The reason that stories such as this one aren't broken BY INVESTIGATIVE reporting, rather than an old chap with a conscious at the national archives is that major institutions like the NY TIMES are now simply propaganda arms of major corporations, politically powerful families and other special interests. When our media is fat and happy, they could care less what their viewers want or need.
But people voting with their dollars is a good way to get their attention. Personally, I hope that the current mistrust and even revulsion to major media becomes epedemic. When the bottom line is really threatened, major media will attempt to renew it's trust with the public and will chase after the real scandals (such as 9/11) rather than sensationalism (such as OJ Simpson). If they fail to live up to that challenge, they deserve to go extinct. The net will evolve a means of mediating and refereeing the investigative reporting that is going on already in personal blogs and whatnot. It is certain to happen.
I imagine a future where the distribution of information and the act of investigating is so decentralized that it cannot be effectively harnessed, controlled, corrupted or subverted by powerful special interests. That future probably doesn't have major media in any significantly central or powerful position. IMHO
The slogan here is "news for nerds", not "news for people who have no knowledge whatsoever of the basic principles of physical science"...
So just to be clear on the basic principles of physical science, could you explain how the magnetic flux of a permanent magnet retains the same strength over time, is able to perform useful work indefinitely (e.g. could magnetically levitate another magnet which requires, according to any analysis you choose, a continual exertion of force and therefore power and energy), etc.?
After all, if we are going to ridicule anything that resembles perpetual motion due to permanent magnets, then it is pretty important that we can unequivocally state that a permanent magnet itself is not capable of perpetually exerting force, power and energy. Right? Oh wait...
Think carefully before walking down this road. Even if you are a trained physisct, there be some serious dragons here. Be careful what you dismiss as pseudoscience.
s well put, but misses the point. In the context of the story "wrong" equals "illegal" to the Police chief. He's talking about legality, not morality and didn't use a good word (given that he wants to put cameras in people's houses and thinks this is a good idea, I'm not surprised).
Actually, you are missing the point entirely.
Let me try to come at it from a different angle, just for you; In the United States, there are laws against just about everything. If a law enforcement officer really wants to, he can arrest you for walking across the street wrong, spitting in public or a whole host of other ridiculousness. But generally, he will ignore such things. However, if he doesn't like you, is prejudice against you, etc.., you may in fact find yourself being cited (read: harassed) for what otherwise may be insignificant. The officer may watch you, hoping to find some way of getting you. Hiding your behavior from someone who may not like you is important. Capiche?
Tesla was important. Edison was more so. Get over it already.
You need to do a little more research, bub. Does edison have a unit of fundamental scientific measurement named after him (such as the unit of magnetic flux, the "TESLA")?
Tesla did invent a better lightbulb, quite a few years before Edison's oiled filiment bulb, Tesla was wirelessly powering the equivilent of modern flourecent bulbs. But he wasn't the business grandstander that Edison was, so this goes largely unacknowledged in historical accounts.
Truth be told, Tesla took the original work of Maxwell and expanded on it in a dimension that no other scientist/inventor has before or since. The original quaternion formulation of Maxwell's equations included terms and accomidations for scalar fields, asynchronous (open) circuits and a variety of other electromagnetic effects that mainstream science weeded out through Lorentz, Heaviside and other manipulations to Maxwell's work. Had Tesla been listened to more closely, we would, today, have wireless power transmission, essentially free power generation and a whole slew of other intense advances that are difficult for the modern (closed) brain to comprehend.
The primary problem Tesla had was that his inventions often offered to give people things for free, in direct conflict with the power-mongers of the day who wanted to meter everything. His research was vigorously censured for that reason.
But even so, if you compare Edison with Tesla, what you are left with is this:
Edison made a few cute gadgets.
Tesla changed the world.
Therefore, Edison was important because people like gadgets, but Tesla was moreso, because he changed our way of life... Without Tesla, there wouldn't be any power in your home to play that phonograph or light up that oiled-filament lightbulb. So, you, bub, should get over it already.
"If you aren't doing anything wrong, what do you have to hide?"
Wrong, according to whom? You? The mormon manning the camera who thinks drinking is against God's law? The Jewish officer next to the Mormon who has a problem with my delight in cooking pork?
Everybody sees the world through their own lenses of right and wrong. If I am being observed by somoene with a radically different belief structure than my own, it stands to reason that in their eyes I very well may be doing something wrong. It is completely the right decision to want to hide my behaviors from such people, allowing them to navigate through the world with their own peculiar perceptions without slapping their personal prejudices against me.
We do not live in a homogenous society. We live in a society of great diversity where people are offended on a reasonably consistent basis by the behavior of others in society. Offense and prejudice breed harassment and worse. It is absolutely critical that people hide their personal lives from each other, and especially those who have the authority to act on their prejudices. Anyone who thinks differently - well, those are the ones who have the most dangerous prejudices of all - the ones who think they have the authority and RIGHT to force their view of the world on others.
