Making connections with your peers at a specific level of status. Harvard, Yale, etc. could all give away every single class lecture for every single class, and it still wouldn't matter: the point of university isn't learning. It's learning WITH someone, and forging relationships that may well last a lifetime. And these relationships can have far reaching effects. Example: The Skull and Bones club at Yale has a habit of generating presidents or otherwise very powerful people. All the classwork online isn't going to get you into that club, and the relationships formed in that club are what get you to be president (Bush) or Senator (Kerry) or whatever.
It's really pretty obvious. You don't attend school for schooling - you attend school to meet people so you can use them later.
wow. I didn't notice. It seemed to be the same old crap as the crap I used to watch. The Daily Show and Colbert had more interviews, and I liked that. And Bill Maher took questions from the internets, so I guess I did notice some changes, but over all, next to the RIAA, entertainment TV is the one industry I truly don't give a shit about.
I wish I could say that this is not wasting resources, but it is. All these plans would not be that necessary if the USA kept out of other countries' business. But we will not leave them alone.
It's a total waste of resources, based on a unipolar fantasy in the US military/industrial complex. These idiots think that the USA has to be the One And Only on planet earth, and it's ridiculous and ignorant. ridiculous because it is utterly unsustainable and untenable and ignorant because it refuses to look at material history.
There are greater threats to USA's security than these mach 6 planes will address. Things like terror are far worse. Imagine six 9-11's on our [critical] infrastructure.
Dude - fuck that. 3000 died in the 9/11 strikes. Fine. 42,116 people died in traffic accidents that same year. 15,019 died because they slipped and fell. Over 10,000 people died from suffocation. I don't see the.gov shelling out a trillion dollars to fight the war on ham sandwiches, icy sidewalks, or fuckwits who run stop signs. Humans are notoriously sucky at risk assessment. So, do yourself a big favour: skip the 9/11 paranoia. It only feeds into the militarist bullshit. You're not going to die in a terrorist action. You are are likely to die of exposure as a refugee in a transit camp in Eastern Oregon after the oil runs out and society collapses.
These plans also assume that Russia and China are sitting idle. Once again, we shall be surprised just like we were when Russia put into service, a nuclear capable missile with independent, multiple war-heads. This made our missile shield obsolete.
No, and no. The Russians and Chinese have miniscule military budgets compared to the USA, both in real and relative terms. They learned their lesson: unless someone is fixing to invade you, there is no point in playing the Cold War pissing contest game.
This confirms to me that my president and his administration are just incompetent.
That's been pretty much common knowledge all over the world since February 2001.
No, you're missing the logic. I'll repeat: EVERY calorie you burn costs 10 calories to get to your mouth. Note: it wasn't always like that... back in the days when food was grown and consumed locally, food had a positive ER/EI (Energy Return on Enery Invested). Today, people eat fresh salads from 3000 miles away. In the dead of winter. Growing the stuff requires massive fossil fuels (planting, harvesting, shipping) then massive fossil fuels to process, then more to package it all, and then more to ship it, and then more to house it at the store, and even more to schlep your butt down to the store and back. When all is said and done, it's 10x the amount of energy you burn from eating it.
The earth is (for all intents and purposes) a closed system, so at any given moment there is (x) energy available. So, you can burn it is in a very inefficient manner to charge peripheral electronic systems, or you can use it directly to do so, which is much more efficient.
For a similar reason, it is much more energy efficient to ride an electric bike - all the energy used to make and power it is directly there for transport. Your personal energy budget has to keep your body working AND do whatever else needs to be done. I know this sounds fucked up and counter-intuitive, but it's totally true.
Powering the device requires using calories you eat. However, every calorie you eat requires 10 calories of fossil fuel to get it in your mouth.
As a consequence, whatever energy is used to power such a device needs to be measured against that yard stick.
It's kind of like using an electric stove. One can (for example) burn natural gas to power a generator to power your stove, with, at best 20% efficiency (the nat gas turbine isn't super eficient, and then its dumped into electric lines that are lossy, and then it goes to your stove, which also has loss.) The result? You're beter off burning nat gas directly to cook your food...
