modes, recharge, until next day, when your job is ready to suck all the energy out of you, all over again. What happened to people glowing at their jobs, putting their heart into it?
Unfortunaely, there are some jobs, such as doctors dealing with terminally ill 5 year old children, where every minute of your job sucks all the energy you got out of you, 60 minutes an hour, 8 hours a day, every day. Or dealing with sexually molested kids. People working such jobs are heroes, and can even be forbidden for flying off the handle. There was a "Law and Order" episode on this, on MSNBC, where a doctor murdered a clown. Why? Because she cared about the welfare of kids. What nonsense? Listen to her arguments: Every day, all my life, I come to work, break my back trying to help these children, that I consider like my own, under my own care. And still, Petey dies, Lucy dies, Bobby dies, Maria dies. I fail, every day. They cry to me, ask me to help them, because they hurt very much, and I am powerless to do anything. And, here, out of nowhere, Mr. Clown comes to them, and talks to them about heaven, and they laugh with him, and ask him, will you be there in heaven with me? And he tells them yes, I will be. She ended up killing Mr. Clown, to be with the kids. Is she nuts, has she gone kookoo? You bet! You try to keeping your sanity doing a job like that.
Life is not always dandy, but the massive majority of jobs should be possible to be made enjoyable, and if you can take some of it home, and put your heart into your function in society even while you drive, or before you fall asleep, your life should be a more fulfilling one.
I got a metamoderation to do on you, and modding is "troll." I like spicy stuff, and I usually leave such stuff un-metamoderated. I love it when I hear counter arguments, strong ones, to see both sides present the best details that even I can't think of. But one thing deserves the troll marker. The strong remarks should deal with the issue at hand, and not with who says it. Personal attacks will instantly get you modded down, no mercy. Even when you're personally attacked, you should be able to respond strongly, without lowering yourself to level of dishing out personal attacks, other than turning the same exact wording of the opponent's personal attacks against themselves - like Tai Chi Chuan does it. Best form of aggression, that will never spontaneously aggress, only respond. No preemption here, buddy, because the threat is, what? Nothing. Weather off personal attacks like they are raindrops, though listen.
As a side note, we have "autorities" testify in court, and we take their words more seriously based on their history, but first of all, I smell no authorities between you two, and second, the very first instinctual stance against an authority figure should be distrust, unless you personally can verify. The jury should be allowed to ask test-questions, random ones, over topics they find on the internet, or in a library. It's okay if the authority about to testify can't answer them, and is willing to accept he can't answer them, but you'll get a pretty good idea about his knowledge, if you get to ask him. This test still wouldn't do anything about whether the authority is bought, crooked or honest, because you can have very intelligent can-answer-any-question authorities, who are still crooked, nevertheless.
I think 3 legs and 2 genitals between each pair would be something. Then you'd find your "perfect match," in a wife whose ass and hips aren't too wide, but her hole-spacing is the same as your own joystick spacing. Love at first sight! Double pumped fun! Don't even talk about orgies! New defintions of twins: full twins and half twins, based on whether you come from the same womb in the same mom, or different wombs in the same mom. Then you get to have paternal full twins, paternal half-twins, and so on. The possibilities are limitless!
Let me grab this opportunity to say that I, for one, welcome our new 3-legged uber martian overlords.
For reference:
News announcer Kent Brockman mistakes a floating ant in a space shuttle experiment floating close to the camera for a giant space ant:
"Ladies and gentlemen, uh, we've just lost the picture, but what we've seen speaks for itself. The Corvair spacecraft has apparently been taken over -- 'conquered' if you will -- by a master race of giant space ants. It's difficult to tell from this vantage point whether they will consume the captive earth men or merely enslave them. One thing is for certain: there is no stopping them; the ants will soon be here. And I for one welcome our new insect overlords. I'd like to remind them that as a trusted TV personality, I can be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground sugar caves."
