The EU is quite upset with Irish success actually, since it was achieved almost entirely by our low corporate tax rates, and the tax harmonisers dont like that one bit. Whatever aid was received was returned to the EU in spades via our fishing rights, and as for the Catholic state, that was largely the creation of the lunatic Spanish-American DeValera with his "comely maidens dancing at the crossroads" vision, a shambles we are still trying to unpick from our constitution. Remittances from the UK? Hardly. The US was the destination of choice for Irish emigrants, people who went to the UK rarely earned enough to send much home, since the local population viewed them as subhuman.
Still, all this is besides the point, which is why you have turned a poor corporate decision by a group that isn't even Irish owned anymore into a spew of racist bile against the Irish people?
There is no knowledge economy. if you become heavily dependent on third world countries for your heavy lifting, you will ultimately end up being owned by them, as their people are no less intelligent than yours, and they also have the industrial base. Foolish concept tbh.
Yes, you can. You see the same rubbish everytime someone speaks in favour of the police anytime on Slashdot, call it a symptom of the group mind.
If you're trying to reduce the level of harassment you're suffering then best keep quiet and get on with your life.
Bollocks. You know what you just said? You were harassed for being a young Dublin male in Dublin. Does it not strike you as a bit odd that no other "young Dublin males", a fairly hefty portion of the population of the city, were harassed? Or are the guards hassling the entire population of the city now? It makes no sense even at first glance.
I'm not lying - I have no reason to.
Who said you needed one?
calls me a fucker because he doesn't like long haired guys in T shirts
And here we get to the crux of the weirdness. Troublemakers in Dublin don't have long hair, they have shaved heads or some sort of pseudo mohicans. The only people with long hair are students, everybody knows that. Unless you are blowing shite, of course. What, someone made up some emo crap on the internet, colour me shocked.
At least the Mayday Bank Holiday protesters a few years ago had video evidence of disgraceful Garda behaviour
They should have thought twice before burning those cars then, shouldn't they?
i will also agree that most of the recent eastern europeans are hard working people and have helped this economy along by doing the jobs the irish were "above" doing in recent "boom" times
Sorry now, but thats nonsense. The Irish were never "above" doing certain jobs, unless you thought every single man woman and child in the country was rich enough never to have to worry about working. Plainly rubbish. What happened was the Eastern Europeans got wind of the country's newfound wealth and showed up in huge numbers to take advantage of this and send the cash to buy their house back home. It would have been the equivalent of 35 million people moving into the US since 2000. Where were they when the country was poor?
As a result of the undercutting (no need to work for minimum wage when you are sharing an apartment with 10 other people for a couple of years, right?) they brought to the jobs market, unskilled and semi skilled jobs were simply no longer available for Irish people, to an extent.
these are also the people who got the stick fastest in the current downturn
And now you know why.
now i will disagree about the language barrier, english is very easy to pick up
The giant mish mash of over a dozen languages coming in from Eastern Europe isn't though, which was the point I was making.
also will disagree about the russian mafia. they are not here in ireland,
Yes they are. They set up a string of credit card machine devices in an extremely well organised fraud on a massive scale only a month or two ago, actually sending people into shops to pose as bank officials. Also you have an increase in the human trafficking usually associated with them.
and you have to realise that most people came here from russia to escape that sort of thing and have a family in peace
And look what came along for the ride.
and to be honest the wouldnt be able to gain any turf as we have our own gangs in dublin who dont hesitate to kill each other, theres a gangland murder on the news practialy every day
Thats why I said "quietly".
also a point about immigrants to ireland that people might find interesting, they have to carry biometric green cards at all times and has to be produced when a Garda says "papers please!", no thats not a joke
So what? Maybe you missed the part where the population of the country has grown by 10% since 2000 - thats a gigantic number and you can't have people wandering in and out at random. I'd need to carry my passport in your country, and I wouldn't be complaining about it.
From beatings to planted drugs to just plain discourteous treatment (being treated like shit because you're a young, Dublin male so CLEARLY must be up to something...) they cover the lot.
And you hear the same complaint from people around the world, oddly enough usually with little to no evidence. You can always contact the Garda Ombudsman if you have a complaint.
"Professional" as in they get paid for what they do, I suppose.
Professional in that they are a largely unarmed police force who still get the better of heavily armed Dublin crime gangs and make it look easy. Not always I'll grant you, but they are doing a lot better than many armed forces I could mention.