Same with this gizmo. You;'re better off using rechargable batteries...
Let's see - I smell vinyl, I smell flourine, I smell all kinds of crap in there. Generate a few hundred square miles of that crap, and I wonder what the slag, pollution, run off, waste, and other toxic crap making polyvinylidene difluoride would require.
Oh, but that's right: electricity for my 52 inch plasma screen is more important.
ANY inflammable liquid? OK. A 750 ml bottle of pure alcohol, aka molotov cocktail. Set it off. It's not going to breach the wall, the passengers will rush to put it out, the pilot will land the plane ASAP (most any interstate highway will do - they're built for that...) and eveyone will beat the living shit out of the moron who set it off. I've made plenty of those things in my youth - when you're bored in Industrial Hellzone NJ, making molotovs is a way to spend a boring afternoon...
Furthermore, the game is now MUCH different. ANYONE who tries any kind of hankypanky will get the shit beat out of them instantly by the other passengers. What we are witnessing is creeping fascism, pure and simple. I stand by my statement: the TSA exists to show people that the gov't is doing something about terrorism, and to instill fear in the populace. In other posts I have pointed out what this fear does: it creates a situation where people make poor risk assessments. EVEN WITH ALL the terror threats on airplanes, you still stand a better chance of getting run over by some drunk in an SUV than dying in a terorrist plot. you stand a much better chance of getting murdered by some crackhead robbing a liquor store than dying in a terrorist plane crash, but the Fascists aren't sending billions of dollars to their buddies in The Industry to put "crackhead" detectors at the door or every liquor store, or putting "stupid asshole" detectors on every steering wheel of everyr SUV, either.
It's a scam. It's a way for the militarists to screw more money out of the treasury by playing on people fears.
Was this a real threat? Yes, there was a very serious plot to blow up planes using liquid explosives in bombs that would have worked to bring down aircraft.
And this is utter horseshit. If someone walked onto a plane with a water bottle filled with nitroglycerin, it would blow up when they tossed it through the XRay machine. So, they would have to make the explosives on the plane, and one of my best friends is a professional chemist and she said "Bullshit". You'd have to hole yourself up in the bathroom for a very long time with a magnetic stirring plate, a very precise dropper, dry ice, and a number of other bottles cups and things, and then in a very programmatic manner make the stuff, all while heaving and bucking on a jet liner and being exposed to some very nasty orders and chemicals. In short: it won't happen and isn't gong to happen and the threats about it are pure bullshit.
The TSA is just there to make people think the gov't is doing something about terrorism, and to keep people afraid. In fact, it's all bullshit, and a way to funnel huge sums of money into the military/industrial complex and keep the nightmare train rolling down the rails to an oblivion as it is headed directly off a cliff.
I got burned once too many times by crappy idiotic third rate nonsense "applications" on facebook. Someone sent me a kiss, so I sent one back, but I had a bunch of windows open and didn't notice that I had just sent a kiss to EVERYONE. Now they all know I love them, that's no big deal, but it's the assumption of broadcasting and the will to spam itself that I find offensive about facebook.
So, one day, I just sat down and yanked most of the applications out. so, if you send me something on the Funwall, sorry - I won't be seeing it. And if you have some dorky movie compatibility quiz, I won't be playing the game. If you want to contact me, there's a facility for sending messages and comments. If you can't get put enough words together to do that, then you're probably not one of my friends, anyway.
Facebook has outlived its usefulness.
Perhaps something like allvoices.com will be the next big thing because there, you have to do something - contribution to the data matters more than just being a consuming node for a data mine.
Why spend 1 trillion dollars and 100,000 soldiers protecting oil flow and royally pissing off huge numbers of people. If the "real" cost of oil is $200 a barrel and we are hiding that by using tax payer money to provide security then stop doing that. With the true price of oil unmasked, then other alternatives become economically viable.