My belief is that Universal binaries and Rosetta are both here to stay. Apple will not phase them out until they are obsolete. These technologies will not go obsolete in any conceivable way.
Through the use of these technologies, Apple has made it's operating system into a chip-neutral platform. It doesn't have to "switch" or "switch" back. It can just happily sit there and continue to support both PPC and x86 for the conceivable future. Soon, it will add 64bit x86 and there is no reason to believe it couldn't add support for another processor if it so chose.
If the new IBM chips are good, Apple can always release product carrying the chip. It should *just work* for all but those few products (I am thinking games now) where the vendor chose not to build Universal binaries.
The big technology companies (such as Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Apple, etc..) will erect alternate backbones and most likely will cover metropolitan areas with wifi. Expect major wars between the tech and data carriers if this were to occur.
Information will always get cheaper. it is inevitable.
I have considered this idea many times since cellphones started sporting memory cards and java apps. With some of the newer phones, all that would be required is a cheap video card and a cable adaptor. The bluetooth keyboard is already available.
And make no mistake about it, it would be useful. With a keyboard and a TV, you could edit documents, send emails, browse the web, play games, etc.. Pretty much everything that the average PC user does with their windows box could more or less be done with a Nokia, bluetooth keyboard and a TV.
No everyone needs an overclocked athalon with a mighty video card to get high frame-rates out of the best new games. For most, this would be enough.
Microsoft is thinking very strategically here. And who cares that you couldn't produce one of these phones today for $100. Are they planning on releasing it today? The writing is on the wall, folks...
If George Bush hired him, he can do whatever he damn well pleases with the reports. But as long as my tax dollars are in there, this guy is welcome to speak the truth. So long as he's clear about what's his opinion and what's NASA's opinion, and it sure sounds like he has been.
Unfortunately, our government has deemed pretty much everything that your tax dollars are spent on to be too sensitive to reveal to you. As a result, you must sit and listen to the propaganda that is designed for small, un-enlightened, un-connected, mindless middleclass consumers such as yourself while the real grownups that are from good families and are appropriately connected in both politics and corporate ownership rightly profit from the information and other assets created from the tax dollars that you have sacrificed. What part of this do you not understand?
Anyone who believes that lying about having sex is even in the same universe of evil as lying about the justification of the wanton destruction, genocide and looting of entire nations needs to have their head examined.
Odds are that every one of you reading this has lied about sex in your life. Have you lied about the rationale you used to kill people and steal their property? How about lying in order to manipulate and enslave millions of people to your whims? I doubt a single one of you can make that claim (except maybe Cmdr Taco himself)...
Time for everyone to stop comparing nuclear weapons to donuts. It's ridiculous.
As paranoid as it might sound, I keep wondering if Bush will invent some 'National Security' Crisis in '08 and announce that it is too dangerous to hold elections at this time.
Come on, you know GW is just a pawn for his daddy. All Daddy has to do is get Jebb a job as president and the monarchy continues. This particular monarchy has been in effect (with the exception of the Clinton years) pretty continuously since Reagan was elected in 1984 [ an auspicious and apropos year for the current regime ]. Reagan could barely do more than a good talking head show, so you know who was really running things don't you (hint: who was Vice President)? If you consider the power of the CIA before the Reagan years (remember the cold war?) and examine who was running the CIA in those days, you may be likely to conclude that this regime has lasted even longer than that... (I suggest researching GW Sr.'s daddy and grand-daddy as well)
It is time for Americans to wake up. It is time for us to ask hard questions and it is time for us to stop buying all the pregenerated propaganda bullshit that is being shoved down our throats by politically owned television networks. If you dig, you will find interesting founding and ownership relationships between the Bush family and a variety of powerful television network interests. This story is intensely more interesting than people are allowing themselves to believe. Here is a good link.
Conspiracy? Hah! Just check the damned facts. They speak for themselves.
But, if you like conspiracies; To get to the conspiracy angle, you have to look at sites like This One . God help us if even a sliver of that tin-foil-hat stuff is true.
I agree. Once it has been proven that any government official has broken the law, then the steps must be taken to mete out justice. At this time, though, it has not been proven that any laws have been broken. As a matter of fact, it has been pointed out several times in other comments that the FISA court has backed up the actions of President Bush.
I was talking about warrants, not justice. The issues associated with warrantless wiretaps, search, seizure, etc... etc... The due process required to prove the government has some reason to invade the privacy of it's citizen, search a citizen's property, sieze a citizen's property, arrest a citizen, hold that citizen, etc...
We should not even be arguing over whether FISA was violated or the PATRIOT ACT is defensible or constitutional. We should be alarmed, shocked and angry that the leaders of our country believe they have a right to invade our personal lives on a hunch, or hell (since there are no consequences now that they can do it), maybe sometimes for fun?
Partisanship would be if I said, "Bush Good, Clinton Bad." I was just trying to point out the hypocrisy of vilifying one President for actions that have been taken by other Presidents. I have the same problem with vilifying Clinton over his extra-marital relations, when it is widely assumed that other Presidents have done the same thing.
