Re:GM food is not a good idea yet
on
Golden Rice
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· Score: 2
Seriously,what do you think we are more likely to be harmed by: a terrorist with genetically modified flu, or rice with added beta carotene?
Worst case calamity index of your terrorist's flu virus scheme is t, of the potential disaster arising from carotene-enriched rice is r; likelihood of any terrorist being able to fund such a gen-eng project, p sub t, is very very close to zero, likelihood of actual real world progress in "golden rice" scheme, p sub r, is maybe one half? within a decimal order of magnitude of a half, anyway?
So maybe the total risk for rice, r times p sub r, might be numerically greater, might be worth hyper-critically looking at anyway, perhaps measure twice cut once, maybe look before you leap, than that risk t times p sub t signified by your terrible word "terrorism," whatever that means. ("Terrorism" must be a marca registrada exclusively owned by the Other guys as "Rolling Thunder" for example was not "terrorism.")
Why this sounds like you're criticizing Microsoft's manuals. How unfair! Microsoft's OS manuals are excellent and thorough. For example the OEM copy of Windows 98 that came with my laptop included, at no additional charge, four thick books, including the 1300 page User's Guide, the 900 page Complete Guide to the Registry, and the 650 page Programmer's Addendum; the best part of that last was the plenitude of source code examples, to help users who might be inclined to use DEBUG to whip out a quick utility... Of course that can't compare with the comprehensive boxed set of hardbound manuals, and the ten-disc set of source code CDs, which came free with my copy of NT...
What? You mean you didn't get these manual sets with your copies of MS's fine OSes? Something must be wrong! Perhaps. in violation of their licensing agreement with MS, your OEM short changed you? I think you should call the BSA and complain.
...he wants three-strikes, more prisons and tougher drug laws. what good would three-strikes have done him?...
Tell you what three-strikes would have done him. He'd been had, that's what. And today judges have this mandatory sentence/no parole razzmatazz that judgment-wise cuts their balls right off. So under a three-strikes regime, our man Shrub, rather than tonight struggling to read the whatever-mishmash that's flowing across the Teleprompter right this moment, wherever in this fair land he's giving a speech just now - rather than all that incomprehensible effort GW might still be relaxing on a bunk in a lockup today!
He got busted in 1968 for some felonious prank or another. Strike one! In 1972, and he refuses to answer specific questions about it, he got mysteriously coerced, in regard to some unspecified event, by some redacted someone - maybe was just his conscience, kinda like how Gore went off to Divinity school, who knows? - whereupon for some odd reason he interrupted his party life for exactly one year to "volunteer" to do "community service" at a "youth program" in the middle of the Houston ghetto. Hmm. Steee-rike two! As we have all had recently shoved down our throats by our trusty news media, Duh-byuh got popped in 1976 for duh-riving while duh-runk. Steee-rike three, and yer OUT!
Oh, wait, I'm being an ass. You knew that soon as you read it. In baseball where there's this word and corresponding concept "fair," a nobody who just made it up from the minors gets the same three strikes as Jose Canseco. But in American courts, while most guys get just three strikes, Senator Bush's kid can keep on swingin' 'til his arms get tired, and of his own casual free will, he quits the sport.
Yeah, sure, group theory and physics, but that was in the past, and times have changed. Science is dead, haven't you heard? killed sixty years ago by the secrecy of the Manhattan Project. Literature is dead, too, kidnapped and murdered by the Disney Corporation and the Sonny Bono (that jackass!) Copyright Act, all so a disgusting cartoon rat might continue to generate profits.
slashdot is a site devoted to hacking but the Digital Millenium (thousand-year-Reich) Copyright Act has made non-corporate computer programming a jailable felony; look at a MS Word document that you yourself wrote with a hex editor, and it's off to Miniluv for you.
Non-human psuedo-intelligent entities with indefinite and potentially endless life spans control society these days, and you have no right these days to disobey them, or even to complain. These entities are known as "corporations." Shut up, keep your head down, and work. Stockholders demand your labor; for just so long as your labor continues to increase their wealth, you'll be allowed to continue to eat.
You're quite right that wading through the complexities of Linux is going to be too difficult for the average non-technical man in the street. But the last two versions of Windows - Win9x and NT 4.0 - with which I have any experience aren't really a whole lot easier to set up from scratch. The only reason that those innocent folks who go down to Best Buy and purchase their first peecee can get any use out of it at all is that that new computer comes all pre-loaded with all that Windows-based software, which works OK right out of the box - at least for a few months!
After a few months, of course, thanks to the fact that the Win9x registry stays fresh and usable about as well as a dead fish on a hot sidewalk, that naive Win9x user is likely to find his his OS works less and less well, finally deteriorating to the point where you can't even get the stupid thing to start. What happens then? Does that naive user buckle down and figure out how to reinstall the works and learn what all those cryptic dialog boxes in the Windows "Control Panel" do? Hell, no, what he does is he sweet-talks one of his fellow workers or some family friend (whom he refers to, in an attempt to be flattering which merely annoys, as a "computer genius" or a "guru,") into coming over to his house and "fixing," that is to say, reinstalling the entire mess. So rather than going home after work and relaxing with a nice cold beer, instead you go do that, and even then they are never really satisfied, because thanks to MS's registry nonsense, whenever you reinstall the OS in the process you wreck all the applications the user has installed.
I hate that. Remember when all you needed to do was just backup of all the files and subdirectories under C:\WP51 or C:\ACAD? Then if the OS somehow became corrupted or you upgraded your hard drive, all you would have to do is restore those directories and maybe one or two SET statements in AUTOEXEC.BAT, and you were up and running again, with all your necessary programs working just the way they used to. Even if you hadn't made that backup before you ran into OS problems, a lot of times you could boot the malfunctioning box off a floppy, back up those program files, FDISK/FORMAT/S, restore the various program dirs, and presto, you were back in business! But no more; now everything is tied into the inscrutable, unfixable registry, so when the OS goes South you lose all your apps as well.
Also, the average PC owned by this sort of user, lacking either a SCSI card or an ethernet card, is damn near impossible to back up anyway, especially from a bootable floppy. Also if the system is hosed to the point where you need to boot off a floppy, you might or might not be able to get to the files on the hard drive, but even if you can, you can't see their long file names at all! So if the user has let his system deteriorate to where he can't even boot anymore, he generally loses all his data files (mainly old emails, nudie pix and MP3s) in the system-rebuilding process too.
I'd like to see a slashdot poll on this:
How many times have you personally been shanghaied into fixing for free some work acquaintance's bit-rotted Win9x box?
( ) never
( ) once
( ) 2-3 times
( ) 4-10 times
( ) lost count
This is the big reason why AOL, despite all its glaring defects, and despite its premium price for dial-ups, is so popular: because it has this dirt-simple installation program that works successfully 95+ percent of the time off the CD, asking the first-user none of those questions everyone knows he can't possibly answer (e.g. "Please enter your ISP's DNS address(es) in the box below"). The last version of AOL software I saw even sidestepped the moderately hairy installation of the MS TCP/IP stack by coming with its own el-bizarro "AOL adapter". And that dumbed-down, painless-to-install software is the reason AOL is usable by millions of people who would never be able to install Win9x, complete with TCP/IP, on a bare box.
No, if the average consumer had to install either Windows or Linux on a bare hard drive before using his PC, more than half of them wouldn't ever use PCs at all. The fact is that for the ordinary man in the street, personal computers these days are like cars in 1905 or radios in 1920; right now, at the current state of the art, they're both too complex and too flaky for general use. The technology just ain't there yet. Nowadays, in contrast, almost anyone can buy a car, learn to drive it, and get good utility out of it.
On the other hand, in 1910, if you liked to play with nuts and bolts, you could have a lot of fun tinkering with your car, with no more investment than a toolbox full of screwdrivers and wrenches; and any bright kid could fool around with radio sets too. Whereas with cars or radios nowadays, even smart people who are mechanically inclined don't mess with all the hermetically sealed boxes and mysterious gadgetry under the hood. Similarly when the computer industry finally cures all the glaring usability failings in home-computer software, I'll bet those computers and that software will be essentially too complicated for most people, even bright ones, to hack around with any more.