It's a really interesting point - and oddly obvious, yet no one notices. Let's pretend the war will only cost $1 trillion dollars. OK. Now, How much oil is in Iraq? Well according to the.gov they have 112 billion barrels of oil. I'm going to be generous and round it off to 120 billion, just because I'm nice, and I suck at doing math on the fly. So, divide 1 trillion by 120 billion and you get $8.3 per barrel. BUT: it doesn't work that way. for one thing, you never pull 100% of the oil out. Normally, it's around 50% or so when you start retreating and give up around 75%. So, let's be generous and pretend they will pull 80%, or 100 billion barrels out. That's $10 a barrel. However, there are MANY people looking to buy this stuff, and there is domestic consumption to consider. If the USA pulls 25% of this over to the states, then we're talking $40 a barrel surcharge on EVERY BARREL OF OIL.
So, when the base cost is $100 a barrel, America will be paying $140 a barrel.
Brilliant. And that's being bend over backwards generous. Frankly, I think the reserves are over estimated by at least 30% and that the quality is crap and they won't get more than 65 - 70% of it out in total and the USA likely to get perhaps 25% of that, which would make the surcharge more like $60 - 80 a barrel.
The answer is: it is always cheaper to buy something than steal it.
Yeah - what a waste. God ferbid you help some old feeble folks pay the rent or see a doctor. That would be Terrible. Just awful. Why take care of your own people when you can piss away trillions on bombs and murder people in a country half way across the globe.
That you got a +4 informative indicates the level of retardation here today.
I'm already there. All my electricity comes from renewable sources. I pay a hefty premium for that, but it's worth it. We have an electric kitchen, and the house is heated with wood. The wood stove also does minor cooking for us as well in the winter (heats up tea water right fine) I don't own a car. My wife does, and it's a Prius, soon to be converted to Plug In. We have solar hot water that is minorly augmented with an electric system. I shovel snow. We have massively reduced plastics (We use cotton bags for groceries) and the plastics in stuff like computers is something we can't control. So, basically, we're around 90% there. Are you?
OK Ms Jane Q Public. YOUR TURN. Get off YOUR fat ass and do as much as we have.
Clean coal isn't. Pumping CO2 underground is not a permanent solution. The Actual Solution is: STOP USING FOSSIL FUELS. NOW.
If you can't / won't do it NOW, then the long emergency will get longer. And Darker. No, it's not the end of the world. It's just a new world we won't recognise, and one that won't likely permit 7 billion people shitting all over it.
You can buy a shit load of grid tied windmills for 1.8 billion dollars...
Hegemony isn't a one way top down kind of thing. It's negotiated between the dominant class and the subordinate group. And the way it is contested is through the media, and in the early 21st century, that's the internet.
So, they put out a shingle, collect comments, make their operations a little "nicer" which calms down the rabble, bu doesn't get rid of the social relation. It's a trap. The point is, the TSA SHOULD NOT EXIST. PERIOD.
But this ruse shows "they are listening" and THEY have to EXIST to listen, so by letting them collect comments, those opposed have already surrendered the fight by letting them exist. Duh. That's how hegemony works. Stuart Hall, Noam Chomsky. Read them.
Really. These tests may indicate OK-ness, but this is such a novel thing to do to a body, I can't see how it will be harmless... I'm sure more studies on in the pipeline, but I wouldn't get all gleeful.
I have 10 years of email in yahoo. If MS takes over, what then? Will they force everyone into hotmail accounts? I think I'm going to be spending a few hours every night downloading and saving my email off line.
Interesting that - imagine building a business using online apps, only to have your supplier go under and get bought out in some botched effort, and then lose history...
I think there are a number of serious implications in this MS/Yahoo deal. The monopoly aspect is actually the least problematic: the loss of history is a greater problem.
But then, maybe the Feds under a Democratic Admin will say "nuh uh!" and kill the deal...
Seriously. Think about it. I'm 23 years old. My generation has lived through:
I'm 49 years old and MY generation has lived through the same. big deal. ALL generations live through history. It's what makes it history.
-Multiple, world-influencing major conflicts.