Yeah, Philip Morris - pardon me, the Altria Group - will start a new ad campaign to legalize smoking on Mars, even for kids aged 11-18. You'll have various levels of menthol, and the packs will be labeled PG-9, PG-11, etc. After all, when you have a much higher chance to die of cancer from cosmic rays, the incremental benefit of that relaxing feeling penetrating your veins while you smoke, is surely worthwhile? Smoking on Mars is an inalienable right, it's a respect for human diggity. Then we come back from there, to reconquer the rebels on Earth.
Have you heard of permanent magnets? With shielding concentrated at the aurora borealis holes in the magnetic field? Perhaps you could mine olivine or ilmenite on mars, extract the iron to make magnetite from it. All you'd need is a well shielded small lab, and you could generate all the magnets and shielding you want, for your big lab.
Yeah, obviously the mozilla foundation is submarined by copperheads. The hive took over it, it's rotting from the top. I was actually waiting for a statement on their frontpage, to say "Don't use Mozilla, use Internet Explorer, because 39 out of 40 Mozilla developers surveyed say Internet Explorer provides you with a better total connected-consumer experience." In other news, that 40'th mozilla developer just died from an unfortunate mountain climbing or parachuting accident, we forget which it really was.
I guess now even MS and MS investors yearn for the "good old days," when they at least had a Netscape commercial company to compete against or invest in, instead of this mozilla/linux thing. Too bad they were so incredibly efficient at butchering Netscape up, leaving a carcass behind, a carcass that grew a ghost and now is haunting them.
Come to think of it, me neither. I used to get points too, all I can do is metamoderate these days, and the items seem just a bit too 'hand picked', damned if you do, damned if you don't, it's neither right, nor wrong, but both true insightful sentences and completey wrong sentences in a blender, where I simply have to leave it unmodded. If there was a way to highlight portions of a post, mod it up, into a different color, then highlight other portions and mod it down. But then to those reading it would read like nothing coherent, and someone's words could be taken way out of context.
There are still people with mod points, However I saw 'spicy' stories that had no moderation at all, then stupid ones full of mods, so something is up. I wonder who dishes out the mod points, and who comes up with the metamod stuff. To just let it randomly generate instead of using it to test somebody, well, there is too much temptation. Market surveys where you pay someone on the phone to dial up someone else, and harass them into expressing an honest opinion, those don't come anywhere close in honesty thus value, compared to what you can do on slashdot, by simply submitting a person something to metamoderate for you. Too much money or marketing survey effort at stake not to abuse such stuff.
Slashdot Mirror
Why is it that an electron orbiting the hydrogen atom doesn't accelerate? Acceleration into a different dimension - i.e. perpendicularly - is still acceleration, and normal electrons going circularly in a cyclotron do radiate. Yeah, it would mean an energy catastrophe, sooner or later it would have to give up juice, either potential or kinetic energy, and run out of it. So these day we just say - postulate - that it goes in circles but it's forbidden to accelerate thus radiate, but could we say "it doesn't go in circles", or more precisely, it doesn't accelerate at all? It doesn't shift dimensions?
Nature tolerates no infinites. Now blackholes may not be a place with division by zero, but stop before reaching infinity, and inside them exist a noninfinite, but different, mystical kind of world where obviously our laws of physics don't operate. However we're still dealing with black holes, big bangs, and such, like people 500 years ago dealt with the sky - if you get a really long ladder, you can surely climb up to that ceiling, and knock on heaven's door? What happens when you walk to the edge of Earth/World? Do you fall down?
Maybe I just need a pill to fix my scattered way of thinking? Yeah. Or maybe some quality sleep.
How about we don't have nations? We have different people, like we have different dogs, some with spots and patches, some uniform color, some tall, some short, some with big furs, some with no hair, under one nation?
Sex is perverted. Humans are nowhere close to what salmons or black widows do. How about let's spread humanity, and cure the salmons genetically, so they live out a happy, fulfilling life, instead of plain dying, after they fuck? Longevity, as Martin Luther King yearned, longevity...
