What on EARTH are you people going to do in 10 years when not a bloomin' history book reflects a damn thing you're so seriously and deludedly whining about?
One hundred fifty years after Lincoln's crimes, he's become a hero he certainly wasn't in his day.
In Lincoln's day, if any of you whiners were newspaper publishers or politicians, you'd be in jail 24 hours after posting.
People should definitely air their concerns. But people also shouldn'e be freakin' deluded morons.
This post is NOT in defense of Bush. It's in shock at idiocy that's a couple centimeters from trutherism.
Geez, if it's heated and under pressure, this could make the geothermal stuff in iceland (greenland? I can never tell 'em apart) look like child's play. Nuclear reactors are used to heat water to drive steam turbines. Um . . . an ocean of water that deep, that hot? Who needs nuclear energy.
So China won't need the middle eastern oil, we in the U.S. can have it all, Chavez can suck it up, and the Arabs can get nervous.
But there's something more important than even freedom of speech at issue here. That's a given. That's not even something that should be on the table. That anyone thinks this is about defending free speech, is insane. That's letting the Islamists dictate the terms. That's fighting this cultural battle on precisely the ground they want it fought on -- because what ends up being at stake is free speech versus sharia. That puts free speech on a symmetrical defense -- not good. It's possible to see that pitched battle LOST by certain Western countries whose capacity for self-loathing equals the Islamist flaggelant's.
The proper understanding of this issue is far simple and less risky: proportionality, under the paradigm of Just War applied to the "clash of civilizations," unlike the "culture war" within the United States, this is a culture war between civilizations. The point would be that Islam itself has a Just War tradition, and dialog with that tradition could lead to a mutual understanding that the responses to the Great Cartoon Crisis Of 2006 by Muslims worldwide can be placed at the same end of the spectrum as the terrorist response to Western aggression/occupation/exploition/whatever as perceived by Al Qaeda, inter alia.
Personally, I think the response is as wacko as Al Qaeda. But helping Muslims see that this is their problem -- one of proportionality -- is something I think can be understood and mutually discussed. Getting bogged down in free speech verus sharia is, IMO, a losing battle for someone -- perhaps both sides to some extent, and in a draw I'd say the Islamists end up with things going more in their direction in Western consciousness, than not.
The "War on Terror" can be construed as a war on disproportionate responses by Islamists to perceived threats to their way of life. In this respect, the cartoon crisis is just another pitched battle in the same war, and I think Muslims must be called upon to respect their own Just War tradition. It's painful to have to remind them of what their best and brightest thinkers in times long past once offered in dialog with the West as profound reflection on the nature of human conflict.
The conspiratorialists will point out that it's just the kind of dissatisfaction that comes from experiencing such hassles, combined with taking the base technology for granted, that will have people welcoming innovations that solve it but are even more scary -- like the use of a primary key for all systems (SSN is the current bogeyman for such conspiratorialists).
I can testify that for my part, I'm definitely vulnerable to the "this new technology sucks, and here's why," then welcoming the solution that works by being far more obtrusive. Gotta watch it -- conspiracy theorists among us or no.
Good grief. Imagine archaeology as an entrepreneurial field for the first time, somewhere in the time of Duck Dodgers. Innovative mavericks will be levitating across midwestern sewerage fields in their byte-mining combines, parsing the surface for data which, in the aggregate, when cross-referenced with live historical transaction records will yeild a corpus of information having arbitrage value on the global information market.
Everything about everyone will be inferrable by triangulation, but only by a system whose storage and processing powers are capable of indexing not only every web page and library document, but every real-time product/service that's purchased/delivered to everyone.
Thinking of ingestion -- what happens when RFID meets nano-genotyping and a swallowed chip will be capable of providing a hash via RF of your gene sequence as a primary key -- in real time?
Somehow this reminds me of the "international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids," in spite of which "we will prevail, in peace and freedom from fear, and in true health, through the purity and essence of our natural fluids."