Like WW2? You lived through that one? I didn't either. Or Napoleon's conquest of Europe? I missed that one too. Oh, and the Aryan invasion of India. That was a biggie I missed out on too. Also: the Viking invasions of the 11th century. Nasty stuff. missed out on that butchery too.
-The introduction, widespread distribution, and near-anywhere access of the Internet (which, in my opinion, is one of our greatest achievements as humans.)
Yeah. That's a big one. kind of like THE TELEPHONE which laid the infrastructure that permitted the internet in the first place.
-The rise of wireless mobile devices that have the potential to function anywhere in the world.
That HAS THE POTENTIAL. whatever. Skip this one.
-Computers moving from universities and government orgs, taking up entire rooms, to becoming nearly universal in our homes, cars, and pockets.
Yeah. almost as big as the invention of AGRICULTURE.
-The rise of communication to the point where an actor can die in New York, and within ONE HOUR the entire world knowing of it (those parts of the world that has access to the net, radio, and/or TV of course)
Right. Like the death of an actor in NY is really such important news that it should be spread by this massive energy and resource intense global network, while IMPORTANT information is trivialised or buried by the same gossipy horseshit called "news", to the point where Real News is covered by COMEDIANS because the news organs have turned into little more than propaganda organs for the military industrial death machine.
-9/11 (one of the most world-changing events in modern history)
compared to WHAT? The USA incinerating hundreds of thousands of japanese CIVILIANS (you know - women and kids and pets and old folks and stuff) with ATOMIC WEAPONS? how is THAT not terrorism on a scale far beyond 9/11? Or the fire bombing of Tokyo? MacNamara himself said ON FILM that what he and LeMay did were WAR CRIMES. And speaking of that, what about events like Kristalnacht? Or Stalin's Purges and Pogroms? Yeah... We focus on 9/11 because we lived through it. But there's been much worse and things of far greater import and disaster than 9/11.
And many more. Seriously folks. We are living through one of the most exciting and important parts of history in the entire time-line of our species.
It's always exciting. I'm just concerned that we may be living at the end of the story, rather than the action packed middle chapters...
Centuries from now, people will be wondering "Imagine what it was like to live through the era where in roughly one century we went from taking weeks to get a message across a country and taking literally MONTHS to travel across the sea... to the point where you could talk to someone on the other side of the world using a device no bigger than your fist, and could travel from New York to Australia in a matter of hours."
And then they say "And because they were so stupid, greedy, selfish and destructive they pissed it all away on CRAP like Las Vegas and celebrity gossip magazines and mind numbing TV shows about nothing, we no longer have the ability to talk to someone on the other side of the world, because we spend most of our time as a society recovering from the die-off they drove themselves into, and now our planet's a furnace, the metals are gone or buried in landfills that are now underwater, the oil was used up in the 21st century, the coal vanished in the 22nd, and that's when the dying began in earnest. The information systems collapsed when the electrical grid became unstable and then disappeared. The last airplane flew in 2115, and it was more of a kite
damn. That was quick.
on
Hacking Asus EEE
·
· Score: 1, Interesting
I was gone for what - 10 minutes? I come back to check some news, and hit the shortcut to/. bby accident (I was going to NYT), but I figured - OK - I was here 10 min ago, but - Oh Look - an article on the EEEPC - I've been tinking of getting one of those - looks interesting!
Bingo - article was slashdotted. Damn that was quick. 10 minutes. amazing. I think with some effort slashdot could bring the internet itself to its knees...maybe...possibley...kinda...sorta...almost...not really...never happen...fuhgeddaboutit...
Nor do I burn CDs of my music. Everything is on a hard drive. And I share music by bringing my drive to a LAN party. So, what are they going to do to me? put a $5 charge on every drive? Or a $10 charge on every router?
Slashdot Mirror
Grass Hut
RS
It's really pretty obvious. You don't attend school for schooling - you attend school to meet people so you can use them later.
RS
RS
It's a total waste of resources, based on a unipolar fantasy in the US military/industrial complex. These idiots think that the USA has to be the One And Only on planet earth, and it's ridiculous and ignorant. ridiculous because it is utterly unsustainable and untenable and ignorant because it refuses to look at material history.