You have a say on how human beings should be, because it affects you when others are hurt, raped, murdered, kids mistreated. There is also a fine balance between how much you should really be affected by the liberty of others, instead of just letting them to be the way they want to be. How about we make all sharks and tigers vegetarians? As far as humans are concerned, how do you know japanese women don't get off on the way they are treated and mistreated? Maybe if you were too kind to them, they would never work up a climax? You know, besides security and love, some women also love being handled rough. It gets them off, and getting them off is important. Sometimes you have to be mean and cruel to show love.
I wasn't trying to think there..
Philip Morris is now called the Altria group. What a lame way to escape responsibility of a tainted image. Well, not so easy, I'll go around being a loudmouth making sure everyone knows the new name. What's in it for me? Well, some things are just not right, and if nobody speaks up, then what happens?
By building a titanium dome/bubble, from the raw materials found there, using sunshine/present nukular minerals as an energy source. This tripple layer titanium dome with spring loaded fish-scales, just like your matress has it, will bounce off most meteorites hitting it, since the atmosphere is too thin to burn them the big meteorites up. If you are unlucky that a really big meteorite falls on your dome, well, tough luck. You can't live life by never taking a walk outside, in fear of getting hit by lightning, though if you're even remotely related to boy-scoutism, your chances of getting struck by electricity or lightning go up astronomically.
Good luck to cutting small business expenses by shortening the intellectual property term limits. You think if patents expire in 10 years instead of 20, businesses won't be just as quick to pollute the system up that keep the just expired technologies under bay, with new patents? Instead of x amount of patents in 20 years that a small business needs to review in fear of infringement, now they have to review 2x patents in 10 years. 6 million USPTO patents in 2005? Try 12 million, in 2008. It's all about jobs, patents and intellectual property provide jobs to lawyers, programmers, and people, to keep the economy going. IP laws are meant to keep us from solutions like reinstituting telephone switchboard ladies, to give everyone something to do and be able to feed. Wouldn't you rather be a lawyer, an IP portfolio manager, a systems analyst, than a button pusher, or a switchboard operator? How do you measure the worth of your intellectual activities? I was actually offered a way to make a living, well, more like shoved down my throat, by continually rewriting software every few years, because it's job security. It's all about jobs and the economy man, because when it stops, when the last drop of oil is gone, and the quarterly growth of waste generation can't be kept up, Heaven save us all.
We're on the planet together, according to Stallman and Linus. But have you ever heard of the survival of the fittest? That's how Microsoft works, internally - they let the biggest testosterone bags outcompete each other for a spot, and out distills something wonderful - perfection.
Hey, remember life before computers? If they introduce this DRM bullshit, you don't actually have to buy it. You can buy the old stuff on ebay, while it lasts, then when that runs out, you might as well just pick up a book to read. Until public libraries are outlawed and you can no longer buy paper books, because they only come on DRM disposable-sticks 3-times-readable on your MS Notepad(tm) - saving trees(tm). After reading the text 3 times, you must repurchase the 'content', the 'property', but wow, you get a 15% discount on any repurchases! Save today by repurchasing stuff you bought yesterday! You can only save buy buying! It's like, uh, free money! One of my coworker's wife bough 2 pure bred puppies at 500 bux a piece, telling him how much she saved, when they go for 1500 a piece! Wow! Gee, you only saved 2x(1500-500)=$2000, but imagine how much you would have saved if you bought 10 puppies! Wee!
At least you'll still be able to do your taxes on a tree-paper and wood-pencil, I mean black ink pen, including the multiplications! (woa, no calculator!), even if they mandate extra taxes for noncomputer taxreturns. There is always the plow and a horse you can go back to, grow your own food, if they let you, because good luck finding non-gm engineered seeds that germinate, and good luck shaking off the lawyers suing you from your non-official, non-gm-engineered seeds cross-polinating the FDA approved 'safe', 'secure' 'nonterrorist' crops a mile down the road, whose seeds if you used them this year, you couldn't save some from the harvest, and sow come next year, because you'd be in violation of your Monsanto License Agreement for your genetically engineered seeds. It's not the seed that's the property, it's the "technology!" Yeah. Bend over - touch your toes - technology.