Well, by attempting to point out the hypocracy of another, you joined his party and made it a true travesty of hypocracy. Funny how that works, huh?
I am a registered Republican, but I hold the current environment in America with great suspicion and would like to see a more balanced distribution of Republicans and Democrats in office. This is because I believe completely that the party (either party) forces party members that hold offices across the boundaries of the different branches of government to take certain actions, effectively subverting the checks and balances that are supposed to prevent large-scale corruption of the U.S. Government. You can think of this EXACTLY in the same way as a FICO style racketeering organization (e.g. MAFIA).
Technology has outpaced traditional means of organizing decision-makers and checks-and-balances. The types of subversions happening to the system today are only possible today through the use of technology to keep track of everything being subverted (e.g. IT). What is really required is something that would probably take an act of god; The U.S. public needs to begin contemplating the new age that we live in and sketching out ways to prevent tools of this new age to be used to subvert our system. I believe the severe limiting of partisan politics is one neccessary fall-out. The parties have become simply too powerful, and with information technology, they can very effectively communicate, coordinate and therefore control vast regions of all branches of government. THIS SUBVERSION MUST BE CORRECTED AND PREVENTED.
Would a police state allow groups like The Center for Constitutional Rights and the ACLU to file such suits, much less exist?
Yes, of course it would, if it wanted to keep intact the illusion that it was not, in fact, a police state. The central issue is not what the government does, but how it keeps the people believing they are free (and therefore happy) while doing whatever it feels like. Generally, I think you would find that the more corrupt a government is, the more paranoid it is about being discovered to be corrupt and therefore the more like a police state it will become. A very smart government would do this subversively, manipulating the press and attempting to ensure that the illusion of prosperity and freedom are maintained.
That being said, it seems reasonably clear that the U.S. Government goes through periods of enlightenment where the checks and balances work well and the citizens are truly the focal point of the country and it also goes through periods where radical partisan politics corrupts the checks and balances and trample over the rights of citizens for it's own ends. These periods look suspiciously like a mafia controlled government, subverting systems designed to protect essential assets in order to steal them, subverting essential systems in order to steal from others (such as other countries), etc...
I leave it as an exercise for you to determine which of these (or what blend of these) periods of American history we occupy presently.
So... it's OK to authorize the warrantless search of an American citizen, as long as you think he's a spy, but it's not OK to wiretap a call to a known Al Quaeda phone number in Iran?
I find it intensely interesting that people will defend the warrantless search and seizure of an American citizen by the Clinton administration, yet will villify the recording of phone conversations of people who have known links to terrorist organizations.
C'mon...
Excuse me, but you guys are really irritating me. Your argument sounds like, "My party's president is good and his stripping of citizen rights was just. Your party's president is bad and his stripping of citizen rights was unjust." Do you realize how idiotic that sounds?
There is NEVER a time when it is just to skip due process when it comes to matters of privacy, civil rights, property, life or liberty. Let me repeat that, "NEVER!" For those of you who do not understand why this is so, let me simply state that all such special circumstances can be faked, subverted, corrupted or worse, used as a seed of new legislation that radically strips due process from government proceedures that are there to protect your privacy, civil rights, property, life and liberty. Put simply, once you give the goons the tools, they will use it for whatever the hell they feel like.
This is, once again, the far left end of the Democratic party trying to force legislation through the courts. If any Democratic Representative or Senator proposed legislation that actually limited the abilities of the President to keep American citizens safe, they'd lose the next election. If, however, they sic the ACLU on the President, they can then wait to see how the courts rule, and take their campaign stance from the result.
I really don't understand why people argue through partisanship so blindly. Partisan politics subvert the checks and balances of the U.S. system of government and end up operating like rich, powerful, political mafias. My personal opinion is that the parties should be completely abolished. We would be much better off if we had to evaluate the merits of individuals than blindly accepting anyone with our personal brand. Moreso, because with only two brands, our freedom of choice is pretty limited.
Democracy? Hah! By the people, for the people? Hah!
Not until we create laws against powerful partisan politics. Today, it is "For the ultra-rich Republicans, by the ultra-rich Republicans and oh, yea, lets throw a few peanuts to the millions who think they are one of us..."
Iranian scientists have also genetically modified a pig so that it will reproduce and grow at 5 times the normal rate. Iran's hunger problems will surely end soon.
Yea, indeed, since there is such a huge demand for pig flesh in muslim Iran...
That's not what I am saying. What I am saying is much more offensive to evolutionists than that;)
And, hopefully, a little bit more logical.
I am saying that all that supposed evidence that the world is billions of years old is nothing of the sort, and that it is an either intentional or unintentional result of the assumptions people make when they start off doing things.
Well, there are literally hundreds of thousands of very educated scientists who, for hundreds of years, have put their entire lives into the study of these things. They do understand such things as radio-carbon dating and seasonal effects on rock formations and ice cores and whatnot. The fact is, you simply cannot argue that the proponderance of evidence for the continuing existance of planet earth over billions of years does not exist. It does. Go take a look at it instead of saying you aren't an expert. Really.