Did this guy not get legal advice pointing out that what he's asking for is almost definitely illegal/unconstitutional?
While it may contravene several EU regulations, I don't think it would be unconstitutional in Ireland. The police in Ireland, the Garda Siochana, have a wide variety of powers that would astonish most people; for example, you can be convicted of a crime solely on the word of a senior Guard. Many of these powers date back to the troubles and before that the civil war, but theres no fuss about them because they are rarely if ever used, and then only to put away the "teflon dons", where evidence is difficult to gather.
I'm of two minds about the request. On the one hand, the Guards have already got enough power to screw over anyone they want, and they haven't done so. Ireland is still a very community based culture, everyone knows everyone else sort of thing, and word gets around quick. The Guards in my experience are a highly professional group of men and women who make a habit of nipping trouble in the bud. Yes, I'm sure lots of people will come in with horror stories now, but you'll have that.
On the other hand, I am very wary of requests for further far reaching powers for their own sake. I suspect this has something to do with the massive influx of eastern Europeans into Ireland over the last six years (the population of the country actually grew by 10%). While for the most part these are good people, they also brought with them some unpleasant baggage, in the form of the Russian mafia, who have been quietly flexing their muscles lately in the Dublin underworld. These types would not fall under the usual categories, and would be much harder to control, what with the language barrier for a start.
I'd like to hear both sides of the story before throwing any stones.
Good man, go ahead and collect your Nobel prize. All those nice people working in AI will be delighted to hear it, too. Stick to your philosophising, Horatio.
I'd also like to get a citation for your claim that people have lost significant hunks of their brains with little detrimental effect.
I knew a man once, he had been shot twice in the head, and not a thing wrong with him, except he used to wear a hat all the time. You can ask him for a citation if you like.
could we keep people's brains working better for longer?
To be honest, given that we have no real definition of what "intelligence" is, to say that people get less intelligent in some way once they get past 40 is reaching a bit. Granted there is a physical effect being observed, but people have lost significant hunks of their brains with little detrimental effect.
I have not in my lifetime seen any amount of guts displayed by the Europeans (or at least the Western ones) over any issue whatsoever.
Confucious say, he who conflates wisdom with weakness is a chump. Just because Europe doesn't go around invading the country of any camel jockey that thumbs his nose in their general direction, doesn't mean that Europeans are in any way weak. Europe hasn't blown most of its budget on military adventurism (hows that working out for you by the way?), but there is no weakness in the old world, where exist gargantuan industrial resources and some of the most advanced weaponry on earth.
Which leads me to ask the biological origin question that I know everyone is wondering about: do the Europeans have the same evolutionary line as the rest of the world? Observational evidence so far would make it appear that they're invertebrates...
Conversely, observational evidence would lead one to conclude that the US has a lot of people with small penises in charge.
Envy can't be answered, true. And as the saying goes, "against stupidity and ignorance, the gods themselves strive in vain".
That really is the heart of it, isn't it. You really believe that your scripted Olympic failure was the dawn of a new sunrise for China, where it comes to dominate the world? Ahahahah, ah that honestly is funny. Wait now, I'll tell you why.
Eight. Your culture places a great deal of emphasis on the number eight. 2008, 08-08-08, all that sort of thing. Why? Because its lucky. So here we have squabbling little third world country trying to join the great white west, with all the immense power and strength of the west, and it bases the entire foundation for its opening propaganda campaign on a superstition.
There really isn't much more to say.
You will not rewrite the history books in the rest of the world as has been done to cover the shameful syphillitic rapist mao, whose greatest leap forward was to promote the spread of STDs.
Also, I had a couple of Chinese girls in the time I lived over there, and they agreed that white penis is much larger than the little yellow ones. Sorry about that.
Writing was not a necessity of civilization. Take for example Catal Hyuck which was continuously occupied for millenia before a writing system. Many American cultures had no writing systems, and they were'nt all hunter gatherer societies. Who says a writing system has to be alphabetic? Are you saying the current Japanese and Chinese languages don't qualify as written language?
Eh I was pointing out that the oldest writing wasn't Chinese, I'm not sure where you are wandering off to, but you seem to be answering a bunch of points I didn't make.
What we have from that era in China doesn't qualify as a written language any more than the counting tokens from 9000 years ago found in the fertile crescent. And while we're on the subject, hieroglyphs aren't alphabetic either, although they certainly count as writing.