Maybe you think you can find peace with the eskimos, maybe them and their dogs will be left alone, free, but even they will have to build their igloos from officially approved "secure" iceblocks by the UN building inspectors, because, should a tourist visit them with the igloo collapsing, that'd be too much risk. Your igloo-insurance agent is at yer service by the way. Talk about when seals get extinct because of a "mysterious" disease, and to "save" them Monsanto comes up with a new, radical cure, that genetically engineers them all, "protects them" from a virus that jumped species, but unfortunately this means that you have to purchase a license and pay Monsanto for every seal you eat. What you say? Bend over, touch your toes, here comes this wonderful technology-property, receive it with all your heart, or more exactly, all your...
As far as science is concerned, it only cares about proofs. There are fossils, there is current living biosphere, where you get to connect the dots, come up with a theory through induction, then verify your theory's predicting power. In case you happen unto something that disproves your theory, you go back and reexamine it. What can I predict from intelligent design? That whatever else I look at next will also be a sign of intelligent design? Duh... I'll give you the concept of Foo, the world is because of Foo, life is because of Foo. Predicting power? Anything else you come across, you guessed it, it's a sign of Foo. Duh.. Sure, the Universe was created by GooGoo the Frog, currently living on bottom of the Lake Chiwauwa, nobody can see him, that's his undercover outfit he takes, but if he's threatened, he jumps two galaxies and hides under the molten sulfur volcano, on a planet near Sirius. What kind of benefit does this theory give me? Predictable power? Proof? Darwinistic evolution does not try to explain how the universe is, it only explains how life and the animal world is. It can predict what happens to life under circumstances, and it can explain the past, without arbitrarily summoning magic. Show me proof it's wrong. Sure, I can't show proof that your magic intelligent design is wrong, because it's outside of scope, just like my GooGoo the Frog theory. Anything's possible. Anything. That's a correct scientific mentallity to take on, to keep an open mind. But just cuz it's possible, we don't put it into science books as something accepted.
I grew up watching a 20 minute daily-weekly science-news show on tv, called "Delta," from about age 4. I didn't understand half the crap, but the images, the divers and beautiful fish, the astronomical bodies, the stars, the bubble chamber traces, were amazing, especially to a child filled with curiosity. And that deep, monotone male voice alternating with a soft female voice, describing it all, in non-hyped, yet amicable rigor, it all just sinks into you, the language, the attitudes, the terminology. Star Trek has some language that sinks, too bad it's filled with yes-sir yes-maam drone mentality that negates automatic doubt and makes the fans go to reunions saluting each other. Also, there are just way too many scientifically unfeasible and incorrent things in Star Trek.
Still, by 5 years old one forms a superego, a personality, that's hard to change after they are 20. There is a last chance before full puberty hits, but the seeds of science start very very young. Something like age 2. But you can't force this kind of stuff, all you can do is offer, and let it happen. You also don't have to lower it to the level of kids, it's alright if they don't understand, understanding of language isn't sudden either, you pick it up when it all finally falls into places.
But such a science show doesn't even fit into a million-channel tv with 30 shopping channels, and all other channels interrupting your attention every 30 milliseconds with a "buy now buy now" screams "because 30 doctors recommend it." It sinks into the very fiber of kids, and they go around like drones, unable to think for themselves. Half hearted "let's do science" shows because we wanna be cool, that just doesn't work. Teaching science itself is a wax-on, wax-off process, unless it's constantly there, in the background, like a daily snack, it's not gonna sink in. You only get political news, sports news, and a lot of 'financial interest' messages - such as the following is a paid advertisement, WWWX is not responsible for the content of this show. Then you get to listen to the scientific benefits of fish oil extract from Iceland, or the benefits of the new NASA-foam bed on the straightness of your spine, and lower back. Shoe sole inserts are also provent to cure all migranes. If you allow this stuff on tv, forget the whole thing. It takes a lot of painstaking labor to build a tower, but so little to destroy it.
The Pentagon needs to decide what they actually want - a mass of consumer drones that can be blindly directed in any direction, or a mass of rationally thinking human beings, that can properly analyze issues, who might kick them out of their comfy power position, demanding real accountability. Funny, ehh, you can't be a world superpower without scientists, but you can't be in charge of a world superpower if you do have scientists. How do you get both? That is the question, hmmm...
