Does the average American actaully not have the two neuron minimum?
Few people bother applying their intelligence to things that they already know the answers to. And every american is given their answers to any political questions from their earliest days at school. They are told that America is the land of the free, that Democrats want to take all their hard earned money and give it to the lazy or that Republicans only care about the super-rich, that the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour was unprovoked and answer after answer. And once someone believes something, anyone who says otherwise is attacking them.
This is true to a greater or lesser extent with all political beliefs that are picked up from school, media or culture. The average american has plenty of intelligence. But the average american uses it to prove they are right, not to find out if they are.
If Americans have a noteable trait as a country over much of Europe, it may be their idealism. If you're ever going to change the world you need that. But if Europeans have a noteable trait over Americans, it's cynicism. You need both if you're ever going to get anywhere.
Surprisingly, the aim of terrorism is to threaten rather than to hurt. It's saying "back off." Al Queda's original stated aim was to get US troops out of Saudi Arabia, it doesn't exist to cause economic damage to the USA. It exists to get "respect."
That said, who is to say that there is not cyber-warfare going on?
I don't like either of the choices offered me there. That plan you quoted begins with provoking the USA into attacking "the muslim world" and thus uniting it against them, driving more recruits into organisations like Al Quaeda, etc. Well, yes - the US government followed the path laid out nicely, despite calls from many of us to take a less beligerant approach.
When two great powers go at each other, it's the people they use that get hurt first. An non-national organisation strikes against the USA and this is used to justify invading Iraq? A country that was a known enemy of Al Quaeda? I don't welcome any overlords, thankyouverymuch. It's not either/or if we can influence the course that is taken ourselves.
If I invented a "powerful-yet-expensive internal combustion engine" then I think I could live with sharing the wealth. If my creation is worth much at all, then I expect I can still make money from it by licensing the production to another party. And as to getting a fair deal, then again I can make others compete for the rights. And if my creation isn't worth enough for both of these concepts to work, then let the inventor try to produce it themself.
The parent post is interensing and well written. Except that we need to be clear what we mean by capitalism.
Not only that, but we also need to review the poster's definition of Democracy. The post is very well written, but makes an implicit assumption when it states that thrusting democracy on another country is telling it how it should be run. That assumption is that a country is it's government and not it's people. In fact, democracy is an expression of exactly the opposite. There is a qualitative difference between insisting that another country enact certain laws, and insisting that the people there be able to enact certain laws if they so wish. I grow a little tired of people saying that enforcing democracy on another country is morally wrong. If people there like the laws they are currently living in, then they can carry on living under them in a democracy. The reverse isn't true. Therefore bringing about democracy is not imposing your will on another country.
Now some of the methods of imposing democracy may be wrong (witness the grand mal fuckup that is Iraq), refusing to support a non-democratic regime either through trade or refusal to assist in their censorship, would seem morally acceptable in principle.
It's not the first time it's been explained like that, though that makes it no less original for you. I remember my history teacher long ago using almost the exact words you did.
Personally, I think the truth is simply that justifications mean less than people think they do. If you go to any extreme, then you're going to have to use force to carry society with you. And repression is repression regardless of the ideology behind it. That's why this strange division of Left-Right is so irritating to me. I look at the effect, rather than what is [allegedly] intended.
I'm not dismissing your recommendations, but I believe that the utter best book for those interested in this area is "The Silent Takeover" by Noreena Hertz. She's a professor at the University of Cambridge and she's the woman who set up Russia's first stock exchange. Highly intelligent and a gifted writer.
She might be biased, but then she might simply be right. Very scary and very uplifting book.
Or like the rising and falling tones in Chinese. It's quite odd as a native English speaker to start trying to integrate pitch to what constitutes a word.
As everyone on/. knows by now, data can not be stolen.
Well it can't easily be stolen if it isn't kept all in one place. I work in the UK's National Health Service at the moment, and over here, primary care (local medical practices) still have control over their local database. Unfortunately, the government is trying to rail-road practices into handig it all over to a centralised system. (They're on a control trip again, and wanting to funnel huge quantities of money to the companies that have been pushing for it such as Accenture and Athos which are getting ridiculous amounts for developing the system).