When I was in HS so long long ago my friends and I made up something called the "Grunt Party." I was the candidate for Student Council President. My platform, as I expressed it in my speech, was that I intended to disband the Student Council altogether, as it was obviously a waste of time and a lot of nonsense. Rumor had it that the Grunt Party candidates all got the majority of votes in their various races - for sure our speeches elicited better, louder laughter from the voters in the audience than all the other candidates put together - but, needless to say, the school administration cancelled our candidacies over some inane technicality. Ah well!
You know, half of my buddies, great guys they were, who were Grunt Party candidates, are dead now.
Probably the best reason to vote for Nader is if you wanted the economy to collapse.
Just wondering. Nader can't possibly be elected. So your implied argument, that in the hypothetical case that Righteous Ralph did achieve the Presidency, he would somehow "wreck" the American economy, that hypothesis, true or false, is irrelevant to the case that is.
In our common real world next week, voting for the unquestionably excellent Mr. Nader would be, in the short (next four years) term at least, more of an instance of performance art than a game-theoretical-optimax, decisive, rational act of patriotic, executive national decision-making. So by what mechanism, then, do you believe some poetry-inclined voter's more or less symbolic act of registering an official protest vote will "cause the American economy to collapse"?
Are you focusing instead, wisely, into the far haze, looking out at the long term? Do you grant Mr. Nader so much mythopoeic power? Do you imagine he can really mobilize that majority who have for so long consistently stayed home Election Day and voted for "none of those asses!"? Is your reasoning by any chance related to Shelley's dictum "Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the World"? If so I can really dig where you're coming from! I really believe that.
Probably the best reason to vote for Nader is if you wanted the economy to collapse.
Just wondering. Nader can't possibly be elected. So your implied argument, that in the hypothetical case that Righteous Ralph did achieve the Presidency, he would somehow "wreck" the American economy, that hypothesis, true or false, is irrelevant to the case that is.
In our common real world next week, voting for the unquestionably excellent Mr. Nader would be, in the short (next four years) term at least, more of an instance of performance art than a game-theoretical-optimax, decisive, rational act of patriotic, executive national decision-making. So by what mechanism, then, do you believe some poetry-inclined voter's more or less symbolic act of registering an official protest vote will "cause the American economy to collapse"?
Are you focusing instead, wisely, into the far haze, looking out at the long term? Do you grant Mr. Nader so much mythopoeic power? Do you imagine he can really mobilize that majority who have for so long consistently stayed home Election Day and voted for "none of those asses!"? Is your reasoning by any chance related to Shelley's dictum "Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the World"? If so I can really dig where you're coming from! I really believe that.
Nic, Nic, now Nic, under our traditional American system of jurisprudence a "criminal" is not defined as a fellow who in the real world performs a specific act which violates the statutes. But instead a "criminal" is defined as he, that unlucky sucker, who has been convicted by a court of law (whether or not, in the real world, he ever laid finger one upon the gravamen) of having performed said illegality. "Innocent until proven guilty," understand? That's the way we Anglo-Saxons undertake jurisprudence.
And as you surely must realize, our Mr. Bush in his official status as Executioner-in-Chief, could indeed factually leave the corpses of countless guiltless dead men heaped up in fucking windrows, and not only that but on top of that, in his unofficial personal capacity, he could shove whole kilograms of cocaine (news flash! possesion of cocaine is and has been for decades illegal in all fifty states!) right up up up his narrow Anglo-Saxon nostrils. But as rich as Duh-byuh is, and as connected as he is, you ought to know damned well Hell will freeze over seven times before the gilded likes of him could ever be convicted in any court of any crime whatsoever. Even if the foul, base act, whatever it were, were captured on videotape.
The fact is, the filthy rich enjoy different laws than you and I - well, than I anyway, you happily live under an altogether different judiciary... Anyhow, gee, I mean, it's not as though he ever got caught committing so unforgivable offense such as one time letting a horny interness suck his dick, especially after having raised slightly the marginal tax rate weighing upon millionaires...
Face facts, they'd catch you on a legality if you did, that, you'd be hung. You just wouldn't get away with it.
So as long as you're goin' down, why not use the data-destruction method that truly works - a big f*ckin BOMB! Like, you remember, somewhere in Gibson, in this "employee-extraction" thing the computer guy has a lump of plastique stuck on top of his box, with a happyface smile and eyes pushed into it - if the deal gets blown the plastique eradicates all the evidence together with whoever's in the bunker - "and they're getting paid for it too". Bomb goes off, of course - never bring a prop on stage unless you use it - but in the end the bad blond guy who pushed the button, this hacker girl who was the blownup tech's partner, she fires an artillery shell right into Blondie's apartment...
Me, I'm voting for Bush, since I think we all deserve a tax break, not just those of us who engage in whatever behavior the government wants to encourage....
Christ on a crutch, you really think you will get a tax break worth lifting your eyelids to see from a Dubya Administration? Mr. Bush plans to hand out a huge honking tax slash extravagnza to all the people who are millionaires already and don't even know now how to spend all the money they've got, and for you, guy-who-works-for-a-wage, you'll get some trifling little bonus that isn't worth half the value of this or that existing government program, which you rely upon, that he plans to dig out from underneath your feet.
Don't take my word for it because a.) I am nobody and b.) you can't believe everyone you read on the Internet, obviously. But would you grant any authority to, say, a full professor of economics at MIT? who is also a regular columnist for the New York Times? I mean, you might not agree with such a fellow on every nuance of policy but will you not go along with the notion that here, at least, is a man who can add?
This MIT professor is named Paul Krugman, and if you have the stomach to put up with the NYT web site's totally annoying password nonsense, then please examine this column from October 1st,, entitled "Oops! He Did It Again" which contains (short "fair use" quote, thank you) the following:
...Needless to say, honest accounting is a given. After all, the interviewers do their homework -- they would pounce on any obviously wrong numbers.
But I guess some people get special treatment.
I really, truly wasn't planning to write any more columns about George W. Bush's arithmetic. But his performance on "Moneyline" last Wednesday was just mind-blowing. I had to download a transcript to convince myself that I had really heard him correctly. It was as if Mr. Bush's aides had prepared him with a memo saying: "You've said some things on the stump that weren't true. Your mission, in the few minutes you have, is to repeat all of those things. Don't speak in generalities -- give specific false numbers. That'll show them!"
Note that this isn't Krugman's first column on the numerical anomalies in Mr. Bush's proposed budget, it's just the others scrolled off the NYT web page by now. Krugman goes on from there; concluding:
...Is there any way to explain away Mr. Bush's remarks -- three major self-serving misstatements in the course of only a couple of minutes? Not that I can see. We're not talking questionable economic analysis here, just facts: what Mr. Bush said to that national television audience simply wasn't true...
While I'm quoting Krugman, here is his column of the 25th of October, a cheery little note entitled "Fuzzier and Fuzzier" which ends on this upbeat note:
Indeed, the motto for this election year -- and the epitaph for the soon-to-be-departed budget surplus -- should be: Real men don't think. Unfortunately, what you refuse to think about can till hurt you.
If you began paying into SS last year, excuse me for annoying you with my trivial personal concerns. I've been paying into SS for thirty years. Believe it or not I would be very displeased to find out, in the unlikely event that I live to retirement age, that I will get no money back because the so-called Social Security Trust Fund has been handed over, in the main, to millionaires and stock-jobbers.
I expect certain things from slashdot readers, which I would not expect from randomly selected members of the general public. In this case, specifically, a decent respect for the laws of arithmetic. You can't expect the average guy to know or care too much about numbers, but, like, "news for Nerds," right? The point to all this typing, then, is that Duh-byuh's stuff just plain doesn't add up.