Darkman, you are a perfect example of those Westerners who are determined to ignore the contributions made by China to global civilization.
Whatever contributions ancient Chinese may have made (and thats a big may), the current crop of lockstepped drones has little to contribute except apparently polluting technical forums with their propaganda, and tedious cold war pageantry.
Hint: paper's huge advantage is that it can be mass manufacturered; it may well have been the first mass manufactured item in history.
Hint: anything can be mass manufactured, from papyrus to pyramids to shoes. Oho and speaking of pyramids, you should read up on the mass manufacturing methods used to produce all those nice regular blocks used to build them. You poor brainwashed muppet.
The 2001 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City was much worse, a snake pit of corruption.
Bahahaha, I see its not just the birthdays of your gymnasts that get moved back a year!
The oldest writing comes from the Chinese, followed by the Sumerians and Babylonians.
Bzzt. The advent of a writing system coincides with the transition from hunter-gatherer societies to more permanent agrarian encampments when it became necessary to count ones property, whether it be parcels of land, animals or measures of grain or to transfer that property to another individual or another settlement. The first evidence for this is with incised "counting tokens" from about 9,000 years ago in the neolithic fertile crescent.
Around 4100-3800 BCE, the tokens began to be symbols that could be impressed or inscribed in clay to represent a record of land, grain or cattle and a written language was beginning to develop. One of the earliest examples was found in the excavations of Uruk in Mesopotamia at a level representing the time of the crystallization of the Sumerian culture.
What you might be thinking of is the Jiahu symbols, markings on prehistoric artifacts found in Jiahu, a neolithic Peiligang culture site found in Henan, China. Dated to 6600 BC, most doubt that the markings represent systematic writing at all and believe that they were simply used as pictures. The earliest evidence for a corpus of writing in the oracle bone script dates much later to the Shang Dynasty (c. 1600 â" 1046 BC).
It is thought that the first true alphabetic writing appeared around 2000 BC, as a representation of language developed for Semitic slaves in Egypt by Egyptians (see History of the alphabet). Most other alphabets in the world today either descended from this one innovation, many via the Phoenician alphabet, or were directly inspired by its design.
Whats with the spate of "China did it first" posts around here lately?
Westerners such as yourself are still reluctant to acknowlege their debt to China.
Bahahah, if it wasn't for the West, China would still be planting rice with wooden hoes. Oh wait, the Chinese still are.
Remember the Olympic opening ceremonies in Beijing?
Yes, those Olympics so riddled with fraud and disgraceful conditions, that they hardly deserve mention in the annals of sport?
The four great inventions shown there -- paper, printing press, gunpowder, compass -- have had an enormous impact on Europe.
Paper in one form or another was around since 3500 BC. The concept was nothing new, only the materials, so the Chinese got the idea from the west. The Chinese "printing press" was almost worthless for the latin alphabet, and had to be completely reinvented from its primitive state. Gunpowder was brought by Genghis Khan, not the Chinese, whose arse he roundly kicked before being stopped at the edge of Europe. The compass as so poorly understood by the Chinese that it was left to Europe to use it to explore and navigate the earth, never mind that the Olmec probably discovered it a thousand years earlier.
That is laughable -- and also revealing.
The only thing you are managing to reveal here is the beginning of a propaganda campaign that is trying to paint China as the source of all knowledge and wisdom, instead of the source of a shower of jackbooted, mysogynistic book burning inbred twerps. The Olympics didn't show China as a great power, instead it showed it as a bunch of feudal states with the biggest case of penis envy in history.
The more you try to strut like cocks, the more you look like fools.
So keep it up.
I really hate fascists.
(Reminds me of a joke I heard. Why do the Irish smell so bad? So blind people can hate them too)
Well known fact, all English people take it up the arse. Enjoy your lower per capita earnings and think of the queen when some purple headed love bison is forcing its way through your sphincter!
I see serious problems with either system. A phallanx type system throws a lot of rounds downrange. Those have to end up somewhere. A clever enemy might fire from the direction of a neighborhood or school, for example.
No, the rounds self detonate, thats the multiple pops you hear after a phalanx firing.
This already exists. There are Islamic courts around the world, and the faithful bring their grievances to them rather than to the local authorities.