There are greater threats to USA's security than these mach 6 planes will address. Things like terror are far worse. Imagine six 9-11's on our [critical] infrastructure.
Dude - fuck that. 3000 died in the 9/11 strikes. Fine. 42,116 people died in traffic accidents that same year. 15,019 died because they slipped and fell. Over 10,000 people died from suffocation. I don't see the .gov shelling out a trillion dollars to fight the war on ham sandwiches, icy sidewalks, or fuckwits who run stop signs. Humans are notoriously sucky at risk assessment. So, do yourself a big favour: skip the 9/11 paranoia. It only feeds into the militarist bullshit. You're not going to die in a terrorist action. You are are likely to die of exposure as a refugee in a transit camp in Eastern Oregon after the oil runs out and society collapses.
These plans also assume that Russia and China are sitting idle. Once again, we shall be surprised just like we were when Russia put into service, a nuclear capable missile with independent, multiple war-heads. This made our missile shield obsolete.
No, and no. The Russians and Chinese have miniscule military budgets compared to the USA, both in real and relative terms. They learned their lesson: unless someone is fixing to invade you, there is no point in playing the Cold War pissing contest game.
This confirms to me that my president and his administration are just incompetent.
That's been pretty much common knowledge all over the world since February 2001.
RS
It's working now.
RS
No, you're missing the logic. I'll repeat: EVERY calorie you burn costs 10 calories to get to your mouth. Note: it wasn't always like that... back in the days when food was grown and consumed locally, food had a positive ER/EI (Energy Return on Enery Invested). Today, people eat fresh salads from 3000 miles away. In the dead of winter. Growing the stuff requires massive fossil fuels (planting, harvesting, shipping) then massive fossil fuels to process, then more to package it all, and then more to ship it, and then more to house it at the store, and even more to schlep your butt down to the store and back. When all is said and done, it's 10x the amount of energy you burn from eating it.
The earth is (for all intents and purposes) a closed system, so at any given moment there is (x) energy available. So, you can burn it is in a very inefficient manner to charge peripheral electronic systems, or you can use it directly to do so, which is much more efficient.
For a similar reason, it is much more energy efficient to ride an electric bike - all the energy used to make and power it is directly there for transport. Your personal energy budget has to keep your body working AND do whatever else needs to be done. I know this sounds fucked up and counter-intuitive, but it's totally true.
RS
As a consequence, whatever energy is used to power such a device needs to be measured against that yard stick.
It's kind of like using an electric stove. One can (for example) burn natural gas to power a generator to power your stove, with, at best 20% efficiency (the nat gas turbine isn't super eficient, and then its dumped into electric lines that are lossy, and then it goes to your stove, which also has loss.) The result? You're beter off burning nat gas directly to cook your food...
Same with this gizmo. You;'re better off using rechargable batteries...
RS
Oh, but that's right: electricity for my 52 inch plasma screen is more important.
RS
ANY inflammable liquid? OK. A 750 ml bottle of pure alcohol, aka molotov cocktail. Set it off. It's not going to breach the wall, the passengers will rush to put it out, the pilot will land the plane ASAP (most any interstate highway will do - they're built for that...) and eveyone will beat the living shit out of the moron who set it off. I've made plenty of those things in my youth - when you're bored in Industrial Hellzone NJ, making molotovs is a way to spend a boring afternoon...
Furthermore, the game is now MUCH different. ANYONE who tries any kind of hankypanky will get the shit beat out of them instantly by the other passengers. What we are witnessing is creeping fascism, pure and simple. I stand by my statement: the TSA exists to show people that the gov't is doing something about terrorism, and to instill fear in the populace. In other posts I have pointed out what this fear does: it creates a situation where people make poor risk assessments. EVEN WITH ALL the terror threats on airplanes, you still stand a better chance of getting run over by some drunk in an SUV than dying in a terorrist plot. you stand a much better chance of getting murdered by some crackhead robbing a liquor store than dying in a terrorist plane crash, but the Fascists aren't sending billions of dollars to their buddies in The Industry to put "crackhead" detectors at the door or every liquor store, or putting "stupid asshole" detectors on every steering wheel of everyr SUV, either.