The 'wax on, wax off' should be a constant mantra in scientific programs, and a single episode that ignores this, would commit a capital sin. You can find ways to inject that wisdom, just like there was a way in the karate kid. Success should not always come so easy. Sometimes you just simply luck out, but most things are elbow grease and persistence. Some CSI episodes show persistence very well. They still need a few episodes where they don't win, where the case isn't solved, but gets shelved. Quite a few of them. Then you come back, episodes later, where one clue somewhere suddenly releases an avalanche of things, so you can pull out your old files, and solve one of them, out of the 20 sitting there, put a few mark on 5 that are not quite solved yet, but there is progress. That's reality, and without such frustrating losses, the moments of success aren't that sweet, your tastebuts get numb from too much stimulation.
There is a way to combat these things. I don't know if you'd consider it good. It's called absolute power. It's been done throughout history. I'm talking about the Ramesess the Pharaoh, Solomon the Wise, Emperor Hirohito, Queen Elizabeth. Not all of them were Neros, just like not every Bush or Nixon ends up being a Washington or Lincoln. Do you think Bush with his absolute power is the answer to the problems the US faces? Someone said democracy is the idea that people know what they want, and get it good and hard too. Sometimes it seems that benevolent dictators, who were raised up and practically bred to giving their life to being leaders, do a better job than elected representatives, who dedicated their life to be Hollywood actors. It's not how the guy got to be in charge, but how he leads, what counts. What kind of decisions he makes is what matter. You could luck out and get an awesome dictator, like Solomon, or, it can go the other way, you can elect a complete idiot, like ... It's not like either way is a guarantee toward selecting great leaders. Still, with absolute power, when things get out of hand, such as with Nero, there are no checks and balances, no feedback mechanism. Any control systems science with its transfer functions will tell you about feedback coupling - it's the only practical way to stability. Unlike with an absolute power system, in a distributed power system, the president, congress, and judicial system can pick at each other, govern and moderate each other's powers, provide feedback. Community can provide feedback. Yes, the feedback can be perverted and abused, but it's one layer safer than not having any feedback. Just like a fence can be jumped, or a locked door circumvented, but at least it's a layer of protection, it's better than gates wide open inviting a flood.
In fact, let me go back on absolute power being a possible solution to a sytem-abuse, because there never has been a successful absolute power, absolute at the core. That kind of thing always leads to self destruction. Anyone on completely on their own is quickly a Napoleon or Nero. The successful absolute power dictators were always ones who were not absolute at the core. They were just a face, a voice of some kind of consensus from a balance of opinions. For instance emperor Hirohito, or actually his premier, he only sat at the 6-general meetings, never interrupting, just listening, until they could come to a consensus, at which point the monarch would simply approve. That was the tradition, the custom, or the system wouldn't have made it past a century. Very seldom did the monarch have to interject, and push his own agenda. But he was trained enough to do that, to bring himself to interject where it mattered, to resign, when his people were suffering. He was raised to 'care.' It would actually have been wrong to hear that as a consensus suggestion from his advisors, to resign.
Ramesess would have been nobody without the balance of voices, the priests behind his back. 15 year old kid making it on his own? Yeah right. The ones actually doing the decision making were the priests, based on thousand year old wisdoms written on clay and papyrus. You could say papyrus was what led Egypt, not the pharaoh. It was a collective wisdom, accumulated knowledge stemming not from within, from inside a single ego, but filtered through many checks and balances. You could call it a refined feedback-transfer-function written on papyrus.
I'm sure most great leaders were just faces, a front, a public image, to a sophisticated decision making machinery behind them. Even Nixon or Bush, are just fronts. Ultimately how the world fares comes down to these faceless Egyptian high Priests running the show from behind that scenes, not to single people. When these high priests have faces, such as senators, congressmen, court justices, you call it a functioning democracy. Unfortunately, these days the high priests themselves have been perverted into faces, fronts, they don't bring themselves to the table, instea
"After killing a spider, how lonely I feel in the cold of night!" - well, you should have thought about that, before you made that slap. Karma is a bitch, ain't it? If you remember, Netscape was a commercialization attempt of a gov't funded NCSA Mosaic. How far did it go? Nowhere, because, to quote someone, here comes the 300 lb gorilla, and the zookeeper is asleep with his stun-gun.