It follows then that somewhere in the big scheme of things, certain promises will not be kept. There are 800 or so people have contributed $95-million out of $100-million his election campaign has brought in. Mr. Bush has promised their social class, in which he also personally enjoys membership, a vast and majestic tax cut. Also Mr. Bush has promised you, Mr. Nobody #26,981,102, and me, Mr. Nobody #165,220,748, some trifling sort of tax relief. Now assume Mr. Bush gets elected President. Also assume, optimistically, that the laws of arithmetic continue to hold into the near future. Then one of those two groups - the campaign contributors, or the nobodies, is in for a letdown.
...Of course, iff any racist comments are found, that's further evidence that Microsoft needs to be disbanded.
For crying out loud, Microsoft has thousands upon thousands of employees, and this is the U.S.A. - do you for a second doubt that among all those employees there are a few racists? The company I work for has maybe 250 employees in all and I personally know of at least a couple of fairly virulent racists among that lot.
I'm no fan of Microsoft at all but I'd bet you a hundred to one that there is no top-down official policy at MS which is racist in nature. Ageist, sure, I'm positive that like the rest of the software industry they blatantly (and illegally) discriminate against older coders, but racist, I seriously doubt it.
If you summarily shut down every American company with racists in it, you have to shut down damn near every company in the country. The way I feel about capitalism in general, I won't object too loudly, but, you know, there are some sensible people who might not think that is such a good idea.
...By clambering over this structure and going into these bright shapes, Hiro could probably uncover some of the code that makes Rife's network operate. He could, perhaps, try to hack it up, as Juanita suggested.
But there is no point to messing with something he doesn't understand. He might waste hours fooling around with some piece of code only to find out that it was the software to control the automatic toilet flushers at Rife Bible College...
I wonder what they found, those probing hackers. If it were merely bare source, Neal above suggests, nothing. Now if it were marketing documents, that would be something; and if it were legal documents relating to all that Federal fuss, well, this would be one interesting crack!
Why did Microsoft tell, and what didn't they tell?
Damn right the constitution only applies to the government. The government is the only entity that needs constitutional limits, because the government is the only entity that has an inherent right to deprive other entities of their rights in the name of preserving the rights of others. If OmniMegaCorp (tm) could arrest me and throw me in jail, then they'd need to have constitutional restrictions requiring them to give me a fair trial. But they can't.
It's a mystery. What is it about the so-called "philosophy" of Ayn Rand and Co. that so bedazzles its votaries? How does this silly, airy stuff induce so many intelligent people so blithely to ignore the facts of the world, even when they thrust themselves under their very noses? "But they can't."? They can and did; OmniMegaCorp, or rather @Home, has granted itself the right to functionally abridge Wesley's right to free speech.
While being summarily muzzled by an overpoweringly powerful corporation is not as painful an experience as, say, being thrown in jail, or being beaten to death over a labor dispute by the Ford Motor Company's armed security guards (1932) nonetheless it is a naked violation of one's right to free speech. Yet you assert that the First Amendment only weighs against the government, and does not affect the bully-censors of that odious @Home company. If only the Federal Government is restrained by the First Amendment, then U.S. citizens's vaunted free-speech right is a hollow one indeed.
The noun 'email' is plural, and should be used exactly the same way as the plural noun 'mail'.
No, email is a brand new word with a life of its own and it is not at all required to follow the same usage as the older word "mail", any more than "television" should be restricted to a range of meanings comparable to that of its root word "vision". Like all other words, the word "email" means what people who use the word "email" mean by it, and if they decide to widely use this new word in a grammatical sense that is not precisely analogous to its root word "mail," then they are free to do so.
Like so very many other English words, "email" has more than one meaning, and the reader or listener is required to distinguish between them by reasoning from the context. In this quote:
An email is a single message which one receives via one's email, that is, one's network mail system. Some users receive hundreds of emails a day. You never know from day to day what will turn up amidst your email.
the first "email" in those sentences does not mean the same as the second, yet you immediately know, reading it, what each instance of "email" means. Note that I have included an example, the last, of "email" as a plural noun, and another, the second-to-last, where the plural of "email" is "emails" instead.
...This used to be standard usage before about 1993 or so (see September that never ended), but sadly seems to be the minority usage now.
Nothing at all "sad" about it; neology is good! What's sad is when a language ceases to change, grow, evolve; what you call it then is a "dead language."
I'm not a weapons designer, but to my knowledge, all current thermonuclear packages require an initiator stage consisting of 1+ "ordinary" nuclear devices (U-235 or plutonium squeeze devices). So while the main stage may not kick out a lot of (long-term) radiation, you can bet your bottom dollar the initiator device(s) will.
The earliest H-bombs got over two-thirds of their output from fission. The reaction is in three phases. First a relatively small fission bomb, inside the main bomb casing, releases X-rays which excite a medium (plastic?) to plasma; this medium is arranged as a cylinder around an inner "pusher" cylinder of U-238 (depleted uranium, from which the more readily fissionable U-235 has been separated). As the cylinder of X-ray absorption medium becomes plasma it reradiates X-rays which vaporize the outer surface of the "pusher" cylinder; the "pusher" cylinder collapses inward, compressing another cylinder nested inside containing fusion fuel (liquid deuterium on the first H-bomb, or lithium deuteride, much easier to handle as it does not require special cryogenic devices to keep it liquefied, on later ones). As the explosion progresses, the inner fusion-fuel cylinder collapses upon a rod of plutonium, the "sparkplug," compressing it to a critical mass. The central plutonium rod explodes, making a shock wave in the fusion fuel coming out from the radius of the bomb. Along the surface of that shock wave, the fusion fuel fuses, releasing helium, a flood of fast neutrons, and a great deal of energy. Those fast neutrons induce fission in the U-238 of the "pusher" cylinder. The critical mass of U-238 is > infinity, one can't get a bomb-like chain reaction in pure U-238 (in a reactor it is necessary to slow down the neutrons with a moderator like graphite or heavy water), but you can induce U-238 to fission at a bomb-like rate by flooding it with fast neutrons. Of the ten-and-a-half megaton yield of the first H-bomb, eight were contributed by fission in the U-238 "pusher." In terms of leaving radioactive waste, fusion is not clean - it emits a tremendous flood of neutrons, which when they irradiate matter in the vicinity of the explosion, turn stable nuclei into radioactive ones - but that U-238 fission leaves a tremendous residue of chemically exotic radioactive poisons.
What I describe above is the old-style multi-megaton bomb that SAC stockpiled in the fifties to deliver with manned bombers. I'm looking at a picture of the Mark-17 bomb, which weighed twenty tons and had a yield of eleven megatons. With the advent of intercontinental ballistic missile and high-accuracy guidance systems, the U.S.A. switched over to larger numbers of smaller warheads; here is a picture of a Minuteman II "warhead bus," with three conical bombs of 350 kilotons (still, about twenty times the power of the bombs which flattened Hiroshima and Nagasaki). These bombs are 5.9 feet long and 21 inches in diameter at the wide end, which works out to about five cubic feet total. If their specific gravity is ten, then they weigh about a ton and a half each. There may be fundamental technical changes in the design of these bombs which the general public is not allowed to know; I couldn't estimate what fraction of their output, if any, is attributable to that third-stage U238 + n reaction.
These technical details and pictures are in a best-selling book by Richard Rhodes titled Dark Sun. Hey FBI! Yo, I'm not Chinese! So I hope this means that I don't have to expect to spend the best part of the next year shackled in solitary confinement, for "revealing" to "rogue states" information accessible in any well-stocked university library. Gee, I sure hope so. I mean, this election campaign's nearly over anyway, so we can cut the bullshit until the next time it becomes necessary to distract the voters with a phony nuke-spy panic.
My computer connects to the internet, wich has illegal things on it. Should I disconnect my computer from the internet...Signed, Perplexed
Dear Perplexed: No, you should destroy your computer, lest you might later succumb to the urge to reconnect it to the internet, where as all upright persons are appalled to know, licentious talk of illegalities freely and shamelessly circulates. While you're at it, you also, just in case, should pluck your eyeballs out, as per Matthew 5:29.
A square wave of 22050 can NOT be reproduced by even the most ideal audio equipment.