It's a scam. It's a way for the militarists to screw more money out of the treasury by playing on people fears.
RS
Was this a real threat? Yes, there was a very serious plot to blow up planes using liquid explosives in bombs that would have worked to bring down aircraft.
And this is utter horseshit. If someone walked onto a plane with a water bottle filled with nitroglycerin, it would blow up when they tossed it through the XRay machine. So, they would have to make the explosives on the plane, and one of my best friends is a professional chemist and she said "Bullshit". You'd have to hole yourself up in the bathroom for a very long time with a magnetic stirring plate, a very precise dropper, dry ice, and a number of other bottles cups and things, and then in a very programmatic manner make the stuff, all while heaving and bucking on a jet liner and being exposed to some very nasty orders and chemicals. In short: it won't happen and isn't gong to happen and the threats about it are pure bullshit.
The TSA is just there to make people think the gov't is doing something about terrorism, and to keep people afraid. In fact, it's all bullshit, and a way to funnel huge sums of money into the military/industrial complex and keep the nightmare train rolling down the rails to an oblivion as it is headed directly off a cliff.
RS
So, one day, I just sat down and yanked most of the applications out. so, if you send me something on the Funwall, sorry - I won't be seeing it. And if you have some dorky movie compatibility quiz, I won't be playing the game. If you want to contact me, there's a facility for sending messages and comments. If you can't get put enough words together to do that, then you're probably not one of my friends, anyway.
Facebook has outlived its usefulness.
Perhaps something like allvoices.com will be the next big thing because there, you have to do something - contribution to the data matters more than just being a consuming node for a data mine.
RS
It's a really interesting point - and oddly obvious, yet no one notices. Let's pretend the war will only cost $1 trillion dollars. OK. Now, How much oil is in Iraq? Well according to the .gov they have 112 billion barrels of oil. I'm going to be generous and round it off to 120 billion, just because I'm nice, and I suck at doing math on the fly. So, divide 1 trillion by 120 billion and you get $8.3 per barrel. BUT: it doesn't work that way. for one thing, you never pull 100% of the oil out. Normally, it's around 50% or so when you start retreating and give up around 75%. So, let's be generous and pretend they will pull 80%, or 100 billion barrels out. That's $10 a barrel. However, there are MANY people looking to buy this stuff, and there is domestic consumption to consider. If the USA pulls 25% of this over to the states, then we're talking $40 a barrel surcharge on EVERY BARREL OF OIL.
So, when the base cost is $100 a barrel, America will be paying $140 a barrel.
Brilliant. And that's being bend over backwards generous. Frankly, I think the reserves are over estimated by at least 30% and that the quality is crap and they won't get more than 65 - 70% of it out in total and the USA likely to get perhaps 25% of that, which would make the surcharge more like $60 - 80 a barrel.
The answer is: it is always cheaper to buy something than steal it.
RS
That you got a +4 informative indicates the level of retardation here today.
Stupid Americans.
RS
Laugh.com
and if you want to buy used goods of out of print material, there is always GEMM
RS
OK Ms Jane Q Public. YOUR TURN. Get off YOUR fat ass and do as much as we have.
I dare ya.
RS
If you can't / won't do it NOW, then the long emergency will get longer. And Darker. No, it's not the end of the world. It's just a new world we won't recognise, and one that won't likely permit 7 billion people shitting all over it.
You can buy a shit load of grid tied windmills for 1.8 billion dollars...
RS
So, they put out a shingle, collect comments, make their operations a little "nicer" which calms down the rabble, bu doesn't get rid of the social relation. It's a trap. The point is, the TSA SHOULD NOT EXIST. PERIOD.
But this ruse shows "they are listening" and THEY have to EXIST to listen, so by letting them collect comments, those opposed have already surrendered the fight by letting them exist. Duh. That's how hegemony works. Stuart Hall, Noam Chomsky. Read them.