It's a lot healthier when you get to devote your life to your hobby, and get to make a living at it.
Unfortunately not many people can do that. Still, you should be able to take pride in what you do. I worked in a pizza place, and the worker next to me put his heart into making that pizza. And let me tell you, it was so damn good. There is nothing more important than authenticity in your daily activities, whatever that may be. Nothing is more horrible than having to do what you hate doing. You know, some farmers actually like getting up early, going out in the fields, and smelling the fresh air, and being joyful of a rich harvest.
If you love your job, and it's on your mind after you leave work that should be a wonderful thing. Your workplace should be flexible to properly raise your family, properly function as a member of a society, keep you a mentally sane person, in fact, they should be mandated to care about you. Once you hire a worker, you should accept some level of responsibility in them, just like when you tame an animal, you become responsible for them. When you have to resort to firing them, you should feel the biggest shame. Don't tame, don't hire, if you can't honestly say that you'll do your best to improve and help that person, while he helps you.
If you have a job, that, once you step outside the door, you'd rather forget, it's a sorry world you live in. Unfortunately, in such a sorry world, you got the proper answer. Cut it off, switch modes, recharge, until next day, when your job is ready to suck all the energy out of you, all over again. What happened to people glowing at their jobs, putting their heart into it?
Unfortunaely, there are some jobs, such as doctors dealing with terminally ill 5 year old children, where every minute of your job sucks all the energy you got out of you, 60 minutes an hour, 8 hours a day, every day. Or dealing with sexually molested kids. People working such jobs are heroes, and can even be forbidden for flying off the handle. There was a "Law and Order" episode on this, on MSNBC, where a doctor murdered a clown. Why? Because she cared about the welfare of kids. What nonsense? Listen to her arguments: Every day, all my life, I come to work, break my back trying to help these children, that I consider like my own, under my own care. And still, Petey dies, Lucy dies, Bobby dies, Maria dies. I fail, every day. They cry to me, ask me to help them, because they hurt very much, and I am powerless to do anything. And, here, out of nowhere, Mr. Clown comes to them, and talks to them about heaven, and they laugh with him, and ask him, will you be there in heaven with me? And he tells them yes, I will be. She ended up killing Mr. Clown, to be with the kids. Is she nuts, has she gone kookoo? You bet! You try to keeping your sanity doing a job like that.
Life is not always dandy, but the massive majority of jobs should be possible to be made enjoyable, and if you can take some of it home, and put your heart into your function in society even while you drive, or before you fall asleep, your life should be a more fulfilling one.
I got a metamoderation to do on you, and modding is "troll." I like spicy stuff, and I usually leave such stuff un-metamoderated. I love it when I hear counter arguments, strong ones, to see both sides present the best details that even I can't think of. But one thing deserves the troll marker. The strong remarks should deal with the issue at hand, and not with who says it. Personal attacks will instantly get you modded down, no mercy. Even when you're personally attacked, you should be able to respond strongly, without lowering yourself to level of dishing out personal attacks, other than turning the same exact wording of the opponent's personal attacks against themselves - like Tai Chi Chuan does it. Best form of aggression, that will never spontaneously aggress, only respond. No preemption here, buddy, because the threat is, what? Nothing. Weather off personal attacks like they are raindrops, though listen.
As a side note, we have "autorities" testify in court, and we take their words more seriously based on their history, but first of all, I smell no authorities between you two, and second, the very first instinctual stance against an authority figure should be distrust, unless you personally can verify. The jury should be allowed to ask test-questions, random ones, over topics they find on the internet, or in a library. It's okay if the authority about to testify can't answer them, and is willing to accept he can't answer them, but you'll get a pretty good idea about his knowledge, if you get to ask him. This test still wouldn't do anything about whether the authority is bought, crooked or honest, because you can have very intelligent can-answer-any-question authorities, who are still crooked, nevertheless.