Such remarks are hard to take seriously unless we're sitting at the same table drinking the same brew so we can agree on what we're even talking about. "Yes!" "No!" "Yes!" "No!" For my part, I can't take such assertions seriously otherwise, because the factors which contribute to bitterness in coffee seem to be precisely those factors present in the sad history of its most common production and consumption -- at least in the U.S. -- in the last several decades. In other words, there's a "coincidence? I think not" quality to what people think about coffee and what they've likely been conditioned to think of it (by idiotic prevailing standards of production and consumption) -- so why heed comments from people who are likely still "in the cave?";-)
Then spend $5.00 a pound for far better beans than Starbucks buys, and roast them yourself. Among other things, you can dump the roast before it turns into the charcoal Starbucks serves.;-)
Start here http://sweetmarias.com/ and work your way outwards into a very fun world. You'll be trafficking in the world's best coffees at half the price you're paying. You supply the heat.;-)
Your family contains females. Therefore your family is female.
You're committing the fallacy of composition -- attributing to the whole the character of a part.
I'm not denying that much coffee IS bitter -- but this is due to careless roasting, storage, or brewing more often than to the character of the coffee itself. It's as ridiculous to blame coffee for being bitter as it is to blame dogs for being vicious. It's also silly to blame caffeine for the bitterness in poor coffee. You'd have to park all of a cup's caffiene in a single sip to even compete with other embittering factors in a bad brew.
The point, gentle reader, would be that coffee's reputation as a bitter beverage has been earned for it by people who roast it badly, brew it poorly, and feel obliged to consume such dreck for a mild jolt or in respect of social convention -- or because "everyone knows Starbucks is good coffee" (spit).
As for another poster's remark: The real coffee bean ground up and made into a drnk is extremely bitter -- that's one of the most risible, demonstrably absurd statements I've ever heard concerning coffee.
Coffee is not a "bitter" flavor, any more than "wine tastes like Thunderbird". It's a perverse generalization.
Coffee's reputation has suffered as a consequence of shallow consumer experience and ill-advised processed coffee products marketed during the last century. And, for that matter, by the crap sold by Starbucks -- a company that can't even succeed at being pretentious (they're only capable, it seems, of duping connoisseurs of instant coffee into thinking their charcoal blends are a step up).
It can only get worse when dubious beverages are critiqued by those holding dubious assumptions.
Now if someone would take that paragraph and make it happen to usenet, we'd be set. Google has destroyed the archives with a politically/patronage-motivated archive presentation decision, noobs have destroyed the medium itself, and http/php forums have left most of the useful discussion on the planet utterly inaccessibly to central indexing. In other words, what WAS good has been destroyed, and what has come out of this confusing matrix can't be indexed in any helpful way (and there's no one to do it; witness Google's disastrous attempt to index all the php forums a while back).
A hyper-usenet that doesn't depend on internal quoting, something that indexes and links every bloomin' character in a post or document. Nothing short of that.
Whose liberty are you talking about? What "people?" If they're the kids at issue, they are themselves a "chunk of flesh" their own parents "squirted out into the world" -- which suggests that your ostensible advocacy on their behalf is qualified a wee bit by a witless insult unwittingly directed their way as much as mine. As for the "basically" bit, can you trace the inference that I'm pissed? Bemused by morons, yes.
All volunteers for military service are carefully vetted in boot camp and subsequent training, and a determination is made whether they're indeed responsible enough for the job. This is not true of the larger cohort of people that age in the civilian world, who might be considered candidates for drinking privileges. If the law says they can drink, they're not vetted by anyone to determine whether they're responsible enough to avoid driving under the influence, and so forth.
From a standpoint of protecting society, the apparent presumption is that since you can't vet the entire cohort, you have to pitch to the median and pick an age where the number of lunatics is acceptable.
Give me a vetted drunk soldier any day, at my back, over some lamer civilian frat boy. That's comin' from 8 years of service among, sometimes, drunken sailors.
"I was allowed by the US federal govt. to sign my life over to them to possible fight and die for my country at _only_ 18, yet I was not old enough to buy and drink a beer! I guess uncle Sam really knows what is best for us."
I've never understood this logic. It's not really logic at all, because there's no logical connection between being saddled with the duty of defending one's country and the prerogative of drinking alcoholic beverages at one age or another.