That's micro evolution.
I believe in micro evolution.
What I don't believe is *macro* evolution, which says that everything came from a turnip.
I don't see how it can be possible for turnips to turn into dogs, or dogs to turn into people, and that *hasn't* been proven in a lab. There are plenty of problems with macro evolution.
micro != macro.
Sure, you can keep adding billions worth of years in order to make those ludicrously low chances seem less low (because after all, 4.5 billion years is a *LONG* time, couldn't *ANYTHING* happen in that long?), but I for one am not convinced.
Well, the fact is, your DNA is 99% the same as a chimpanzee and we have surprisingly accurate copies of fish DNA as well. In fact all living things share a tremendous amount of genetic material. What this indicates, very strongly, is that there was a time when our ancestors and those of other living things converged to the same creatures.
The concepts of mutation and punctuated evolution are important ones. There is a natural randomness to the genotypes and phenotypes that exist within a population. Some of this randomness expresses itself because of variations in the genetic pool of the population and some of it expresses itself because of errors in combining DNA during mitosis or in mutation caused by radiation or other natural phenomena. The mutations will most often have no effect (genes that do not express) or effects that are terrible for the organism (missing limbs, problems with internal organs, etc..). However, ocassionally such mutations can result in a survival advantage for the recipient of the mutation. An example could be a gene in humans that accidentally mutated to reduce or eliminate melatonin production, resulting in very light skin humans - which is a survival advantage in cold snow-covered climates as it assists in hiding such humans. Some mutations produce morphological changes (changes in body shape). All of them would be minor and only after they accumulate over tens of thousands to millions of years would we see profound differences in organisms. This is how macro-evolution works. Micro-evolution, as you are using the term, is the process of weeding out irrelevant phenotypes that already exist in a genepool and selecting the most relevant. Macro-evolution, your term again, is the process of amplifying and spreading mutations that introduce new genes into the genepool. Both exist, are proven and cannot be argued.
Really? Personally I would think it would be a lot more interesting to design a really cool computer from the get-go, if you knew how, rather than starting off with vacuum tubes and working your way slowly up from there. After all, if the Bible is to be trusted (and I have decided to trust it unless or until it's proven wrong - not by force of how many people in the world think it's right or wrong, but when someone proves to *my* satisfaction t
Well, the unwritten implication is that the jewish concept of kosher food may have been passed down through oral tradition from a time when there were intense levels of poisons in the environment and encoded into judaic law as that religion emerged, what 3000 - 4000 years ago?
There has always been a great debate about both the age of, and purpose of, the concept of jewish kosher food. The same is not true for islam, as islam emerged much later and has it's roots in both judaism and christianity.
Or maybe it was to prevent food spoilage in desert conditions? And arguably later it became convenient for the priests of one religion to use it as a way of limiting contact between their followers and those of neighbouring religions.
Well, let's take a look at a couple of things. How about shellfish? You do realize that shellfish absorb toxins in the ocean (and would accumulate radioactive waste in effected areas) - this is one of the primary reasons that shellfish are dangerous today (toxin absorbtion) - but interestingly, there were no such toxins in the oceans thousands of years ago (or so we are led to believe). So what possible food spoilage problems in desert conditions do shellfish have? Does the religious border argument make sense either? Seems to me, the toxin issue makes TOO MUCH SENSE.
How about the bleeding of stock animals? Same issue, really...
What about pork? Pigs eat anything, you can't stop them. Again, in a toxic environment, it seems to me that pork would be particularly dangerous because of the diet of the animal.
>6000? Not 300? Maybe it's only 2 days old - a simulation that was checkpointed and restarted
>2 days ago (our subjective time).
See, now you're rejecting things out of hand just because of your own assumptions (that the world is older than 6,000 years).
Not at all. I was, instead, saying that it could just as easily have been created 300 years ago. There is considerable physical evidence (geologic, fossil, radiocarbon, etc..) that shows that the earth is billions of years old. If it were created in such a way that we couldn't tell the difference, it would be just as easy to create it 300 years ago to look that way as it would be to create it 6000 years ago to look that way. Hell, it could have been created 2 days ago and our own memories are as much a synthesis as the surroundings around us. That was my point. If you believe in creationism, you must accept these possibilities as equally likely to any arbitrary starting point.
Evolution theory makes more sense from a politcal and (im)moral point of view than it does from a scientific point of view.
What I mean is, evolution is more comfortable for man than this theory of a God who has the right to judge the earth; if evolution is true you don't have to wait until you're married to have sex, or to not get drunk, or to be faithful to your spouse.. because who's going to stop you? It seems fairly clear that a lot of people have a vested interest in keeping the evolution theory going for their own comfort, whether or not it is true.
In fact, if it *is* true, that would be all the more reason to stick up for it - why live a self-sacrificing life if there's no possible benefit? Why not just party and do whatever you feel like, if all that waits at death is cessation of existence?