I think 3 legs and 2 genitals between each pair would be something.
Then you'd find your "perfect match," in a wife whose ass and hips aren't too wide, but her hole-spacing is the same as your own joystick spacing. Love at first sight! Double pumped fun! Don't even talk about orgies! New defintions of twins: full twins and half twins, based on whether you come from the same womb in the same mom, or different wombs in the same mom. Then you get to have paternal full twins, paternal half-twins, and so on. The possibilities are limitless!
Let me grab this opportunity to say that I, for one, welcome our new 3-legged uber martian overlords.
For reference:
News announcer Kent Brockman mistakes a floating ant in a space shuttle experiment floating close to the camera for a giant space ant:
"Ladies and gentlemen, uh, we've just lost the picture, but what we've seen speaks for itself. The Corvair spacecraft has apparently been taken over -- 'conquered' if you will -- by a master race of giant space ants. It's difficult to tell from this vantage point whether they will consume the captive earth men or merely enslave them. One thing is for certain: there is no stopping them; the ants will soon be here. And I for one welcome our new insect overlords. I'd like to remind them that as a trusted TV personality, I can be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground sugar caves."
Yeah, Philip Morris - pardon me, the Altria Group - will start a new ad campaign to legalize smoking on Mars, even for kids aged 11-18. You'll have various levels of menthol, and the packs will be labeled PG-9, PG-11, etc. After all, when you have a much higher chance to die of cancer from cosmic rays, the incremental benefit of that relaxing feeling penetrating your veins while you smoke, is surely worthwhile? Smoking on Mars is an inalienable right, it's a respect for human diggity. Then we come back from there, to reconquer the rebels on Earth.
Yeah, and then this uber-race of humans comes to Earth, detonates a few nukular packages, and proclaims superiority of the survival of the fittest.
Have you heard of permanent magnets? With shielding concentrated at the aurora borealis holes in the magnetic field? Perhaps you could mine olivine or ilmenite on mars, extract the iron to make magnetite from it. All you'd need is a well shielded small lab, and you could generate all the magnets and shielding you want, for your big lab.
Yeah, obviously the mozilla foundation is submarined by copperheads. The hive took over it, it's rotting from the top. I was actually waiting for a statement on their frontpage, to say "Don't use Mozilla, use Internet Explorer, because 39 out of 40 Mozilla developers surveyed say Internet Explorer provides you with a better total connected-consumer experience." In other news, that 40'th mozilla developer just died from an unfortunate mountain climbing or parachuting accident, we forget which it really was.
I guess now even MS and MS investors yearn for the "good old days," when they at least had a Netscape commercial company to compete against or invest in, instead of this mozilla/linux thing. Too bad they were so incredibly efficient at butchering Netscape up, leaving a carcass behind, a carcass that grew a ghost and now is haunting them.
Come to think of it, me neither. I used to get points too, all I can do is metamoderate these days, and the items seem just a bit too 'hand picked', damned if you do, damned if you don't, it's neither right, nor wrong, but both true insightful sentences and completey wrong sentences in a blender, where I simply have to leave it unmodded. If there was a way to highlight portions of a post, mod it up, into a different color, then highlight other portions and mod it down. But then to those reading it would read like nothing coherent, and someone's words could be taken way out of context. There are still people with mod points, However I saw 'spicy' stories that had no moderation at all, then stupid ones full of mods, so something is up. I wonder who dishes out the mod points, and who comes up with the metamod stuff. To just let it randomly generate instead of using it to test somebody, well, there is too much temptation. Market surveys where you pay someone on the phone to dial up someone else, and harass them into expressing an honest opinion, those don't come anywhere close in honesty thus value, compared to what you can do on slashdot, by simply submitting a person something to metamoderate for you. Too much money or marketing survey effort at stake not to abuse such stuff.
I haven't looked at it, but how much would it take to trump up a website, submit a story on slashdot over it, then do an IPO on it?