RS
I'll prolly just spring the $20 to yahoo, get POP set up with it, and then direct mail.app at yahoo and DL everything to my drive.
RS
RS
RS
Interesting that - imagine building a business using online apps, only to have your supplier go under and get bought out in some botched effort, and then lose history...
I think there are a number of serious implications in this MS/Yahoo deal. The monopoly aspect is actually the least problematic: the loss of history is a greater problem.
But then, maybe the Feds under a Democratic Admin will say "nuh uh!" and kill the deal...
RS
I'm 49 years old and MY generation has lived through the same. big deal. ALL generations live through history. It's what makes it history.
-Multiple, world-influencing major conflicts.
Like WW2? You lived through that one? I didn't either. Or Napoleon's conquest of Europe? I missed that one too. Oh, and the Aryan invasion of India. That was a biggie I missed out on too. Also: the Viking invasions of the 11th century. Nasty stuff. missed out on that butchery too.
-The introduction, widespread distribution, and near-anywhere access of the Internet (which, in my opinion, is one of our greatest achievements as humans.)
Yeah. That's a big one. kind of like THE TELEPHONE which laid the infrastructure that permitted the internet in the first place.
-The rise of wireless mobile devices that have the potential to function anywhere in the world.
That HAS THE POTENTIAL. whatever. Skip this one.
-Computers moving from universities and government orgs, taking up entire rooms, to becoming nearly universal in our homes, cars, and pockets.
Yeah. almost as big as the invention of AGRICULTURE.
-The rise of communication to the point where an actor can die in New York, and within ONE HOUR the entire world knowing of it (those parts of the world that has access to the net, radio, and/or TV of course)
Right. Like the death of an actor in NY is really such important news that it should be spread by this massive energy and resource intense global network, while IMPORTANT information is trivialised or buried by the same gossipy horseshit called "news", to the point where Real News is covered by COMEDIANS because the news organs have turned into little more than propaganda organs for the military industrial death machine.
-9/11 (one of the most world-changing events in modern history)
compared to WHAT? The USA incinerating hundreds of thousands of japanese CIVILIANS (you know - women and kids and pets and old folks and stuff) with ATOMIC WEAPONS? how is THAT not terrorism on a scale far beyond 9/11? Or the fire bombing of Tokyo? MacNamara himself said ON FILM that what he and LeMay did were WAR CRIMES. And speaking of that, what about events like Kristalnacht? Or Stalin's Purges and Pogroms? Yeah... We focus on 9/11 because we lived through it. But there's been much worse and things of far greater import and disaster than 9/11.
And many more. Seriously folks. We are living through one of the most exciting and important parts of history in the entire time-line of our species.
It's always exciting. I'm just concerned that we may be living at the end of the story, rather than the action packed middle chapters...
Centuries from now, people will be wondering "Imagine what it was like to live through the era where in roughly one century we went from taking weeks to get a message across a country and taking literally MONTHS to travel across the sea... to the point where you could talk to someone on the other side of the world using a device no bigger than your fist, and could travel from New York to Australia in a matter of hours."
And then they say "And because they were so stupid, greedy, selfish and destructive they pissed it all away on CRAP like Las Vegas and celebrity gossip magazines and mind numbing TV shows about nothing, we no longer have the ability to talk to someone on the other side of the world, because we spend most of our time as a society recovering from the die-off they drove themselves into, and now our planet's a furnace, the metals are gone or buried in landfills that are now underwater, the oil was used up in the 21st century, the coal vanished in the 22nd, and that's when the dying began in earnest. The information systems collapsed when the electrical grid became unstable and then disappeared. The last airplane flew in 2115, and it was more of a kite
Bingo - article was slashdotted. Damn that was quick. 10 minutes. amazing. I think with some effort slashdot could bring the internet itself to its knees...maybe...possibley...kinda...sorta...almost...not really...never happen...fuhgeddaboutit...
RS
Pathetic scum sucking filth.
net surcharge !solution
RS