In fact, all the energy in the cosmos can't reproduce any square wave perfectly, because the leading edge of an ideal square wave is perfectly vertical, requiring an infinite acceleration at the speaker cone.
So here's the ugly truth. The MP3 revolution seems to have proven that most people have tin ears...
No, what the MP3 revolution shows is that almost all music fans value the content more than the technical reproduction. In the same way I'd prefer a worn paperback Nabokov to a shiny-new hardbound Stephen King, I'd rather, by a factor of a thousand at least, listen to a scratchy cassette copy of "Tim" on my Walkman than the latest Brittney Spears (sp.?) blasting out through the best stereo system you've ever seen or heard in your life. If you're not a Replacements fan, or if you are, God help you, a B.S. fan, go ahead and substitute in the above sentence the names of your faves ad lib.
First thing the damned trillion-dollar insurance business gets access to this database of yours, then they promptly start red-lining all the people with an identifiable genetic disposition to certain diseases. On the "plus" side, this could eventually lead, after the collapse of the for-profit health-care industry, to a national health care program like all civilized countries already have, which is something this country desperately needs.
As far as cloning all those God damned celebrities, wash your mouth out with soap! Aren't the ones we have now odious enough as singles, now you want to manufacture whole platoons of identical copies of those phony worthless sons of bitches?!
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
...about two years ago, a magazine offered me a tempting sum to fly out to Hollywood and do a profile of Sharon Stone. This is, of course, the drift these days -- the religious adulation of celebrities. But I don't give a flying
fuck about Sharon Stone, so, for purely practical and writerly reasons, I had to pass. - Barbara Ehrenreich
The capitalists who ru(i)n the computer industry in this country wouldn't be working so hard to scabify and undermine their employees if not for Katz, and by extension, slashdot as a whole. Why? Because this is the place where loudest of all we heard the cry "Hax0rs are the linchpin of twenty-first century America!"
Now the guys who really run this so-called democracy are the investing class; their mode of operation is to have someone else do all the work for them, and then they rake in the profits, throwing only enough crumbs to the actual workers to keep them just the down side of active revolt. Now that is a cushy job, but one which makes the jobholder plenty nervous, because obviously one could behead the five hundred richest Americans, parasites one and all, and national productivity would not decline by even an iota. (One could also hang them or stand them in front of a firing squad, or weld them into cages down in unlighted dungeons and let them starve to death. Ah fantasy!)
The point is that one could not, without dire practical consequences, behead, as a group, the programmers of America. No programmers = no programs = no software industry = dead computer industry = NASDAQ goes through the floor = rich guys's portfolios suffer grievously. For the investing/ruling class, that's still cool, so long as all the programmers aren't aware of their own power.
Everything was cool, then, until this bigmouth Katz (note: no hax0r himself, but a publicist and lay sociologist instead) started coming out with all his talk about the central economic importance of the hax0r class. So then hax0rs, especially young ones, started to imagine they could impose certain political and economic demands upon the ruling/investing class. But the r/i class is not in the least willing to share any part, no matter how small, of their overmastering power or wealth. Sure the worthless, parasitical r/i class can't write their own software, no more than they can do any work of value, and yet that software must be written to keep America's industries afloat.
But whereas hax0rs all dress funny and have rings through their noses, eyebrows and other unmentionable parts, and obviously they control no Washington lobbyists at all, in contrast, the r/i class runs Congress like whatshisname ran Charlie McCarthy. So, for the same reason that Reagan ran unemployment up to 12.0% in 1982 - that is, to smack down the labor unions and put them lowly workies down in their place - here come the software-writing scabs, with their ridiculous H1-B visas, specially crafted to deny them rights which full-fledged citizens take for granted, such as the right to trade in one massa for a better position at a competing plantation down the way.
As I say, it's all Katz's fault. If he'd kept his yap shut a little while longer, who knows how far the sinister hax0r plot for world domination (hey come to think of it, Linus Torvalds could have been a tad more discreet too) could have developed? Now, alas, history will have to wait for another Spartacus to arise.
Marxism is primarily responsible for the existence of the forty-hour work week; this quote is out of Engels's 1890 preface to the Manifesto:
...Because today, as I write these lines, the European and American proletariat is reviewing its fighting forces, mobilized for the first time, mobilized as one army, under one flag, for one immediate aim: the standard eight-hour working day to be established by legal enactment, as proclaimed by the Geneva Congress of the International in 1866, and again by the Paris Workers' Congress of 1889. And today's spectacle will open the eyes of the capitalists and landlords of all countries to the fact that today the proletarians of all countries are united indeed.
If only Marx were still by my side to see this with his own eyes!
as well as government pensions for retirees, and a large number of other things which working citizens of modern developed economies, like yourself, presently take entirely for granted. Would you personally care to work seventy hours a week for subsistence wages? The seventy-hour-a-week worker of 1844;, and I should emphasize to you that in all the industrial countries of the world that was the worker of median income, had virtually no opportunities to "go out and double (his) productivity, gain new skills, etc, (so he) can get a raise or a better paying job and make drastic improvements in (his) family's standard of living." He lacked that opportunity because he was too exhausted and undernourished.
Unless you happen to have been born a millionaire's heir, you owe Marxism. It was Marxists all over the world who, during whole generations of political struggle, got their heads busted in in order to get you a legally-mandated limited work week, and job conditions so you don't run a three-to-one chance of being maimed on the job before you reach your grey hairs, and free public schools for all, and the rest of the program of the International. Instead of merely parroting trashy third-hand anti-red propaganda, why don't you go learn a little bit of the history of labor? There is an ocean of difference between the historical facts and all that weightless moral-theoretical ahistoric nonsense that union-busting capitalists and their captive schools and news media have crammed into your head.
Some people feel sorry for no one except maybe themselves, possibly because they're just plain mean sons of guns. I feel sorry for everyone, because we're all going to die pretty soon. Whatever.
...hunting. There are few male-bonding experiences like hunting. A group of guys in backpacks (not all of us get drunk and wait in deer stands) and rifles go out for days at a time and usually come back empty-handed, but it was the experience that was worth it...
So how do you get out from wherever you live to wherever you hunt? I'm making the not-completely-implausible guess that you don't happen live in the deep woods of Montana or wherever. Why I surmise, you or your buddy drives a motor vehicle, right?
Now, suppose I take at face value your pangyric to the perfect virtues of hunting - OK, I'll admit that a.) I myself eat meat and b.) hunting one's meat with a rifle is a thousand times more morally justifiable than buying it out of the grocery freezer in cellophane and supporting that nightmarish factory industry which delivers it there. That aside, but taking into account the irrefutable logic that no 4x4 to drive you fifty miles from your house to the woods equals no thrilling hunting/male bonding experience, do you from that conclude that the state should not ever under any circs lift a finger to remove repeat drunk drivers, blind persons, young children and the stark raving mad from behind the wheels of cars?
Believe it or not there is a narrow pathway betwixt allowing the over-the-counter sales of Stinger anti-aircraft rockets and punishing possesion of a steak knife with decades in the federal slam. All I ask of the govt. is that all through the U.S.A. (where there are no internal customs stops) there should be a law regulating the sales of firearms so that felons can't buy them with impunity from so-called "private owners" at public gun shows.
I know it's a hassle for you gun lovers. I know the very notion of universal national handgun registration (together with almost seven decades worth of various legislation, like that which outlaws free commerce in Tommy Guns, but which nonetheless, strangely, the Supreme Court has found to pass muster) ruthlessly violates that old long dead letter the Second Amendment. I know, like the license tag laws, it opens up the possibility of abuse (I'm thinking here of the curious fact that the FBI through their informer allegedly informed the Alabama Ku Klux Klan of Viola Liuzzo's tag number). But the ugly fact remains that your favorite hobby object, the gun, is responsible for thirty thousand deaths and a quarter million injuries a year in this country. And while I know guns are themselves inanimate and blameless, still I refuse to buy the argument that any so perilous a technology should, on moral/ethical/constitutional grounds, be immune to effective regulation.