But no one is talking about doing anything illegal, merely spinning the wheels of the system in our favour for once. Also Muslim courts don't qualify as shadow governments, they qualify as a seperate rogue judiciary. There's more to government than the judiciary.
What you've just done is describe a political party. You might envisage more robust accountability mechanisms, and you might see a large role for technology in easing inclusion for the party members, but its still just a political party, not anything new or radical.
Nope, its a lobbying group. I don't care which flag a politician rides under as long as s/he gets it done. The political party comes later.:D
Don't give generalized mush like "we want a smaller government" so much as "87% of your voters say 'vote yes on the bill coming up at 11 am this morning'"
They already ignore the best wishes of their voters, to a great extent. Explicitly telling them so isn't going to have much effect. The best part about lobbying is that politicians themselves would be well in favour of it. Money is the currency that talks here, so let them have it. Drown them in it, let them choke on their damned money. But they'll dance to the right tune, or they won't get any more. it will be sent to someone with a more reasonable attitude. By their own tools will they become extinct.
Actually, my thoughts have been more along the lines of not merely influencing the current corrupt mess, but of replacing it altogether
Yes, but the first step along that road would be influencing it...;D Once you can game the political system you can do whatever the hell you want, thats why the US is in its current straits. I'm definetely thinking about joining an effort to get this going, if a few people want in.
If they only check/balance that you have to keep out duplicate votes to limit fraud/manipulation, is that you charge a "membership fee" of $100 per vote, then you'll still have LOTS of votes bought.
Aha, a minimum of $100. People can contribute as much as they like. This could be linked to account activity in debates, and sock puppet accounts aren't that hard to spot. It is a danger that if the group was smaller in number shills might overwhelm it in terms of votes.
that if I can't afford to give a complete stranger $100, then I don't get any say in how things work out.
Its not really meant to be a replacement for voting, just gaming the system to get desired results.
Same thing, just on a social scale. Thats why social attack/hacks work... People don't practice the same security in person as they do on their networks.
You could do a one off authentication for each account by snail mail? That would also cut down drastically on the amount of international noise coming in...
Slashdot Mirror
NTL is available in most metropolitan areas.
The EU is quite upset with Irish success actually, since it was achieved almost entirely by our low corporate tax rates, and the tax harmonisers dont like that one bit. Whatever aid was received was returned to the EU in spades via our fishing rights, and as for the Catholic state, that was largely the creation of the lunatic Spanish-American DeValera with his "comely maidens dancing at the crossroads" vision, a shambles we are still trying to unpick from our constitution. Remittances from the UK? Hardly. The US was the destination of choice for Irish emigrants, people who went to the UK rarely earned enough to send much home, since the local population viewed them as subhuman. Still, all this is besides the point, which is why you have turned a poor corporate decision by a group that isn't even Irish owned anymore into a spew of racist bile against the Irish people?
What about this part: Eircom agreed to cut off customers found to be repeatedly downloading music illegally.
A letter to penthouse...
There is no knowledge economy. if you become heavily dependent on third world countries for your heavy lifting, you will ultimately end up being owned by them, as their people are no less intelligent than yours, and they also have the industrial base. Foolish concept tbh.
They might find it fairly hard to get work.
No you can't.
Yes, you can. You see the same rubbish everytime someone speaks in favour of the police anytime on Slashdot, call it a symptom of the group mind.
If you're trying to reduce the level of harassment you're suffering then best keep quiet and get on with your life.
Bollocks. You know what you just said? You were harassed for being a young Dublin male in Dublin. Does it not strike you as a bit odd that no other "young Dublin males", a fairly hefty portion of the population of the city, were harassed? Or are the guards hassling the entire population of the city now? It makes no sense even at first glance.
I'm not lying - I have no reason to.
Who said you needed one?
calls me a fucker because he doesn't like long haired guys in T shirts
And here we get to the crux of the weirdness. Troublemakers in Dublin don't have long hair, they have shaved heads or some sort of pseudo mohicans. The only people with long hair are students, everybody knows that. Unless you are blowing shite, of course. What, someone made up some emo crap on the internet, colour me shocked.