While hiding behind materialism, evolution and science is certainly a way in which people may rationalize away guilt, I think you are making a mistake in waving evolution away. Evolution is a provable science today. DNA analysis can show, beyond a shadow of a doubt, different specialized adaptations in members of the same animal species that inhabit different parts of the globe. Farmers can selectively breed features in and out of both animals and plants. And the list goes on. Regardless of whether you believe in intelligent design, it is absolutely clear that the mechanics of natural selection do exist and are in operation today. Period. It can not be argued.
Now, I am not saying that intelligent design is not in operation. It very well may be, and if it is, it is probably manifest in a much more beautiful and profound fashion than we realize. The idea of panspermia is a damned good one. The idea that an intelligence exists that is so advanced that it could design a few small bacterial cells to throw at a lifeless rock and watch those cells flower into our modern world is a much grander wand of god than "poof, now it all exists". I would like to think that God's poetry contains such beauty, myself.
And if you take a look at Bush Sr's track record, I think it is safe to say, he was definitely one of the first ninjas to take a lead position... Interesting reference to Kennedy, btw...
One student asked: "Was the bomb exploded at Alamogordo during the Manhattan Project the first one to be detonated?"
Dr. Oppenheimer's answer was short but extremely telling. Dr. Oppenheimer said: "Well - yes. In modern times, of course."
-------
There is a ton more material out there on ancient nuclear wars. Just go google "ancient nuclear war" and see for yourself. Be objective. You might learn something.
Alternate energy? Black projects? Black science? Oil cartels? Repressed energy technology? Science cover-ups? Murdered scientists?... go google... It is insane how much material exists. Just remember that the U.S. black budget is higher than most country's GDPs, and that is without counting the hidden revenue (such as CIA drug operations and whatnot - yea, again, tin-foil hat stuff, right?). Don't ridicule. Go find out for yourself.
Fact can be and usually is, much stranger than fiction.
I am not an evolutionist. I believe the earth is only about 6,000 years old. Now, it's possible that people made space ships and travelled to other planets or maybe even galaxies in that time, but, well, the lack of archeological evidence is interesting. Not enough, I think, to entirely disprove any ideas of past space flight ability.. but certainly enough to throw shadows of doubt.
6000? Not 300? Maybe it's only 2 days old - a simulation that was checkpointed and restarted 2 days ago (our subjective time).
6000 years? So, core samples from ice in antarctica that shows seasonal snowfall for hundreds of thousands of years? Faked? God has quite a sense of humor;-)
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The reason that stories such as this one aren't broken BY INVESTIGATIVE reporting, rather than an old chap with a conscious at the national archives is that major institutions like the NY TIMES are now simply propaganda arms of major corporations, politically powerful families and other special interests. When our media is fat and happy, they could care less what their viewers want or need.
But people voting with their dollars is a good way to get their attention. Personally, I hope that the current mistrust and even revulsion to major media becomes epedemic. When the bottom line is really threatened, major media will attempt to renew it's trust with the public and will chase after the real scandals (such as 9/11) rather than sensationalism (such as OJ Simpson). If they fail to live up to that challenge, they deserve to go extinct. The net will evolve a means of mediating and refereeing the investigative reporting that is going on already in personal blogs and whatnot. It is certain to happen.
I imagine a future where the distribution of information and the act of investigating is so decentralized that it cannot be effectively harnessed, controlled, corrupted or subverted by powerful special interests. That future probably doesn't have major media in any significantly central or powerful position. IMHO
The slogan here is "news for nerds", not "news for people who have no knowledge whatsoever of the basic principles of physical science"...
So just to be clear on the basic principles of physical science, could you explain how the magnetic flux of a permanent magnet retains the same strength over time, is able to perform useful work indefinitely (e.g. could magnetically levitate another magnet which requires, according to any analysis you choose, a continual exertion of force and therefore power and energy), etc.?
After all, if we are going to ridicule anything that resembles perpetual motion due to permanent magnets, then it is pretty important that we can unequivocally state that a permanent magnet itself is not capable of perpetually exerting force, power and energy. Right? Oh wait...
Think carefully before walking down this road. Even if you are a trained physisct, there be some serious dragons here. Be careful what you dismiss as pseudoscience.
s well put, but misses the point. In the context of the story "wrong" equals "illegal" to the Police chief. He's talking about legality, not morality and didn't use a good word (given that he wants to put cameras in people's houses and thinks this is a good idea, I'm not surprised).
Actually, you are missing the point entirely.
Let me try to come at it from a different angle, just for you; In the United States, there are laws against just about everything. If a law enforcement officer really wants to, he can arrest you for walking across the street wrong, spitting in public or a whole host of other ridiculousness. But generally, he will ignore such things. However, if he doesn't like you, is prejudice against you, etc.., you may in fact find yourself being cited (read: harassed) for what otherwise may be insignificant. The officer may watch you, hoping to find some way of getting you. Hiding your behavior from someone who may not like you is important. Capiche?
Who said I was a Gentile?
Tesla was important. Edison was more so. Get over it already.