What is there about this juxtaposition of such incommensurables that people so often take it to be such a compelling argument that nods of assent may be anticipated from all hearers? Seriously, this is a mystery to me. And I, too, am a veteran who entered service under the drinking age.
Well, there's another kind of hysteria that I see a lot more of. For my part, as a parent, I just nod and take note of this kind of thing, realizing that it doesn't really give me any reason to let down my guard, etc. So no hysteria here. But then I come up to/. and see a whole passel of yahoos rending their garments, gnashing their teeth, pouring gasoline on themselves and sticking shotguns in their mouths -- all because it's such a terrible curb on liberty in the name of misguided blah blah blah.
Ya know what? I just nod and take note of this kind of thing.
The Internet renders null and void many social forces that once shaped the development of young people. A young person wishing to view pornography once had to risk being seen at the newsstand by his Aunt Esther. No more. No constraints. No bounds. No risk of shame, no guiding deterents.
That's just an example of a huge phenomenon merely betokened in part by on-line access to materials parents might not appreciate. The burden on parents has increased as communical cohesiveness has waned and a greater proportion of homes have busier parents -- both during the day and in the evenings. Other agents frequently compete with, rather than reinforce, parental influence. This is even championed in many quarters, enervating a classical Lockean framework not of parental rights to raise their children, but parental responsibilities to do so and society's obligation to reinforce and protect the excercise of that obligation.
Blah, blah, blah. But it taxes my patience to see anyone impatient with parents, before admitting that the world is a very different place for raising children -- a lonelier place for parents, for sure.
My God, would someone please shoot the morons who constantly bray about the need to "stop protecting kids and give them more information and help them make good decisions?" What damnable idiots see these as mutually exclusive options, rather than complementary ones?
Good grief. Another childless wonder who's also obviously under 30. Damn.
Whether or not you agree with all this, the notion that the burden of protecting children from this or that is some kind of new construct is almost insanely naive. I mean, if you're going to wax indignant, do so less ignorantly.
"Kids do not need to be protected from every goddamned thing in the world" -- well, right. But apparently, in a free society people differ on what children should be protected from. In this case, the active cooperation of a services vendor was sought, and gained.
A free society means this kind of thing as well as that others may continue to provide similar services to minors. Freedom means the freedom of some to restrict access, as well as the freedom of others to give it.
First, vouchers. Let the market have at it. And if anyone objects that private schools won't take the hardest-to-educate kids -- B.S. They already are. Districts in Illinois farm out special education students (learning disabilities, severe behavior disorders) to private alternative education schools that are paid $150 per kid per day.
Second, deal with the damn unions. As a parent, I'm sick and tired of seeing NEA insiders "take care of their own" with respect to TRS, by retiring after 5 years of top admin jobs at outrageous salaries.
But actually, just let (1) happen, and (2) will be forced to take care of itself. Then the union will whine about competition raining on their freakin' parade. Tough. Catholic schools have been doing college prep excellently for more than a century.
How is it democratic to have a monopoly hold your kids hostage while they yawn, don't promote or fire based on merit, and architect the country's most powerful retirement system?
I suspect most/.ers are too young and single to appreciate why this can make a parent of 4 angry...
Rutan is a superb engineer who has accumulated a wealth of experience. If you look over the history of Scaled's projects http://www.scaled.com/projects/index.html you'll see a lot of thematic unity. There's a natural progression to things.
Rutan's politics of all this is also fascinating. He's argued that space development has proceeded along entirely different lines than did aviation, and he explains why. He also argues that this is unfortunate, and explains why. And so he goes on to prove the value of the alternate reality he envisions for his industry.
Burt's an amazing fellow, a design genius, and a maverick who happens to be, I think, right about a lot of things. He's a history-changing fellow, and heaven knows we could use some history-changers who have his passion for excellence in innovation.
Slashdot Mirror
What on EARTH are you people going to do in 10 years when not a bloomin' history book reflects a damn thing you're so seriously and deludedly whining about? One hundred fifty years after Lincoln's crimes, he's become a hero he certainly wasn't in his day. In Lincoln's day, if any of you whiners were newspaper publishers or politicians, you'd be in jail 24 hours after posting. People should definitely air their concerns. But people also shouldn'e be freakin' deluded morons. This post is NOT in defense of Bush. It's in shock at idiocy that's a couple centimeters from trutherism.