At least the Mayday Bank Holiday protesters a few years ago had video evidence of disgraceful Garda behaviour
They should have thought twice before burning those cars then, shouldn't they?
i will also agree that most of the recent eastern europeans are hard working people and have helped this economy along by doing the jobs the irish were "above" doing in recent "boom" times
Sorry now, but thats nonsense. The Irish were never "above" doing certain jobs, unless you thought every single man woman and child in the country was rich enough never to have to worry about working. Plainly rubbish. What happened was the Eastern Europeans got wind of the country's newfound wealth and showed up in huge numbers to take advantage of this and send the cash to buy their house back home. It would have been the equivalent of 35 million people moving into the US since 2000. Where were they when the country was poor?
As a result of the undercutting (no need to work for minimum wage when you are sharing an apartment with 10 other people for a couple of years, right?) they brought to the jobs market, unskilled and semi skilled jobs were simply no longer available for Irish people, to an extent.
these are also the people who got the stick fastest in the current downturn
And now you know why.
now i will disagree about the language barrier, english is very easy to pick up
The giant mish mash of over a dozen languages coming in from Eastern Europe isn't though, which was the point I was making.
also will disagree about the russian mafia. they are not here in ireland,
Yes they are. They set up a string of credit card machine devices in an extremely well organised fraud on a massive scale only a month or two ago, actually sending people into shops to pose as bank officials. Also you have an increase in the human trafficking usually associated with them.
and you have to realise that most people came here from russia to escape that sort of thing and have a family in peace
And look what came along for the ride.
and to be honest the wouldnt be able to gain any turf as we have our own gangs in dublin who dont hesitate to kill each other, theres a gangland murder on the news practialy every day
Thats why I said "quietly".
also a point about immigrants to ireland that people might find interesting, they have to carry biometric green cards at all times and has to be produced when a Garda says "papers please!", no thats not a joke
So what? Maybe you missed the part where the population of the country has grown by 10% since 2000 - thats a gigantic number and you can't have people wandering in and out at random. I'd need to carry my passport in your country, and I wouldn't be complaining about it.
From beatings to planted drugs to just plain discourteous treatment (being treated like shit because you're a young, Dublin male so CLEARLY must be up to something...) they cover the lot.
And you hear the same complaint from people around the world, oddly enough usually with little to no evidence. You can always contact the Garda Ombudsman if you have a complaint.
"Professional" as in they get paid for what they do, I suppose.
Professional in that they are a largely unarmed police force who still get the better of heavily armed Dublin crime gangs and make it look easy. Not always I'll grant you, but they are doing a lot better than many armed forces I could mention.
Did this guy not get legal advice pointing out that what he's asking for is almost definitely illegal/unconstitutional?
While it may contravene several EU regulations, I don't think it would be unconstitutional in Ireland. The police in Ireland, the Garda Siochana, have a wide variety of powers that would astonish most people; for example, you can be convicted of a crime solely on the word of a senior Guard. Many of these powers date back to the troubles and before that the civil war, but theres no fuss about them because they are rarely if ever used, and then only to put away the "teflon dons", where evidence is difficult to gather.
I'm of two minds about the request. On the one hand, the Guards have already got enough power to screw over anyone they want, and they haven't done so. Ireland is still a very community based culture, everyone knows everyone else sort of thing, and word gets around quick. The Guards in my experience are a highly professional group of men and women who make a habit of nipping trouble in the bud. Yes, I'm sure lots of people will come in with horror stories now, but you'll have that.
On the other hand, I am very wary of requests for further far reaching powers for their own sake. I suspect this has something to do with the massive influx of eastern Europeans into Ireland over the last six years (the population of the country actually grew by 10%). While for the most part these are good people, they also brought with them some unpleasant baggage, in the form of the Russian mafia, who have been quietly flexing their muscles lately in the Dublin underworld. These types would not fall under the usual categories, and would be much harder to control, what with the language barrier for a start.
I'd like to hear both sides of the story before throwing any stones.
There. I just defined intelligence for you.
Good man, go ahead and collect your Nobel prize. All those nice people working in AI will be delighted to hear it, too. Stick to your philosophising, Horatio.
I'd also like to get a citation for your claim that people have lost significant hunks of their brains with little detrimental effect.
I knew a man once, he had been shot twice in the head, and not a thing wrong with him, except he used to wear a hat all the time. You can ask him for a citation if you like.
could we keep people's brains working better for longer?
To be honest, given that we have no real definition of what "intelligence" is, to say that people get less intelligent in some way once they get past 40 is reaching a bit. Granted there is a physical effect being observed, but people have lost significant hunks of their brains with little detrimental effect.