You need to do a little more research, bub. Does edison have a unit of fundamental scientific measurement named after him (such as the unit of magnetic flux, the "TESLA")?
Tesla did invent a better lightbulb, quite a few years before Edison's oiled filiment bulb, Tesla was wirelessly powering the equivilent of modern flourecent bulbs. But he wasn't the business grandstander that Edison was, so this goes largely unacknowledged in historical accounts.
Truth be told, Tesla took the original work of Maxwell and expanded on it in a dimension that no other scientist/inventor has before or since. The original quaternion formulation of Maxwell's equations included terms and accomidations for scalar fields, asynchronous (open) circuits and a variety of other electromagnetic effects that mainstream science weeded out through Lorentz, Heaviside and other manipulations to Maxwell's work. Had Tesla been listened to more closely, we would, today, have wireless power transmission, essentially free power generation and a whole slew of other intense advances that are difficult for the modern (closed) brain to comprehend.
The primary problem Tesla had was that his inventions often offered to give people things for free, in direct conflict with the power-mongers of the day who wanted to meter everything. His research was vigorously censured for that reason.
But even so, if you compare Edison with Tesla, what you are left with is this:
Edison made a few cute gadgets.
Tesla changed the world.
Therefore, Edison was important because people like gadgets, but Tesla was moreso, because he changed our way of life... Without Tesla, there wouldn't be any power in your home to play that phonograph or light up that oiled-filament lightbulb. So, you, bub, should get over it already.
"If you aren't doing anything wrong, what do you have to hide?"
Wrong, according to whom? You? The mormon manning the camera who thinks drinking is against God's law? The Jewish officer next to the Mormon who has a problem with my delight in cooking pork?
Everybody sees the world through their own lenses of right and wrong. If I am being observed by somoene with a radically different belief structure than my own, it stands to reason that in their eyes I very well may be doing something wrong. It is completely the right decision to want to hide my behaviors from such people, allowing them to navigate through the world with their own peculiar perceptions without slapping their personal prejudices against me.
We do not live in a homogenous society. We live in a society of great diversity where people are offended on a reasonably consistent basis by the behavior of others in society. Offense and prejudice breed harassment and worse. It is absolutely critical that people hide their personal lives from each other, and especially those who have the authority to act on their prejudices. Anyone who thinks differently - well, those are the ones who have the most dangerous prejudices of all - the ones who think they have the authority and RIGHT to force their view of the world on others.
My belief is that Universal binaries and Rosetta are both here to stay. Apple will not phase them out until they are obsolete. These technologies will not go obsolete in any conceivable way.
Through the use of these technologies, Apple has made it's operating system into a chip-neutral platform. It doesn't have to "switch" or "switch" back. It can just happily sit there and continue to support both PPC and x86 for the conceivable future. Soon, it will add 64bit x86 and there is no reason to believe it couldn't add support for another processor if it so chose.
If the new IBM chips are good, Apple can always release product carrying the chip. It should *just work* for all but those few products (I am thinking games now) where the vendor chose not to build Universal binaries.
The big technology companies (such as Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Apple, etc..) will erect alternate backbones and most likely will cover metropolitan areas with wifi. Expect major wars between the tech and data carriers if this were to occur.
Information will always get cheaper. it is inevitable.
I have considered this idea many times since cellphones started sporting memory cards and java apps. With some of the newer phones, all that would be required is a cheap video card and a cable adaptor. The bluetooth keyboard is already available.
And make no mistake about it, it would be useful. With a keyboard and a TV, you could edit documents, send emails, browse the web, play games, etc.. Pretty much everything that the average PC user does with their windows box could more or less be done with a Nokia, bluetooth keyboard and a TV.
No everyone needs an overclocked athalon with a mighty video card to get high frame-rates out of the best new games. For most, this would be enough.
Microsoft is thinking very strategically here. And who cares that you couldn't produce one of these phones today for $100. Are they planning on releasing it today? The writing is on the wall, folks...
If George Bush hired him, he can do whatever he damn well pleases with the reports. But as long as my tax dollars are in there, this guy is welcome to speak the truth. So long as he's clear about what's his opinion and what's NASA's opinion, and it sure sounds like he has been.
Unfortunately, our government has deemed pretty much everything that your tax dollars are spent on to be too sensitive to reveal to you. As a result, you must sit and listen to the propaganda that is designed for small, un-enlightened, un-connected, mindless middleclass consumers such as yourself while the real grownups that are from good families and are appropriately connected in both politics and corporate ownership rightly profit from the information and other assets created from the tax dollars that you have sacrificed. What part of this do you not understand?
Anyone who believes that lying about having sex is even in the same universe of evil as lying about the justification of the wanton destruction, genocide and looting of entire nations needs to have their head examined.
Odds are that every one of you reading this has lied about sex in your life. Have you lied about the rationale you used to kill people and steal their property? How about lying in order to manipulate and enslave millions of people to your whims? I doubt a single one of you can make that claim (except maybe Cmdr Taco himself)...