Geez, if it's heated and under pressure, this could make the geothermal stuff in iceland (greenland? I can never tell 'em apart) look like child's play. Nuclear reactors are used to heat water to drive steam turbines. Um . . . an ocean of water that deep, that hot? Who needs nuclear energy.
So China won't need the middle eastern oil, we in the U.S. can have it all, Chavez can suck it up, and the Arabs can get nervous.
What a world.
But there's something more important than even freedom of speech at issue here. That's a given. That's not even something that should be on the table. That anyone thinks this is about defending free speech, is insane. That's letting the Islamists dictate the terms. That's fighting this cultural battle on precisely the ground they want it fought on -- because what ends up being at stake is free speech versus sharia. That puts free speech on a symmetrical defense -- not good. It's possible to see that pitched battle LOST by certain Western countries whose capacity for self-loathing equals the Islamist flaggelant's.
The proper understanding of this issue is far simple and less risky: proportionality, under the paradigm of Just War applied to the "clash of civilizations," unlike the "culture war" within the United States, this is a culture war between civilizations. The point would be that Islam itself has a Just War tradition, and dialog with that tradition could lead to a mutual understanding that the responses to the Great Cartoon Crisis Of 2006 by Muslims worldwide can be placed at the same end of the spectrum as the terrorist response to Western aggression/occupation/exploition/whatever as perceived by Al Qaeda, inter alia.
Personally, I think the response is as wacko as Al Qaeda. But helping Muslims see that this is their problem -- one of proportionality -- is something I think can be understood and mutually discussed. Getting bogged down in free speech verus sharia is, IMO, a losing battle for someone -- perhaps both sides to some extent, and in a draw I'd say the Islamists end up with things going more in their direction in Western consciousness, than not.
The "War on Terror" can be construed as a war on disproportionate responses by Islamists to perceived threats to their way of life. In this respect, the cartoon crisis is just another pitched battle in the same war, and I think Muslims must be called upon to respect their own Just War tradition. It's painful to have to remind them of what their best and brightest thinkers in times long past once offered in dialog with the West as profound reflection on the nature of human conflict.
The conspiratorialists will point out that it's just the kind of dissatisfaction that comes from experiencing such hassles, combined with taking the base technology for granted, that will have people welcoming innovations that solve it but are even more scary -- like the use of a primary key for all systems (SSN is the current bogeyman for such conspiratorialists). I can testify that for my part, I'm definitely vulnerable to the "this new technology sucks, and here's why," then welcoming the solution that works by being far more obtrusive. Gotta watch it -- conspiracy theorists among us or no.
Good grief. Imagine archaeology as an entrepreneurial field for the first time, somewhere in the time of Duck Dodgers. Innovative mavericks will be levitating across midwestern sewerage fields in their byte-mining combines, parsing the surface for data which, in the aggregate, when cross-referenced with live historical transaction records will yeild a corpus of information having arbitrage value on the global information market.
Everything about everyone will be inferrable by triangulation, but only by a system whose storage and processing powers are capable of indexing not only every web page and library document, but every real-time product/service that's purchased/delivered to everyone.
Thinking of ingestion -- what happens when RFID meets nano-genotyping and a swallowed chip will be capable of providing a hash via RF of your gene sequence as a primary key -- in real time?
You forgot folded, spindled, and mutilated.
Somehow this reminds me of the "international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids," in spite of which "we will prevail, in peace and freedom from fear, and in true health, through the purity and essence of our natural fluids."
Good grief.
Will this dissuade news sites from blogging in the future?
I can't imagine it will dissuade them from blogging in the past . . .