Coercive techniques involve upgrades to clinical software including automatically linking to it and soon, payments that were formerly about clinical performance being restructured to include things like implementing this system. There's a lot of this sort of stuff going on in the NHS at the moment, such as practices having to compile ethnic monitoring information on all new patients if they want full pay.
Anyway, the long and the short of it, is that something like the above will inevitably happen in the UK in a few years time if the government succeeds in getting control of local practices' databases. The prize is just too juicy for it not to happen.
Whether it will be publicly disclosed, or even discovered, may be another matter however.
Am I missing something obvious here? If they've stolen heavily from the online forums and this pisses the posters off, the n the posters should hold of the guide and distribute it online themselves at their forum. If it was free for this company to steal, then it's free for them to take back. And if it's not free, then the company is going to have to start redistributing some cash based on the sales they've made.
But it's a cash bounty for actual evidence. What's wrong with that?
I'll take a stab at this one. But first, yes - the student can offer his bounty if he wants and I'm kind of glad to see people here arguing the rights of this from first principles rather than breaking up on partisan lines. That said, I'll explain what is wrong about this.
Presumably, after outing a professor who has expressed some unapproved opinion, the intention is to follow it up with pressure to stop or a PR campaign for "the other side" (whatever that will be). $22,000 has a purpose and whoever is donating this clearly has an agenda. The arguments for this student's right to do what he's doing have all centered on "Freedom of Speech" but clearly the intention is to curb the professor's freedom to promote her own views. Maybe it's only to present students leaving the lectures with pro-Intelligent Design or pro-Capitalism or pro-whatever leaflets, but I think that's highly unlikely.
The arguments for pressuring the professor not to give unapproved opinions in his lectures are that (a) he is paid to teach a particular subject and not another; and (b) the students don't have much choice to avoid his opinions if they have to go to that class.
Counter-argument A. applies to anything else that impairs the professor's teaching as well. There should be a system in place to check if students are suffering from poor teaching and if they are not, then there is no problem here to be addressed. Bear in mind that in many cases, the professor's individual views may be tied up with the subject they are teaching. It would be hard not to give views on ID if teaching biology, difficult not to explain socialism in economics.
Counter-argument B. has to do with whether he is misinforming the students. The intention to "out" the professor suggests that the opinions are minority or dissenting opinions. The students are over 18 now however, and have plenty of opportunities to hear the other side and make up their own mind. Whether or not the professor's opinions are considered "subversive" by others in the community has historically been a poor guide to whether those opinions are valid. Essentially this student with the bounty is attempting to bring pressure to bear on the proffesor to curb his Freedom of Speech. Powerful or numerous individuals ramping up the efforts to drive out opposing viewpoints.
So illegal? No the bounty may not be that and attempting to curb it with legislation would be misguided. But harmful and chilling effect? Yes.
The parent has made their point very badly (imho). Fascism is not about government vs. corporate rule, it's simply the mode of government. However, government is whoever governs, not necessarily who was ostensibly elected, and if you want to say that corporations govern then it's perfectly reasonable to say that corporations can be fascist.
In so far as corporations have power over your life, you can debate whether that power is fascist. Given the amount of lobbying and law buying that's been going on in the USA, it's reasonable to say that corporations do form part of the "government" in the sense of who holds the power.
The problem with doing Reaper Man before Mort would be that the character develops. I wouldn't describe Death as a "prop" in Mort, but the point is that he doesn't have so much of a personality when he's introduced. As I recall, Reaper Man begins with the auditors discussing the problem of Death's growing individuality. If you read that book first and then go to Mort, you'll not understand at all why Death is how he is in that book, or how he can not understand certain things.
Mort's a funny book and introduces some fundamental Disc World features to the reader - the Star Turtle, the way the wizards of Unseen University work and do magic, that you can walk through walls if you can just avoid noticing what you're doing until you get to the other side. I'd recommend that as the starting point, followed by Wyrd Sisters and Guards Guards, because you can start off with crazy stuff and tone it down later, if you like; but you can't go the other way around.