Time for everyone to stop comparing nuclear weapons to donuts. It's ridiculous.
As paranoid as it might sound, I keep wondering if Bush will invent some 'National Security' Crisis in '08 and announce that it is too dangerous to hold elections at this time.
Come on, you know GW is just a pawn for his daddy. All Daddy has to do is get Jebb a job as president and the monarchy continues. This particular monarchy has been in effect (with the exception of the Clinton years) pretty continuously since Reagan was elected in 1984 [ an auspicious and apropos year for the current regime ]. Reagan could barely do more than a good talking head show, so you know who was really running things don't you (hint: who was Vice President)? If you consider the power of the CIA before the Reagan years (remember the cold war?) and examine who was running the CIA in those days, you may be likely to conclude that this regime has lasted even longer than that... (I suggest researching GW Sr.'s daddy and grand-daddy as well)
It is time for Americans to wake up. It is time for us to ask hard questions and it is time for us to stop buying all the pregenerated propaganda bullshit that is being shoved down our throats by politically owned television networks. If you dig, you will find interesting founding and ownership relationships between the Bush family and a variety of powerful television network interests. This story is intensely more interesting than people are allowing themselves to believe. Here is a good link.
Conspiracy? Hah! Just check the damned facts. They speak for themselves.
But, if you like conspiracies; To get to the conspiracy angle, you have to look at sites like This One . God help us if even a sliver of that tin-foil-hat stuff is true.
Has given you away. Only one skilled in the art would even know how to string such words together...
We should not even be arguing over whether FISA was violated or the PATRIOT ACT is defensible or constitutional. We should be alarmed, shocked and angry that the leaders of our country believe they have a right to invade our personal lives on a hunch, or hell (since there are no consequences now that they can do it), maybe sometimes for fun?
Well, by attempting to point out the hypocracy of another, you joined his party and made it a true travesty of hypocracy. Funny how that works, huh?
I am a registered Republican, but I hold the current environment in America with great suspicion and would like to see a more balanced distribution of Republicans and Democrats in office. This is because I believe completely that the party (either party) forces party members that hold offices across the boundaries of the different branches of government to take certain actions, effectively subverting the checks and balances that are supposed to prevent large-scale corruption of the U.S. Government. You can think of this EXACTLY in the same way as a FICO style racketeering organization (e.g. MAFIA).
Technology has outpaced traditional means of organizing decision-makers and checks-and-balances. The types of subversions happening to the system today are only possible today through the use of technology to keep track of everything being subverted (e.g. IT). What is really required is something that would probably take an act of god; The U.S. public needs to begin contemplating the new age that we live in and sketching out ways to prevent tools of this new age to be used to subvert our system. I believe the severe limiting of partisan politics is one neccessary fall-out. The parties have become simply too powerful, and with information technology, they can very effectively communicate, coordinate and therefore control vast regions of all branches of government. THIS SUBVERSION MUST BE CORRECTED AND PREVENTED.
Would a police state allow groups like The Center for Constitutional Rights and the ACLU to file such suits, much less exist?
Yes, of course it would, if it wanted to keep intact the illusion that it was not, in fact, a police state. The central issue is not what the government does, but how it keeps the people believing they are free (and therefore happy) while doing whatever it feels like. Generally, I think you would find that the more corrupt a government is, the more paranoid it is about being discovered to be corrupt and therefore the more like a police state it will become. A very smart government would do this subversively, manipulating the press and attempting to ensure that the illusion of prosperity and freedom are maintained.
That being said, it seems reasonably clear that the U.S. Government goes through periods of enlightenment where the checks and balances work well and the citizens are truly the focal point of the country and it also goes through periods where radical partisan politics corrupts the checks and balances and trample over the rights of citizens for it's own ends. These periods look suspiciously like a mafia controlled government, subverting systems designed to protect essential assets in order to steal them, subverting essential systems in order to steal from others (such as other countries), etc...
I leave it as an exercise for you to determine which of these (or what blend of these) periods of American history we occupy presently.
There is NEVER a time when it is just to skip due process when it comes to matters of privacy, civil rights, property, life or liberty. Let me repeat that, "NEVER!" For those of you who do not understand why this is so, let me simply state that all such special circumstances can be faked, subverted, corrupted or worse, used as a seed of new legislation that radically strips due process from government proceedures that are there to protect your privacy, civil rights, property, life and liberty. Put simply, once you give the goons the tools, they will use it for whatever the hell they feel like. I really don't understand why people argue through partisanship so blindly. Partisan politics subvert the checks and balances of the U.S. system of government and end up operating like rich, powerful, political mafias. My personal opinion is that the parties should be completely abolished. We would be much better off if we had to evaluate the merits of individuals than blindly accepting anyone with our personal brand. Moreso, because with only two brands, our freedom of choice is pretty limited.
Democracy? Hah! By the people, for the people? Hah!
Not until we create laws against powerful partisan politics. Today, it is "For the ultra-rich Republicans, by the ultra-rich Republicans and oh, yea, lets throw a few peanuts to the millions who think they are one of us..."