This was the interesting juxtaposition of slashdot titles in my Google homepage:
Removing Obstacles on Joint Research
Testing Drugs on India's Poor
:::sigh:::
;-)
Such remarks are hard to take seriously unless we're sitting at the same table drinking the same brew so we can agree on what we're even talking about. "Yes!" "No!" "Yes!" "No!" For my part, I can't take such assertions seriously otherwise, because the factors which contribute to bitterness in coffee seem to be precisely those factors present in the sad history of its most common production and consumption -- at least in the U.S. -- in the last several decades. In other words, there's a "coincidence? I think not" quality to what people think about coffee and what they've likely been conditioned to think of it (by idiotic prevailing standards of production and consumption) -- so why heed comments from people who are likely still "in the cave?"
Then spend $5.00 a pound for far better beans than Starbucks buys, and roast them yourself. Among other things, you can dump the roast before it turns into the charcoal Starbucks serves. ;-)
;-)
Start here http://sweetmarias.com/ and work your way outwards into a very fun world. You'll be trafficking in the world's best coffees at half the price you're paying. You supply the heat.
Your family contains females. Therefore your family is female.
You're committing the fallacy of composition -- attributing to the whole the character of a part.
I'm not denying that much coffee IS bitter -- but this is due to careless roasting, storage, or brewing more often than to the character of the coffee itself. It's as ridiculous to blame coffee for being bitter as it is to blame dogs for being vicious. It's also silly to blame caffeine for the bitterness in poor coffee. You'd have to park all of a cup's caffiene in a single sip to even compete with other embittering factors in a bad brew.
The point, gentle reader, would be that coffee's reputation as a bitter beverage has been earned for it by people who roast it badly, brew it poorly, and feel obliged to consume such dreck for a mild jolt or in respect of social convention -- or because "everyone knows Starbucks is good coffee" (spit).
As for another poster's remark: The real coffee bean ground up and made into a drnk is extremely bitter -- that's one of the most risible, demonstrably absurd statements I've ever heard concerning coffee.
RW's definitely has awesome food. One must be careful not to order the large German pancake with the hope of consuming it solo. ;-)
Coffee is not a "bitter" flavor, any more than "wine tastes like Thunderbird". It's a perverse generalization.
Coffee's reputation has suffered as a consequence of shallow consumer experience and ill-advised processed coffee products marketed during the last century. And, for that matter, by the crap sold by Starbucks -- a company that can't even succeed at being pretentious (they're only capable, it seems, of duping connoisseurs of instant coffee into thinking their charcoal blends are a step up).
It can only get worse when dubious beverages are critiqued by those holding dubious assumptions.
Not one whit does this matter. See how active this thread is in two weeks.
Now if someone would take that paragraph and make it happen to usenet, we'd be set. Google has destroyed the archives with a politically/patronage-motivated archive presentation decision, noobs have destroyed the medium itself, and http/php forums have left most of the useful discussion on the planet utterly inaccessibly to central indexing. In other words, what WAS good has been destroyed, and what has come out of this confusing matrix can't be indexed in any helpful way (and there's no one to do it; witness Google's disastrous attempt to index all the php forums a while back). A hyper-usenet that doesn't depend on internal quoting, something that indexes and links every bloomin' character in a post or document. Nothing short of that.
Whose liberty are you talking about? What "people?" If they're the kids at issue, they are themselves a "chunk of flesh" their own parents "squirted out into the world" -- which suggests that your ostensible advocacy on their behalf is qualified a wee bit by a witless insult unwittingly directed their way as much as mine. As for the "basically" bit, can you trace the inference that I'm pissed? Bemused by morons, yes.
All volunteers for military service are carefully vetted in boot camp and subsequent training, and a determination is made whether they're indeed responsible enough for the job. This is not true of the larger cohort of people that age in the civilian world, who might be considered candidates for drinking privileges. If the law says they can drink, they're not vetted by anyone to determine whether they're responsible enough to avoid driving under the influence, and so forth.
From a standpoint of protecting society, the apparent presumption is that since you can't vet the entire cohort, you have to pitch to the median and pick an age where the number of lunatics is acceptable.
Give me a vetted drunk soldier any day, at my back, over some lamer civilian frat boy. That's comin' from 8 years of service among, sometimes, drunken sailors.
"I was allowed by the US federal govt. to sign my life over to them to possible fight and die for my country at _only_ 18, yet I was not old enough to buy and drink a beer! I guess uncle Sam really knows what is best for us."