You allude to the ineffective gun laws in New York, etc. Have you ever visited a gun show in sunny Florida? I did once. No ID required, no background check, all the pistols and ammo you can carry, and they'll sell 'em to ya even if you still have on the stripy orange Raiford suit and the sawn handcuff-halves on your wrists. Now hop in the old car in Bradenton, I-275 to I-4 to I-95 and (if you've got enough methedrine) without stopping except at the Pump-n-Piss all the way to NYNY, where even including the costs of guns, gas and tire wear you can double your investment on their gun-controlled streets. Remember: no internal customs stops.
Now I really really really don't want to take away your goodole deer-huntin 30-06, much less my old buddy Tim Kurtz's fancy muzzle-loader. But seriously, answer me this, friend: it is asking too much to have the law put the likes of Hank Earl Carr out of business?
Slashdot Mirror
Seriously,what do you think we are more likely to be harmed by: a terrorist with genetically modified flu, or rice with added beta carotene?
Worst case calamity index of your terrorist's flu virus scheme is t, of the potential disaster arising from carotene-enriched rice is r; likelihood of any terrorist being able to fund such a gen-eng project, p sub t, is very very close to zero, likelihood of actual real world progress in "golden rice" scheme, p sub r, is maybe one half? within a decimal order of magnitude of a half, anyway?
So maybe the total risk for rice, r times p sub r, might be numerically greater, might be worth hyper-critically looking at anyway, perhaps measure twice cut once, maybe look before you leap, than that risk t times p sub t signified by your terrible word "terrorism," whatever that means. ("Terrorism" must be a marca registrada exclusively owned by the Other guys as "Rolling Thunder" for example was not "terrorism.")
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
o i thought it were
out of sight out of mind
of course under the new Moron administration itll be
what, me worry?
yours wdk
Why this sounds like you're criticizing Microsoft's manuals. How unfair! Microsoft's OS manuals are excellent and thorough. For example the OEM copy of Windows 98 that came with my laptop included, at no additional charge, four thick books, including the 1300 page User's Guide, the 900 page Complete Guide to the Registry, and the 650 page Programmer's Addendum; the best part of that last was the plenitude of source code examples, to help users who might be inclined to use DEBUG to whip out a quick utility... Of course that can't compare with the comprehensive boxed set of hardbound manuals, and the ten-disc set of source code CDs, which came free with my copy of NT...
What? You mean you didn't get these manual sets with your copies of MS's fine OSes? Something must be wrong! Perhaps. in violation of their licensing agreement with MS, your OEM short changed you? I think you should call the BSA and complain.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Tell you what three-strikes would have done him. He'd been had, that's what. And today judges have this mandatory sentence/no parole razzmatazz that judgment-wise cuts their balls right off. So under a three-strikes regime, our man Shrub, rather than tonight struggling to read the whatever-mishmash that's flowing across the Teleprompter right this moment, wherever in this fair land he's giving a speech just now - rather than all that incomprehensible effort GW might still be relaxing on a bunk in a lockup today!
He got busted in 1968 for some felonious prank or another. Strike one! In 1972, and he refuses to answer specific questions about it, he got mysteriously coerced, in regard to some unspecified event, by some redacted someone - maybe was just his conscience, kinda like how Gore went off to Divinity school, who knows? - whereupon for some odd reason he interrupted his party life for exactly one year to "volunteer" to do "community service" at a "youth program" in the middle of the Houston ghetto. Hmm. Steee-rike two! As we have all had recently shoved down our throats by our trusty news media, Duh-byuh got popped in 1976 for duh-riving while duh-runk. Steee-rike three, and yer OUT!
Oh, wait, I'm being an ass. You knew that soon as you read it. In baseball where there's this word and corresponding concept "fair," a nobody who just made it up from the minors gets the same three strikes as Jose Canseco. But in American courts, while most guys get just three strikes, Senator Bush's kid can keep on swingin' 'til his arms get tired, and of his own casual free will, he quits the sport.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Yeah, sure, group theory and physics, but that was in the past, and times have changed. Science is dead, haven't you heard? killed sixty years ago by the secrecy of the Manhattan Project. Literature is dead, too, kidnapped and murdered by the Disney Corporation and the Sonny Bono (that jackass!) Copyright Act, all so a disgusting cartoon rat might continue to generate profits.
slashdot is a site devoted to hacking but the Digital Millenium (thousand-year-Reich) Copyright Act has made non-corporate computer programming a jailable felony; look at a MS Word document that you yourself wrote with a hex editor, and it's off to Miniluv for you.
Non-human psuedo-intelligent entities with indefinite and potentially endless life spans control society these days, and you have no right these days to disobey them, or even to complain. These entities are known as "corporations." Shut up, keep your head down, and work. Stockholders demand your labor; for just so long as your labor continues to increase their wealth, you'll be allowed to continue to eat.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
You're quite right that wading through the complexities of Linux is going to be too difficult for the average non-technical man in the street. But the last two versions of Windows - Win9x and NT 4.0 - with which I have any experience aren't really a whole lot easier to set up from scratch. The only reason that those innocent folks who go down to Best Buy and purchase their first peecee can get any use out of it at all is that that new computer comes all pre-loaded with all that Windows-based software, which works OK right out of the box - at least for a few months!
After a few months, of course, thanks to the fact that the Win9x registry stays fresh and usable about as well as a dead fish on a hot sidewalk, that naive Win9x user is likely to find his his OS works less and less well, finally deteriorating to the point where you can't even get the stupid thing to start. What happens then? Does that naive user buckle down and figure out how to reinstall the works and learn what all those cryptic dialog boxes in the Windows "Control Panel" do? Hell, no, what he does is he sweet-talks one of his fellow workers or some family friend (whom he refers to, in an attempt to be flattering which merely annoys, as a "computer genius" or a "guru,") into coming over to his house and "fixing," that is to say, reinstalling the entire mess. So rather than going home after work and relaxing with a nice cold beer, instead you go do that, and even then they are never really satisfied, because thanks to MS's registry nonsense, whenever you reinstall the OS in the process you wreck all the applications the user has installed.
I hate that. Remember when all you needed to do was just backup of all the files and subdirectories under C:\WP51 or C:\ACAD? Then if the OS somehow became corrupted or you upgraded your hard drive, all you would have to do is restore those directories and maybe one or two SET statements in AUTOEXEC.BAT, and you were up and running again, with all your necessary programs working just the way they used to. Even if you hadn't made that backup before you ran into OS problems, a lot of times you could boot the malfunctioning box off a floppy, back up those program files, FDISK/FORMAT /S, restore the various program dirs, and presto, you were back in business! But no more; now everything is tied into the inscrutable, unfixable registry, so when the OS goes South you lose all your apps as well.
Also, the average PC owned by this sort of user, lacking either a SCSI card or an ethernet card, is damn near impossible to back up anyway, especially from a bootable floppy. Also if the system is hosed to the point where you need to boot off a floppy, you might or might not be able to get to the files on the hard drive, but even if you can, you can't see their long file names at all! So if the user has let his system deteriorate to where he can't even boot anymore, he generally loses all his data files (mainly old emails, nudie pix and MP3s) in the system-rebuilding process too.
I'd like to see a slashdot poll on this:
How many times have you personally been shanghaied into fixing for free some work acquaintance's bit-rotted Win9x box?
( ) never
( ) once
( ) 2-3 times
( ) 4-10 times
( ) lost count
This is the big reason why AOL, despite all its glaring defects, and despite its premium price for dial-ups, is so popular: because it has this dirt-simple installation program that works successfully 95+ percent of the time off the CD, asking the first-user none of those questions everyone knows he can't possibly answer (e.g. "Please enter your ISP's DNS address(es) in the box below"). The last version of AOL software I saw even sidestepped the moderately hairy installation of the MS TCP/IP stack by coming with its own el-bizarro "AOL adapter". And that dumbed-down, painless-to-install software is the reason AOL is usable by millions of people who would never be able to install Win9x, complete with TCP/IP, on a bare box.