Iranian scientists have also genetically modified a pig so that it will reproduce and grow at 5 times the normal rate. Iran's hunger problems will surely end soon.
Yea, indeed, since there is such a huge demand for pig flesh in muslim Iran...
Excellent response. Thanks.
Well, there are literally hundreds of thousands of very educated scientists who, for hundreds of years, have put their entire lives into the study of these things. They do understand such things as radio-carbon dating and seasonal effects on rock formations and ice cores and whatnot. The fact is, you simply cannot argue that the proponderance of evidence for the continuing existance of planet earth over billions of years does not exist. It does. Go take a look at it instead of saying you aren't an expert. Really.
Well, the fact is, your DNA is 99% the same as a chimpanzee and we have surprisingly accurate copies of fish DNA as well. In fact all living things share a tremendous amount of genetic material. What this indicates, very strongly, is that there was a time when our ancestors and those of other living things converged to the same creatures.
The concepts of mutation and punctuated evolution are important ones. There is a natural randomness to the genotypes and phenotypes that exist within a population. Some of this randomness expresses itself because of variations in the genetic pool of the population and some of it expresses itself because of errors in combining DNA during mitosis or in mutation caused by radiation or other natural phenomena. The mutations will most often have no effect (genes that do not express) or effects that are terrible for the organism (missing limbs, problems with internal organs, etc..). However, ocassionally such mutations can result in a survival advantage for the recipient of the mutation. An example could be a gene in humans that accidentally mutated to reduce or eliminate melatonin production, resulting in very light skin humans - which is a survival advantage in cold snow-covered climates as it assists in hiding such humans. Some mutations produce morphological changes (changes in body shape). All of them would be minor and only after they accumulate over tens of thousands to millions of years would we see profound differences in organisms. This is how macro-evolution works. Micro-evolution, as you are using the term, is the process of weeding out irrelevant phenotypes that already exist in a genepool and selecting the most relevant. Macro-evolution, your term again, is the process of amplifying and spreading mutations that introduce new genes into the genepool. Both exist, are proven and cannot be argued.
Well, the unwritten implication is that the jewish concept of kosher food may have been passed down through oral tradition from a time when there were intense levels of poisons in the environment and encoded into judaic law as that religion emerged, what 3000 - 4000 years ago?
There has always been a great debate about both the age of, and purpose of, the concept of jewish kosher food. The same is not true for islam, as islam emerged much later and has it's roots in both judaism and christianity.
How about the bleeding of stock animals? Same issue, really...
What about pork? Pigs eat anything, you can't stop them. Again, in a toxic environment, it seems to me that pork would be particularly dangerous because of the diet of the animal.
It is an interesting point to ponder.
While hiding behind materialism, evolution and science is certainly a way in which people may rationalize away guilt, I think you are making a mistake in waving evolution away. Evolution is a provable science today. DNA analysis can show, beyond a shadow of a doubt, different specialized adaptations in members of the same animal species that inhabit different parts of the globe. Farmers can selectively breed features in and out of both animals and plants. And the list goes on. Regardless of whether you believe in intelligent design, it is absolutely clear that the mechanics of natural selection do exist and are in operation today. Period. It can not be argued.
Now, I am not saying that intelligent design is not in operation. It very well may be, and if it is, it is probably manifest in a much more beautiful and profound fashion than we realize. The idea of panspermia is a damned good one. The idea that an intelligence exists that is so advanced that it could design a few small bacterial cells to throw at a lifeless rock and watch those cells flower into our modern world is a much grander wand of god than "poof, now it all exists". I would like to think that God's poetry contains such beauty, myself.
Hmph... I guess I have to agree...
And if you take a look at Bush Sr's track record, I think it is safe to say, he was definitely one of the first ninjas to take a lead position... Interesting reference to Kennedy, btw...
J. Robert Oppenheimer, (1904-1967) the Supervising Scientist of the Manhattan Project was giving a lecture at Rochester University seven years after the first atomic weapon was successfully detonated. After his lecture he opened the floor to a period of questions and answers.
... go google ... It is insane how much material exists. Just remember that the U.S. black budget is higher than most country's GDPs, and that is without counting the hidden revenue (such as CIA drug operations and whatnot - yea, again, tin-foil hat stuff, right?). Don't ridicule. Go find out for yourself.
One student asked: "Was the bomb exploded at Alamogordo during the Manhattan Project the first one to be detonated?"
Dr. Oppenheimer's answer was short but extremely telling. Dr. Oppenheimer said: "Well - yes. In modern times, of course."
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There is a ton more material out there on ancient nuclear wars. Just go google "ancient nuclear war" and see for yourself. Be objective. You might learn something.
Alternate energy? Black projects? Black science? Oil cartels? Repressed energy technology? Science cover-ups? Murdered scientists?
Fact can be and usually is, much stranger than fiction.
6000 years? So, core samples from ice in antarctica that shows seasonal snowfall for hundreds of thousands of years? Faked? God has quite a sense of humor
Who knows.