I've never understood this logic. It's not really logic at all, because there's no logical connection between being saddled with the duty of defending one's country and the prerogative of drinking alcoholic beverages at one age or another.
What is there about this juxtaposition of such incommensurables that people so often take it to be such a compelling argument that nods of assent may be anticipated from all hearers? Seriously, this is a mystery to me. And I, too, am a veteran who entered service under the drinking age.
Well, there's another kind of hysteria that I see a lot more of. For my part, as a parent, I just nod and take note of this kind of thing, realizing that it doesn't really give me any reason to let down my guard, etc. So no hysteria here. But then I come up to /. and see a whole passel of yahoos rending their garments, gnashing their teeth, pouring gasoline on themselves and sticking shotguns in their mouths -- all because it's such a terrible curb on liberty in the name of misguided blah blah blah.
Ya know what? I just nod and take note of this kind of thing.
The Internet renders null and void many social forces that once shaped the development of young people. A young person wishing to view pornography once had to risk being seen at the newsstand by his Aunt Esther. No more. No constraints. No bounds. No risk of shame, no guiding deterents.
That's just an example of a huge phenomenon merely betokened in part by on-line access to materials parents might not appreciate. The burden on parents has increased as communical cohesiveness has waned and a greater proportion of homes have busier parents -- both during the day and in the evenings. Other agents frequently compete with, rather than reinforce, parental influence. This is even championed in many quarters, enervating a classical Lockean framework not of parental rights to raise their children, but parental responsibilities to do so and society's obligation to reinforce and protect the excercise of that obligation.
Blah, blah, blah. But it taxes my patience to see anyone impatient with parents, before admitting that the world is a very different place for raising children -- a lonelier place for parents, for sure.
My God, would someone please shoot the morons who constantly bray about the need to "stop protecting kids and give them more information and help them make good decisions?" What damnable idiots see these as mutually exclusive options, rather than complementary ones?
Good grief. Another childless wonder who's also obviously under 30. Damn.
Whether or not you agree with all this, the notion that the burden of protecting children from this or that is some kind of new construct is almost insanely naive. I mean, if you're going to wax indignant, do so less ignorantly.
"Kids do not need to be protected from every goddamned thing in the world" -- well, right. But apparently, in a free society people differ on what children should be protected from. In this case, the active cooperation of a services vendor was sought, and gained.
A free society means this kind of thing as well as that others may continue to provide similar services to minors. Freedom means the freedom of some to restrict access, as well as the freedom of others to give it.
First, vouchers. Let the market have at it. And if anyone objects that private schools won't take the hardest-to-educate kids -- B.S. They already are. Districts in Illinois farm out special education students (learning disabilities, severe behavior disorders) to private alternative education schools that are paid $150 per kid per day.
/.ers are too young and single to appreciate why this can make a parent of 4 angry...
Second, deal with the damn unions. As a parent, I'm sick and tired of seeing NEA insiders "take care of their own" with respect to TRS, by retiring after 5 years of top admin jobs at outrageous salaries.
But actually, just let (1) happen, and (2) will be forced to take care of itself. Then the union will whine about competition raining on their freakin' parade. Tough. Catholic schools have been doing college prep excellently for more than a century.
How is it democratic to have a monopoly hold your kids hostage while they yawn, don't promote or fire based on merit, and architect the country's most powerful retirement system?
I suspect most
Rutan is a superb engineer who has accumulated a wealth of experience. If you look over the history of Scaled's projects http://www.scaled.com/projects/index.html you'll see a lot of thematic unity. There's a natural progression to things.
Rutan's politics of all this is also fascinating. He's argued that space development has proceeded along entirely different lines than did aviation, and he explains why. He also argues that this is unfortunate, and explains why. And so he goes on to prove the value of the alternate reality he envisions for his industry.
Burt's an amazing fellow, a design genius, and a maverick who happens to be, I think, right about a lot of things. He's a history-changing fellow, and heaven knows we could use some history-changers who have his passion for excellence in innovation.
Not that I have any strong opinions . . .