No, if the average consumer had to install either Windows or Linux on a bare hard drive before using his PC, more than half of them wouldn't ever use PCs at all. The fact is that for the ordinary man in the street, personal computers these days are like cars in 1905 or radios in 1920; right now, at the current state of the art, they're both too complex and too flaky for general use. The technology just ain't there yet. Nowadays, in contrast, almost anyone can buy a car, learn to drive it, and get good utility out of it.
On the other hand, in 1910, if you liked to play with nuts and bolts, you could have a lot of fun tinkering with your car, with no more investment than a toolbox full of screwdrivers and wrenches; and any bright kid could fool around with radio sets too. Whereas with cars or radios nowadays, even smart people who are mechanically inclined don't mess with all the hermetically sealed boxes and mysterious gadgetry under the hood. Similarly when the computer industry finally cures all the glaring usability failings in home-computer software, I'll bet those computers and that software will be essentially too complicated for most people, even bright ones, to hack around with any more.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@oncentric.net
When I was in HS so long long ago my friends and I made up something called the "Grunt Party." I was the candidate for Student Council President. My platform, as I expressed it in my speech, was that I intended to disband the Student Council altogether, as it was obviously a waste of time and a lot of nonsense. Rumor had it that the Grunt Party candidates all got the majority of votes in their various races - for sure our speeches elicited better, louder laughter from the voters in the audience than all the other candidates put together - but, needless to say, the school administration cancelled our candidacies over some inane technicality. Ah well!
You know, half of my buddies, great guys they were, who were Grunt Party candidates, are dead now.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Probably the best reason to vote for Nader is if you wanted the economy to collapse.
Just wondering. Nader can't possibly be elected. So your implied argument, that in the hypothetical case that Righteous Ralph did achieve the Presidency, he would somehow "wreck" the American economy, that hypothesis, true or false, is irrelevant to the case that is.
In our common real world next week, voting for the unquestionably excellent Mr. Nader would be, in the short (next four years) term at least, more of an instance of performance art than a game-theoretical-optimax, decisive, rational act of patriotic, executive national decision-making. So by what mechanism, then, do you believe some poetry-inclined voter's more or less symbolic act of registering an official protest vote will "cause the American economy to collapse"?
Are you focusing instead, wisely, into the far haze, looking out at the long term? Do you grant Mr. Nader so much mythopoeic power? Do you imagine he can really mobilize that majority who have for so long consistently stayed home Election Day and voted for "none of those asses!"? Is your reasoning by any chance related to Shelley's dictum "Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the World"? If so I can really dig where you're coming from! I really believe that.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Probably the best reason to vote for Nader is if you wanted the economy to collapse.
Just wondering. Nader can't possibly be elected. So your implied argument, that in the hypothetical case that Righteous Ralph did achieve the Presidency, he would somehow "wreck" the American economy, that hypothesis, true or false, is irrelevant to the case that is.
In our common real world next week, voting for the unquestionably excellent Mr. Nader would be, in the short (next four years) term at least, more of an instance of performance art than a game-theoretical-optimax, decisive, rational act of patriotic, executive national decision-making. So by what mechanism, then, do you believe some poetry-inclined voter's more or less symbolic act of registering an official protest vote will "cause the American economy to collapse"?
Are you focusing instead, wisely, into the far haze, looking out at the long term? Do you grant Mr. Nader so much mythopoeic power? Do you imagine he can really mobilize that majority who have for so long consistently stayed home Election Day and voted for "none of those asses!"? Is your reasoning by any chance related to Shelley's dictum "Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the World"? If so I can really dig where you're coming from! I really believe that.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Nic, Nic, now Nic, under our traditional American system of jurisprudence a "criminal" is not defined as a fellow who in the real world performs a specific act which violates the statutes. But instead a "criminal" is defined as he, that unlucky sucker, who has been convicted by a court of law (whether or not, in the real world, he ever laid finger one upon the gravamen) of having performed said illegality. "Innocent until proven guilty," understand? That's the way we Anglo-Saxons undertake jurisprudence.
And as you surely must realize, our Mr. Bush in his official status as Executioner-in-Chief, could indeed factually leave the corpses of countless guiltless dead men heaped up in fucking windrows, and not only that but on top of that, in his unofficial personal capacity, he could shove whole kilograms of cocaine (news flash! possesion of cocaine is and has been for decades illegal in all fifty states!) right up up up his narrow Anglo-Saxon nostrils. But as rich as Duh-byuh is, and as connected as he is, you ought to know damned well Hell will freeze over seven times before the gilded likes of him could ever be convicted in any court of any crime whatsoever. Even if the foul, base act, whatever it were, were captured on videotape.
The fact is, the filthy rich enjoy different laws than you and I - well, than I anyway, you happily live under an altogether different judiciary... Anyhow, gee, I mean, it's not as though he ever got caught committing so unforgivable offense such as one time letting a horny interness suck his dick, especially after having raised slightly the marginal tax rate weighing upon millionaires...
Vive la France!
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Face facts, they'd catch you on a legality if you did, that, you'd be hung. You just wouldn't get away with it.
So as long as you're goin' down, why not use the data-destruction method that truly works - a big f*ckin BOMB! Like, you remember, somewhere in Gibson, in this "employee-extraction" thing the computer guy has a lump of plastique stuck on top of his box, with a happyface smile and eyes pushed into it - if the deal gets blown the plastique eradicates all the evidence together with whoever's in the bunker - "and they're getting paid for it too". Bomb goes off, of course - never bring a prop on stage unless you use it - but in the end the bad blond guy who pushed the button, this hacker girl who was the blownup tech's partner, she fires an artillery shell right into Blondie's apartment...
Bombs away! WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Me, I'm voting for Bush, since I think we all deserve a tax break, not just those of us who engage in whatever behavior the government wants to encourage....
Christ on a crutch, you really think you will get a tax break worth lifting your eyelids to see from a Dubya Administration? Mr. Bush plans to hand out a huge honking tax slash extravagnza to all the people who are millionaires already and don't even know now how to spend all the money they've got, and for you, guy-who-works-for-a-wage, you'll get some trifling little bonus that isn't worth half the value of this or that existing government program, which you rely upon, that he plans to dig out from underneath your feet.
Don't take my word for it because a.) I am nobody and b.) you can't believe everyone you read on the Internet, obviously. But would you grant any authority to, say, a full professor of economics at MIT? who is also a regular columnist for the New York Times? I mean, you might not agree with such a fellow on every nuance of policy but will you not go along with the notion that here, at least, is a man who can add?
This MIT professor is named Paul Krugman, and if you have the stomach to put up with the NYT web site's totally annoying password nonsense, then please examine this column from October 1st,, entitled "Oops! He Did It Again" which contains (short "fair use" quote, thank you) the following:
But I guess some people get special treatment.
I really, truly wasn't planning to write any more columns about George W. Bush's arithmetic. But his performance on "Moneyline" last Wednesday was just mind-blowing. I had to download a transcript to convince myself that I had really heard him correctly. It was as if Mr. Bush's aides had prepared him with a memo saying: "You've said some things on the stump that weren't true. Your mission, in the few minutes you have, is to repeat all of those things. Don't speak in generalities -- give specific false numbers. That'll show them!"
Note that this isn't Krugman's first column on the numerical anomalies in Mr. Bush's proposed budget, it's just the others scrolled off the NYT web page by now. Krugman goes on from there; concluding:
While I'm quoting Krugman, here is his column of the 25th of October, a cheery little note entitled "Fuzzier and Fuzzier" which ends on this upbeat note:
Indeed, the motto for this election year -- and the epitaph for the soon-to-be-departed budget surplus -- should be: Real men don't think. Unfortunately, what you refuse to think about can till hurt you.
If you began paying into SS last year, excuse me for annoying you with my trivial personal concerns. I've been paying into SS for thirty years. Believe it or not I would be very displeased to find out, in the unlikely event that I live to retirement age, that I will get no money back because the so-called Social Security Trust Fund has been handed over, in the main, to millionaires and stock-jobbers.
I expect certain things from slashdot readers, which I would not expect from randomly selected members of the general public. In this case, specifically, a decent respect for the laws of arithmetic. You can't expect the average guy to know or care too much about numbers, but, like, "news for Nerds," right? The point to all this typing, then, is that Duh-byuh's stuff just plain doesn't add up.