I saw the same production and was surprised how good it was. I'm not a big Pratchett fan though I like some of his earlier work. The animated version of Wyrd Sisters is also fun. Wyrd Sisters would also be the other 'easy' Disc World novel.
But I doubt any Hollywood studio has the guts to make a Pratchett movie as insanely over the top as it should be done. Remember the eight wizards in the shopping trolly and Death facing down the combine harvester?
Though I wonder if the person would press charges if they weren't upset?
I'll tell you a compulsory market for this - the army. Standard issue for anyone likely to kill someone, conduct an interrogation or anything else where they might sick or ashamed at what they've done.
I think detaching the readout from the meter is a bad idea.
How about some Knoppic variant or other bootable O/S? Depending on his requirements, this would be even more effective than carrying around a computer. You'd just have a thumb-drive or perhaps a portable HD. Easy to back-up, low-cost, not constrained by the higher price of laptop CPU cycles against desktop cycles.
Slower? Probably not really. I have a computer with 3GB RAM here, which is plenty to load most of the modules and software bits and pieces that I need at any one time. Maybe worth thinking about.
I'd like to propose that burial rituals could result from how distressing it is to see the remains of your loved one slowly decaying, being gnawed away, etc. The only alternative that made sense would be to burn the remains. And as it turns out, that is the other common death ritual.
So what do you like about yourself? Your ideas? Values? Looks? Witty sayings? If it's any of this, then these parts of yourself can outlast the physical body that is you. At least they can if there are humans around to contain this information. For that, you might need to leave some sort of world behind for them to live in.
Just make sure that you file your complaints by post not email, folks. Otherwise you'll get two years for harrasment.
Honestly, if I were to run a blog, inviting comments on it or not is up to me. Also, do I trust them to have the same cultural values as I do, or the Internet community does, when it comes to being polite?
Slashdot Mirror
Does the average American actaully not have the two neuron minimum?
Few people bother applying their intelligence to things that they already know the answers to. And every american is given their answers to any political questions from their earliest days at school. They are told that America is the land of the free, that Democrats want to take all their hard earned money and give it to the lazy or that Republicans only care about the super-rich, that the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour was unprovoked and answer after answer. And once someone believes something, anyone who says otherwise is attacking them.
This is true to a greater or lesser extent with all political beliefs that are picked up from school, media or culture. The average american has plenty of intelligence. But the average american uses it to prove they are right, not to find out if they are.
If Americans have a noteable trait as a country over much of Europe, it may be their idealism. If you're ever going to change the world you need that. But if Europeans have a noteable trait over Americans, it's cynicism. You need both if you're ever going to get anywhere.
It's always good to know what you want to prove when you go looking for evidence. It helps you prove it.
Surprisingly, the aim of terrorism is to threaten rather than to hurt. It's saying "back off." Al Queda's original stated aim was to get US troops out of Saudi Arabia, it doesn't exist to cause economic damage to the USA. It exists to get "respect."
That said, who is to say that there is not cyber-warfare going on?
I don't like either of the choices offered me there. That plan you quoted begins with provoking the USA into attacking "the muslim world" and thus uniting it against them, driving more recruits into organisations like Al Quaeda, etc. Well, yes - the US government followed the path laid out nicely, despite calls from many of us to take a less beligerant approach.
When two great powers go at each other, it's the people they use that get hurt first. An non-national organisation strikes against the USA and this is used to justify invading Iraq? A country that was a known enemy of Al Quaeda? I don't welcome any overlords, thankyouverymuch. It's not either/or if we can influence the course that is taken ourselves.
If I invented a "powerful-yet-expensive internal combustion engine" then I think I could live with sharing the wealth. If my creation is worth much at all, then I expect I can still make money from it by licensing the production to another party. And as to getting a fair deal, then again I can make others compete for the rights. And if my creation isn't worth enough for both of these concepts to work, then let the inventor try to produce it themself.
I'm going to sue the makers of mine for not making my vision worse. After all, they're denying me my right to sue.
The parent post is interensing and well written. Except that we need to be clear what we mean by capitalism.