I have not in my lifetime seen any amount of guts displayed by the Europeans (or at least the Western ones) over any issue whatsoever.
Confucious say, he who conflates wisdom with weakness is a chump. Just because Europe doesn't go around invading the country of any camel jockey that thumbs his nose in their general direction, doesn't mean that Europeans are in any way weak. Europe hasn't blown most of its budget on military adventurism (hows that working out for you by the way?), but there is no weakness in the old world, where exist gargantuan industrial resources and some of the most advanced weaponry on earth.
Which leads me to ask the biological origin question that I know everyone is wondering about: do the Europeans have the same evolutionary line as the rest of the world? Observational evidence so far would make it appear that they're invertebrates...
Conversely, observational evidence would lead one to conclude that the US has a lot of people with small penises in charge.
Envy can't be answered, true. And as the saying goes, "against stupidity and ignorance, the gods themselves strive in vain".
That really is the heart of it, isn't it. You really believe that your scripted Olympic failure was the dawn of a new sunrise for China, where it comes to dominate the world? Ahahahah, ah that honestly is funny. Wait now, I'll tell you why.
Eight. Your culture places a great deal of emphasis on the number eight. 2008, 08-08-08, all that sort of thing. Why? Because its lucky. So here we have squabbling little third world country trying to join the great white west, with all the immense power and strength of the west, and it bases the entire foundation for its opening propaganda campaign on a superstition.
There really isn't much more to say.
You will not rewrite the history books in the rest of the world as has been done to cover the shameful syphillitic rapist mao, whose greatest leap forward was to promote the spread of STDs.
Also, I had a couple of Chinese girls in the time I lived over there, and they agreed that white penis is much larger than the little yellow ones. Sorry about that.
Writing was not a necessity of civilization. Take for example Catal Hyuck which was continuously occupied for millenia before a writing system. Many American cultures had no writing systems, and they were'nt all hunter gatherer societies. Who says a writing system has to be alphabetic? Are you saying the current Japanese and Chinese languages don't qualify as written language?
Eh I was pointing out that the oldest writing wasn't Chinese, I'm not sure where you are wandering off to, but you seem to be answering a bunch of points I didn't make.
What we have from that era in China doesn't qualify as a written language any more than the counting tokens from 9000 years ago found in the fertile crescent. And while we're on the subject, hieroglyphs aren't alphabetic either, although they certainly count as writing.
Darkman, you are a perfect example of those Westerners who are determined to ignore the contributions made by China to global civilization.
Whatever contributions ancient Chinese may have made (and thats a big may), the current crop of lockstepped drones has little to contribute except apparently polluting technical forums with their propaganda, and tedious cold war pageantry.
Hint: paper's huge advantage is that it can be mass manufacturered; it may well have been the first mass manufactured item in history.
Hint: anything can be mass manufactured, from papyrus to pyramids to shoes. Oho and speaking of pyramids, you should read up on the mass manufacturing methods used to produce all those nice regular blocks used to build them. You poor brainwashed muppet.
The 2001 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City was much worse, a snake pit of corruption.
Bahahaha, I see its not just the birthdays of your gymnasts that get moved back a year!
[Other loads of envy and ignorance: ignored]
You mean, can't be answered.
The oldest writing comes from the Chinese, followed by the Sumerians and Babylonians.
Bzzt. The advent of a writing system coincides with the transition from hunter-gatherer societies to more permanent agrarian encampments when it became necessary to count ones property, whether it be parcels of land, animals or measures of grain or to transfer that property to another individual or another settlement. The first evidence for this is with incised "counting tokens" from about 9,000 years ago in the neolithic fertile crescent.
Around 4100-3800 BCE, the tokens began to be symbols that could be impressed or inscribed in clay to represent a record of land, grain or cattle and a written language was beginning to develop. One of the earliest examples was found in the excavations of Uruk in Mesopotamia at a level representing the time of the crystallization of the Sumerian culture.
What you might be thinking of is the Jiahu symbols, markings on prehistoric artifacts found in Jiahu, a neolithic Peiligang culture site found in Henan, China. Dated to 6600 BC, most doubt that the markings represent systematic writing at all and believe that they were simply used as pictures. The earliest evidence for a corpus of writing in the oracle bone script dates much later to the Shang Dynasty (c. 1600 â" 1046 BC).