It follows then that somewhere in the big scheme of things, certain promises will not be kept. There are 800 or so people have contributed $95-million out of $100-million his election campaign has brought in. Mr. Bush has promised their social class, in which he also personally enjoys membership, a vast and majestic tax cut. Also Mr. Bush has promised you, Mr. Nobody #26,981,102, and me, Mr. Nobody #165,220,748, some trifling sort of tax relief. Now assume Mr. Bush gets elected President. Also assume, optimistically, that the laws of arithmetic continue to hold into the near future. Then one of those two groups - the campaign contributors, or the nobodies, is in for a letdown.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
For crying out loud, Microsoft has thousands upon thousands of employees, and this is the U.S.A. - do you for a second doubt that among all those employees there are a few racists? The company I work for has maybe 250 employees in all and I personally know of at least a couple of fairly virulent racists among that lot.
I'm no fan of Microsoft at all but I'd bet you a hundred to one that there is no top-down official policy at MS which is racist in nature. Ageist, sure, I'm positive that like the rest of the software industry they blatantly (and illegally) discriminate against older coders, but racist, I seriously doubt it.
If you summarily shut down every American company with racists in it, you have to shut down damn near every company in the country. The way I feel about capitalism in general, I won't object too loudly, but, you know, there are some sensible people who might not think that is such a good idea.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
But there is no point to messing with something he doesn't understand. He might waste hours fooling around with some piece of code only to find out that it was the software to control the automatic toilet flushers at Rife Bible College...
I wonder what they found, those probing hackers. If it were merely bare source, Neal above suggests, nothing. Now if it were marketing documents, that would be something; and if it were legal documents relating to all that Federal fuss, well, this would be one interesting crack!
Why did Microsoft tell, and what didn't they tell?
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Damn right the constitution only applies to the government. The government is the only entity that needs constitutional limits, because the government is the only entity that has an inherent right to deprive other entities of their rights in the name of preserving the rights of others. If OmniMegaCorp (tm) could arrest me and throw me in jail, then they'd need to have constitutional restrictions requiring them to give me a fair trial. But they can't.
It's a mystery. What is it about the so-called "philosophy" of Ayn Rand and Co. that so bedazzles its votaries? How does this silly, airy stuff induce so many intelligent people so blithely to ignore the facts of the world, even when they thrust themselves under their very noses? "But they can't."? They can and did; OmniMegaCorp, or rather @Home, has granted itself the right to functionally abridge Wesley's right to free speech.
While being summarily muzzled by an overpoweringly powerful corporation is not as painful an experience as, say, being thrown in jail, or being beaten to death over a labor dispute by the Ford Motor Company's armed security guards (1932) nonetheless it is a naked violation of one's right to free speech. Yet you assert that the First Amendment only weighs against the government, and does not affect the bully-censors of that odious @Home company. If only the Federal Government is restrained by the First Amendment, then U.S. citizens's vaunted free-speech right is a hollow one indeed.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
The noun 'email' is plural, and should be used exactly the same way as the plural noun 'mail'.
No, email is a brand new word with a life of its own and it is not at all required to follow the same usage as the older word "mail", any more than "television" should be restricted to a range of meanings comparable to that of its root word "vision". Like all other words, the word "email" means what people who use the word "email" mean by it, and if they decide to widely use this new word in a grammatical sense that is not precisely analogous to its root word "mail," then they are free to do so.
Like so very many other English words, "email" has more than one meaning, and the reader or listener is required to distinguish between them by reasoning from the context. In this quote:
An email is a single message which one receives via one's email, that is, one's network mail system. Some users receive hundreds of emails a day. You never know from day to day what will turn up amidst your email.
the first "email" in those sentences does not mean the same as the second, yet you immediately know, reading it, what each instance of "email" means. Note that I have included an example, the last, of "email" as a plural noun, and another, the second-to-last, where the plural of "email" is "emails" instead.
Nothing at all "sad" about it; neology is good! What's sad is when a language ceases to change, grow, evolve; what you call it then is a "dead language."
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
I'm not a weapons designer, but to my knowledge, all current thermonuclear packages require an initiator stage consisting of 1+ "ordinary" nuclear devices (U-235 or plutonium squeeze devices). So while the main stage may not kick out a lot of (long-term) radiation, you can bet your bottom dollar the initiator device(s) will.
The earliest H-bombs got over two-thirds of their output from fission. The reaction is in three phases. First a relatively small fission bomb, inside the main bomb casing, releases X-rays which excite a medium (plastic?) to plasma; this medium is arranged as a cylinder around an inner "pusher" cylinder of U-238 (depleted uranium, from which the more readily fissionable U-235 has been separated). As the cylinder of X-ray absorption medium becomes plasma it reradiates X-rays which vaporize the outer surface of the "pusher" cylinder; the "pusher" cylinder collapses inward, compressing another cylinder nested inside containing fusion fuel (liquid deuterium on the first H-bomb, or lithium deuteride, much easier to handle as it does not require special cryogenic devices to keep it liquefied, on later ones). As the explosion progresses, the inner fusion-fuel cylinder collapses upon a rod of plutonium, the "sparkplug," compressing it to a critical mass. The central plutonium rod explodes, making a shock wave in the fusion fuel coming out from the radius of the bomb. Along the surface of that shock wave, the fusion fuel fuses, releasing helium, a flood of fast neutrons, and a great deal of energy. Those fast neutrons induce fission in the U-238 of the "pusher" cylinder. The critical mass of U-238 is > infinity, one can't get a bomb-like chain reaction in pure U-238 (in a reactor it is necessary to slow down the neutrons with a moderator like graphite or heavy water), but you can induce U-238 to fission at a bomb-like rate by flooding it with fast neutrons. Of the ten-and-a-half megaton yield of the first H-bomb, eight were contributed by fission in the U-238 "pusher." In terms of leaving radioactive waste, fusion is not clean - it emits a tremendous flood of neutrons, which when they irradiate matter in the vicinity of the explosion, turn stable nuclei into radioactive ones - but that U-238 fission leaves a tremendous residue of chemically exotic radioactive poisons.
What I describe above is the old-style multi-megaton bomb that SAC stockpiled in the fifties to deliver with manned bombers. I'm looking at a picture of the Mark-17 bomb, which weighed twenty tons and had a yield of eleven megatons. With the advent of intercontinental ballistic missile and high-accuracy guidance systems, the U.S.A. switched over to larger numbers of smaller warheads; here is a picture of a Minuteman II "warhead bus," with three conical bombs of 350 kilotons (still, about twenty times the power of the bombs which flattened Hiroshima and Nagasaki). These bombs are 5.9 feet long and 21 inches in diameter at the wide end, which works out to about five cubic feet total. If their specific gravity is ten, then they weigh about a ton and a half each. There may be fundamental technical changes in the design of these bombs which the general public is not allowed to know; I couldn't estimate what fraction of their output, if any, is attributable to that third-stage U238 + n reaction.
These technical details and pictures are in a best-selling book by Richard Rhodes titled Dark Sun. Hey FBI! Yo, I'm not Chinese! So I hope this means that I don't have to expect to spend the best part of the next year shackled in solitary confinement, for "revealing" to "rogue states" information accessible in any well-stocked university library. Gee, I sure hope so. I mean, this election campaign's nearly over anyway, so we can cut the bullshit until the next time it becomes necessary to distract the voters with a phony nuke-spy panic.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
My computer connects to the internet, wich has illegal things on it. Should I disconnect my computer from the internet...Signed, Perplexed
Dear Perplexed: No, you should destroy your computer, lest you might later succumb to the urge to reconnect it to the internet, where as all upright persons are appalled to know, licentious talk of illegalities freely and shamelessly circulates. While you're at it, you also, just in case, should pluck your eyeballs out, as per Matthew 5:29.
Yours Dr. Laura - WKiernan@concentric.net
A square wave of 22050 can NOT be reproduced by even the most ideal audio equipment.