Not only that, but we also need to review the poster's definition of Democracy. The post is very well written, but makes an implicit assumption when it states that thrusting democracy on another country is telling it how it should be run. That assumption is that a country is it's government and not it's people. In fact, democracy is an expression of exactly the opposite. There is a qualitative difference between insisting that another country enact certain laws, and insisting that the people there be able to enact certain laws if they so wish. I grow a little tired of people saying that enforcing democracy on another country is morally wrong. If people there like the laws they are currently living in, then they can carry on living under them in a democracy. The reverse isn't true. Therefore bringing about democracy is not imposing your will on another country.
Now some of the methods of imposing democracy may be wrong (witness the grand mal fuckup that is Iraq), refusing to support a non-democratic regime either through trade or refusal to assist in their censorship, would seem morally acceptable in principle.
It's not the first time it's been explained like that, though that makes it no less original for you. I remember my history teacher long ago using almost the exact words you did.
Personally, I think the truth is simply that justifications mean less than people think they do. If you go to any extreme, then you're going to have to use force to carry society with you. And repression is repression regardless of the ideology behind it. That's why this strange division of Left-Right is so irritating to me. I look at the effect, rather than what is [allegedly] intended.
I'm not dismissing your recommendations, but I believe that the utter best book for those interested in this area is "The Silent Takeover" by Noreena Hertz. She's a professor at the University of Cambridge and she's the woman who set up Russia's first stock exchange. Highly intelligent and a gifted writer.
She might be biased, but then she might simply be right. Very scary and very uplifting book.
Or like the rising and falling tones in Chinese. It's quite odd as a native English speaker to start trying to integrate pitch to what constitutes a word.
The Eskimo do have 93 different words for snow.
It's just that all but four of them are unprintable.
As everyone on
Well it can't easily be stolen if it isn't kept all in one place. I work in the UK's National Health Service at the moment, and over here, primary care (local medical practices) still have control over their local database. Unfortunately, the government is trying to rail-road practices into handig it all over to a centralised system. (They're on a control trip again, and wanting to funnel huge quantities of money to the companies that have been pushing for it such as Accenture and Athos which are getting ridiculous amounts for developing the system).
Coercive techniques involve upgrades to clinical software including automatically linking to it and soon, payments that were formerly about clinical performance being restructured to include things like implementing this system. There's a lot of this sort of stuff going on in the NHS at the moment, such as practices having to compile ethnic monitoring information on all new patients if they want full pay.
Anyway, the long and the short of it, is that something like the above will inevitably happen in the UK in a few years time if the government succeeds in getting control of local practices' databases. The prize is just too juicy for it not to happen.
Whether it will be publicly disclosed, or even discovered, may be another matter however.
Change your dictionary.
I think we'll all stick with the commonly accepted definition, thanks - the purpose of language being to communicate with other people and all that.
Am I missing something obvious here? If they've stolen heavily from the online forums and this pisses the posters off, the n the posters should hold of the guide and distribute it online themselves at their forum. If it was free for this company to steal, then it's free for them to take back. And if it's not free, then the company is going to have to start redistributing some cash based on the sales they've made.
But it's a cash bounty for actual evidence. What's wrong with that?
I'll take a stab at this one. But first, yes - the student can offer his bounty if he wants and I'm kind of glad to see people here arguing the rights of this from first principles rather than breaking up on partisan lines. That said, I'll explain what is wrong about this.
Presumably, after outing a professor who has expressed some unapproved opinion, the intention is to follow it up with pressure to stop or a PR campaign for "the other side" (whatever that will be). $22,000 has a purpose and whoever is donating this clearly has an agenda. The arguments for this student's right to do what he's doing have all centered on "Freedom of Speech" but clearly the intention is to curb the professor's freedom to promote her own views. Maybe it's only to present students leaving the lectures with pro-Intelligent Design or pro-Capitalism or pro-whatever leaflets, but I think that's highly unlikely.
The arguments for pressuring the professor not to give unapproved opinions in his lectures are that (a) he is paid to teach a particular subject and not another; and (b) the students don't have much choice to avoid his opinions if they have to go to that class.