It is thought that the first true alphabetic writing appeared around 2000 BC, as a representation of language developed for Semitic slaves in Egypt by Egyptians (see History of the alphabet). Most other alphabets in the world today either descended from this one innovation, many via the Phoenician alphabet, or were directly inspired by its design.
Whats with the spate of "China did it first" posts around here lately?
Westerners such as yourself are still reluctant to acknowlege their debt to China.
Bahahah, if it wasn't for the West, China would still be planting rice with wooden hoes. Oh wait, the Chinese still are.
Remember the Olympic opening ceremonies in Beijing?
Yes, those Olympics so riddled with fraud and disgraceful conditions, that they hardly deserve mention in the annals of sport?
The four great inventions shown there -- paper, printing press, gunpowder, compass -- have had an enormous impact on Europe.
Paper in one form or another was around since 3500 BC. The concept was nothing new, only the materials, so the Chinese got the idea from the west. The Chinese "printing press" was almost worthless for the latin alphabet, and had to be completely reinvented from its primitive state. Gunpowder was brought by Genghis Khan, not the Chinese, whose arse he roundly kicked before being stopped at the edge of Europe. The compass as so poorly understood by the Chinese that it was left to Europe to use it to explore and navigate the earth, never mind that the Olmec probably discovered it a thousand years earlier.
That is laughable -- and also revealing.
The only thing you are managing to reveal here is the beginning of a propaganda campaign that is trying to paint China as the source of all knowledge and wisdom, instead of the source of a shower of jackbooted, mysogynistic book burning inbred twerps. The Olympics didn't show China as a great power, instead it showed it as a bunch of feudal states with the biggest case of penis envy in history. The more you try to strut like cocks, the more you look like fools. So keep it up. I really hate fascists.
(Reminds me of a joke I heard. Why do the Irish smell so bad? So blind people can hate them too)
Well known fact, all English people take it up the arse. Enjoy your lower per capita earnings and think of the queen when some purple headed love bison is forcing its way through your sphincter!
I see serious problems with either system. A phallanx type system throws a lot of rounds downrange. Those have to end up somewhere. A clever enemy might fire from the direction of a neighborhood or school, for example.
No, the rounds self detonate, thats the multiple pops you hear after a phalanx firing.
This already exists. There are Islamic courts around the world, and the faithful bring their grievances to them rather than to the local authorities.
But no one is talking about doing anything illegal, merely spinning the wheels of the system in our favour for once. Also Muslim courts don't qualify as shadow governments, they qualify as a seperate rogue judiciary. There's more to government than the judiciary.
What you've just done is describe a political party. You might envisage more robust accountability mechanisms, and you might see a large role for technology in easing inclusion for the party members, but its still just a political party, not anything new or radical.
Nope, its a lobbying group. I don't care which flag a politician rides under as long as s/he gets it done. The political party comes later. :D
Don't give generalized mush like "we want a smaller government" so much as "87% of your voters say 'vote yes on the bill coming up at 11 am this morning'"
They already ignore the best wishes of their voters, to a great extent. Explicitly telling them so isn't going to have much effect. The best part about lobbying is that politicians themselves would be well in favour of it. Money is the currency that talks here, so let them have it. Drown them in it, let them choke on their damned money. But they'll dance to the right tune, or they won't get any more. it will be sent to someone with a more reasonable attitude. By their own tools will they become extinct.
Actually, my thoughts have been more along the lines of not merely influencing the current corrupt mess, but of replacing it altogether
Yes, but the first step along that road would be influencing it... ;D Once you can game the political system you can do whatever the hell you want, thats why the US is in its current straits. I'm definetely thinking about joining an effort to get this going, if a few people want in.
If they only check/balance that you have to keep out duplicate votes to limit fraud/manipulation, is that you charge a "membership fee" of $100 per vote, then you'll still have LOTS of votes bought.
Aha, a minimum of $100. People can contribute as much as they like. This could be linked to account activity in debates, and sock puppet accounts aren't that hard to spot. It is a danger that if the group was smaller in number shills might overwhelm it in terms of votes.
that if I can't afford to give a complete stranger $100, then I don't get any say in how things work out.
Its not really meant to be a replacement for voting, just gaming the system to get desired results.
Same thing, just on a social scale. Thats why social attack/hacks work... People don't practice the same security in person as they do on their networks.
You could do a one off authentication for each account by snail mail? That would also cut down drastically on the amount of international noise coming in...