In fact, all the energy in the cosmos can't reproduce any square wave perfectly, because the leading edge of an ideal square wave is perfectly vertical, requiring an infinite acceleration at the speaker cone.
Fussily yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
So here's the ugly truth. The MP3 revolution seems to have proven that most people have tin ears...
No, what the MP3 revolution shows is that almost all music fans value the content more than the technical reproduction. In the same way I'd prefer a worn paperback Nabokov to a shiny-new hardbound Stephen King, I'd rather, by a factor of a thousand at least, listen to a scratchy cassette copy of "Tim" on my Walkman than the latest Brittney Spears (sp.?) blasting out through the best stereo system you've ever seen or heard in your life. If you're not a Replacements fan, or if you are, God help you, a B.S. fan, go ahead and substitute in the above sentence the names of your faves ad lib.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
You're my favorite thing!
First thing the damned trillion-dollar insurance business gets access to this database of yours, then they promptly start red-lining all the people with an identifiable genetic disposition to certain diseases. On the "plus" side, this could eventually lead, after the collapse of the for-profit health-care industry, to a national health care program like all civilized countries already have, which is something this country desperately needs.
As far as cloning all those God damned celebrities, wash your mouth out with soap! Aren't the ones we have now odious enough as singles, now you want to manufacture whole platoons of identical copies of those phony worthless sons of bitches?!
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
The capitalists who ru(i)n the computer industry in this country wouldn't be working so hard to scabify and undermine their employees if not for Katz, and by extension, slashdot as a whole. Why? Because this is the place where loudest of all we heard the cry "Hax0rs are the linchpin of twenty-first century America!"
Now the guys who really run this so-called democracy are the investing class; their mode of operation is to have someone else do all the work for them, and then they rake in the profits, throwing only enough crumbs to the actual workers to keep them just the down side of active revolt. Now that is a cushy job, but one which makes the jobholder plenty nervous, because obviously one could behead the five hundred richest Americans, parasites one and all, and national productivity would not decline by even an iota. (One could also hang them or stand them in front of a firing squad, or weld them into cages down in unlighted dungeons and let them starve to death. Ah fantasy!)
The point is that one could not, without dire practical consequences, behead, as a group, the programmers of America. No programmers = no programs = no software industry = dead computer industry = NASDAQ goes through the floor = rich guys's portfolios suffer grievously. For the investing/ruling class, that's still cool, so long as all the programmers aren't aware of their own power.
Everything was cool, then, until this bigmouth Katz (note: no hax0r himself, but a publicist and lay sociologist instead) started coming out with all his talk about the central economic importance of the hax0r class. So then hax0rs, especially young ones, started to imagine they could impose certain political and economic demands upon the ruling/investing class. But the r/i class is not in the least willing to share any part, no matter how small, of their overmastering power or wealth. Sure the worthless, parasitical r/i class can't write their own software, no more than they can do any work of value, and yet that software must be written to keep America's industries afloat.
But whereas hax0rs all dress funny and have rings through their noses, eyebrows and other unmentionable parts, and obviously they control no Washington lobbyists at all, in contrast, the r/i class runs Congress like whatshisname ran Charlie McCarthy. So, for the same reason that Reagan ran unemployment up to 12.0% in 1982 - that is, to smack down the labor unions and put them lowly workies down in their place - here come the software-writing scabs, with their ridiculous H1-B visas, specially crafted to deny them rights which full-fledged citizens take for granted, such as the right to trade in one massa for a better position at a competing plantation down the way.
As I say, it's all Katz's fault. If he'd kept his yap shut a little while longer, who knows how far the sinister hax0r plot for world domination (hey come to think of it, Linus Torvalds could have been a tad more discreet too) could have developed? Now, alas, history will have to wait for another Spartacus to arise.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Marxism is primarily responsible for the existence of the forty-hour work week; this quote is out of Engels's 1890 preface to the Manifesto:
If only Marx were still by my side to see this with his own eyes!
as well as government pensions for retirees, and a large number of other things which working citizens of modern developed economies, like yourself, presently take entirely for granted. Would you personally care to work seventy hours a week for subsistence wages? The seventy-hour-a-week worker of 1844 ;, and I should emphasize to you that in all the industrial countries of the world that was the worker of median income, had virtually no opportunities to "go out and double (his) productivity, gain new skills, etc, (so he) can get a raise or a better paying job and make drastic improvements in (his) family's standard of living." He lacked that opportunity because he was too exhausted and undernourished.
Unless you happen to have been born a millionaire's heir, you owe Marxism. It was Marxists all over the world who, during whole generations of political struggle, got their heads busted in in order to get you a legally-mandated limited work week, and job conditions so you don't run a three-to-one chance of being maimed on the job before you reach your grey hairs, and free public schools for all, and the rest of the program of the International. Instead of merely parroting trashy third-hand anti-red propaganda, why don't you go learn a little bit of the history of labor? There is an ocean of difference between the historical facts and all that weightless moral-theoretical ahistoric nonsense that union-busting capitalists and their captive schools and news media have crammed into your head.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
I have absolutely no compassion for those people.
Some people feel sorry for no one except maybe themselves, possibly because they're just plain mean sons of guns. I feel sorry for everyone, because we're all going to die pretty soon. Whatever.
Yours WD "dead" K - WKiernan@concentric.net
So how do you get out from wherever you live to wherever you hunt? I'm making the not-completely-implausible guess that you don't happen live in the deep woods of Montana or wherever. Why I surmise, you or your buddy drives a motor vehicle, right?
Now, suppose I take at face value your pangyric to the perfect virtues of hunting - OK, I'll admit that a.) I myself eat meat and b.) hunting one's meat with a rifle is a thousand times more morally justifiable than buying it out of the grocery freezer in cellophane and supporting that nightmarish factory industry which delivers it there. That aside, but taking into account the irrefutable logic that no 4x4 to drive you fifty miles from your house to the woods equals no thrilling hunting/male bonding experience, do you from that conclude that the state should not ever under any circs lift a finger to remove repeat drunk drivers, blind persons, young children and the stark raving mad from behind the wheels of cars?
Believe it or not there is a narrow pathway betwixt allowing the over-the-counter sales of Stinger anti-aircraft rockets and punishing possesion of a steak knife with decades in the federal slam. All I ask of the govt. is that all through the U.S.A. (where there are no internal customs stops) there should be a law regulating the sales of firearms so that felons can't buy them with impunity from so-called "private owners" at public gun shows.
I know it's a hassle for you gun lovers. I know the very notion of universal national handgun registration (together with almost seven decades worth of various legislation, like that which outlaws free commerce in Tommy Guns, but which nonetheless, strangely, the Supreme Court has found to pass muster) ruthlessly violates that old long dead letter the Second Amendment. I know, like the license tag laws, it opens up the possibility of abuse (I'm thinking here of the curious fact that the FBI through their informer allegedly informed the Alabama Ku Klux Klan of Viola Liuzzo's tag number). But the ugly fact remains that your favorite hobby object, the gun, is responsible for thirty thousand deaths and a quarter million injuries a year in this country. And while I know guns are themselves inanimate and blameless, still I refuse to buy the argument that any so perilous a technology should, on moral/ethical/constitutional grounds, be immune to effective regulation.
You allude to the ineffective gun laws in New York, etc. Have you ever visited a gun show in sunny Florida? I did once. No ID required, no background check, all the pistols and ammo you can carry, and they'll sell 'em to ya even if you still have on the stripy orange Raiford suit and the sawn handcuff-halves on your wrists. Now hop in the old car in Bradenton, I-275 to I-4 to I-95 and (if you've got enough methedrine) without stopping except at the Pump-n-Piss all the way to NYNY, where even including the costs of guns, gas and tire wear you can double your investment on their gun-controlled streets. Remember: no internal customs stops.
Now I really really really don't want to take away your goodole deer-huntin 30-06, much less my old buddy Tim Kurtz's fancy muzzle-loader. But seriously, answer me this, friend: it is asking too much to have the law put the likes of Hank Earl Carr out of business?
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net