Counter-argument A. applies to anything else that impairs the professor's teaching as well. There should be a system in place to check if students are suffering from poor teaching and if they are not, then there is no problem here to be addressed. Bear in mind that in many cases, the professor's individual views may be tied up with the subject they are teaching. It would be hard not to give views on ID if teaching biology, difficult not to explain socialism in economics.
Counter-argument B. has to do with whether he is misinforming the students. The intention to "out" the professor suggests that the opinions are minority or dissenting opinions. The students are over 18 now however, and have plenty of opportunities to hear the other side and make up their own mind. Whether or not the professor's opinions are considered "subversive" by others in the community has historically been a poor guide to whether those opinions are valid. Essentially this student with the bounty is attempting to bring pressure to bear on the proffesor to curb his Freedom of Speech. Powerful or numerous individuals ramping up the efforts to drive out opposing viewpoints.
So illegal? No the bounty may not be that and attempting to curb it with legislation would be misguided. But harmful and chilling effect? Yes.
The parent has made their point very badly (imho). Fascism is not about government vs. corporate rule, it's simply the mode of government. However, government is whoever governs, not necessarily who was ostensibly elected, and if you want to say that corporations govern then it's perfectly reasonable to say that corporations can be fascist.
In so far as corporations have power over your life, you can debate whether that power is fascist. Given the amount of lobbying and law buying that's been going on in the USA, it's reasonable to say that corporations do form part of the "government" in the sense of who holds the power.
The problem with doing Reaper Man before Mort would be that the character develops. I wouldn't describe Death as a "prop" in Mort, but the point is that he doesn't have so much of a personality when he's introduced. As I recall, Reaper Man begins with the auditors discussing the problem of Death's growing individuality. If you read that book first and then go to Mort, you'll not understand at all why Death is how he is in that book, or how he can not understand certain things.
Mort's a funny book and introduces some fundamental Disc World features to the reader - the Star Turtle, the way the wizards of Unseen University work and do magic, that you can walk through walls if you can just avoid noticing what you're doing until you get to the other side. I'd recommend that as the starting point, followed by Wyrd Sisters and Guards Guards, because you can start off with crazy stuff and tone it down later, if you like; but you can't go the other way around.
I saw the same production and was surprised how good it was. I'm not a big Pratchett fan though I like some of his earlier work. The animated version of Wyrd Sisters is also fun. Wyrd Sisters would also be the other 'easy' Disc World novel.
But I doubt any Hollywood studio has the guts to make a Pratchett movie as insanely over the top as it should be done. Remember the eight wizards in the shopping trolly and Death facing down the combine harvester?
Though I wonder if the person would press charges if they weren't upset?
I'll tell you a compulsory market for this - the army. Standard issue for anyone likely to kill someone, conduct an interrogation or anything else where they might sick or ashamed at what they've done.
I think detaching the readout from the meter is a bad idea.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
.sig is more appropriate.
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
There's probably never been a story where your
How about some Knoppic variant or other bootable O/S? Depending on his requirements, this would be even more effective than carrying around a computer. You'd just have a thumb-drive or perhaps a portable HD. Easy to back-up, low-cost, not constrained by the higher price of laptop CPU cycles against desktop cycles.
Slower? Probably not really. I have a computer with 3GB RAM here, which is plenty to load most of the modules and software bits and pieces that I need at any one time. Maybe worth thinking about.
I'd like to propose that burial rituals could result from how distressing it is to see the remains of your loved one slowly decaying, being gnawed away, etc. The only alternative that made sense would be to burn the remains. And as it turns out, that is the other common death ritual.
So what do you like about yourself? Your ideas? Values? Looks? Witty sayings? If it's any of this, then these parts of yourself can outlast the physical body that is you. At least they can if there are humans around to contain this information. For that, you might need to leave some sort of world behind for them to live in.
Think of you as the data, not the network cable.
Just make sure that you file your complaints by post not email, folks. Otherwise you'll get two years for harrasment.
Honestly, if I were to run a blog, inviting comments on it or not is up to me. Also, do I trust them to have the same cultural values as I do, or the Internet community does, when it comes to being polite?
No, you typed it. He typed 'Who said pedantry was dead?'