Stalin didn't give a hoot either way. The blueprints for Soviet (a misnomer, the Soviets were crushed by the Bolshevik) society were drawn up by Lenin in a huge series of short, rambling articles and notes which were later to be collected, edited and used as a sort of a "communist Gospel" by Stalin. By the way, the planned end-state was not communism per se, but rather "dictatorship of the proletariat".
There's not some super-secret version of the Bible that you only get to look at after 15 years of faithful service and huge stacks of cash donations to the Vatican.
How do you know that?
It's known, for instance, that the Church suppressed the Gospel of Thomas. The only remaining full copy that we know of was found at Nag Hammadi in the 20th century. It escaped the purge by virtue of being hidden for 1800 years or so.
If the Scientologists are ultimately successful in suppressing Operation Clambake and similar efforts, it's conceivable that the full text of LRH's teachings will similarly disappear from history, to be replaced in the public consciousness with a less controversial, Church-sanitized version.
Yes. That's exactly what I'm talking about. I exemplified with low-level waste from LANL as a (likely) source of radioactive contaminants. Also, a 1000-something ton truck would be mighty big;).
I would think that a rogue state would actually use a limited supply of radioactive material to actually produce conventional munitions that spread far more deadly radioactive material around by simple explosion than try to build a suitcase nuke.
Chemical agents are much, much more effective and way cheaper.
(or plus radiation if it was dispersed in the explosion)
No. A nuclear explosion activates material around it. A fertilizer bomb does not, no matter how many used Tyvek suits from Los Alamos you stuff it with.
Excessive risk-taking behaviour is inheritable. So are bad eyesight, poor proprioception and lousy motor co-ordination (to name just a few of the many factors which may have contributed to that accident).
Two minor nits to pick, because, well, although the OP is a frother, you come across as unnecessarily condescending and I feel righteous today:
By default nearly every Windows program released in the past decade puts its main files in Program Files. Shared libraries go in Program Files/Common Files (difficult to remember, I know). User settings are stored under the user's home directory inside the Application Data folder
Except when they aren't. How many programs store stuff in their own directories in Program Files or in registry keys under HKLM? Good luck switching Windows installs with all your program settings and user data intact. It's simply not possible, unless you're willing to rebuild the registry by hand.
The only things I install today that require a reboot are things like SQL Server or something that needs to modify system files that are currently in use
Like Adobe Reader. And Java. And the VB runtime And any drivers. And some software with DRM up the yin-yang, like, say, WMP. And stuff that's just flaky. And antivirus programs, did I mention those?
Does he? Witness the race riots that followed his death, the Black Panthers, Malcolm X and the disgusting frauds that came in his wake and purported to carry on his teachings while bilking the oppressors and the oppressed alike.
Make the coil gun longer, much longer, launch on a tangent instead of straight up.
Yes, it would be even more horrifically inefficient, but it doesn't matter, since the energy is free. You could apply a comfortable 8-9 g to people for a minute or so and just be done with it.
With free energy, everything else becomes free, don't you see? Humanity's only problem would then be how to radiate enough waste heat, but even that can be solved. We'd probably multiply like cockroaches.
Hmm... I wonder if the answer to the Fermi paradox is that advanced species come 'round every once in a while to exterminate any upstarts that get fusion power.
An end to poverty is immediately weaponizable. The military planners are just too dumb to think beyond crushing stuff for now - although the recent talk of "hearts and minds" is leading them in the right direction.
Think of the destabilizing effect a large middle class would have if it appeared overnight in China or Russia.
Old enough to get it, are you? Hrm. haven't gone far enough in your thinking though. The text is not destroyed after reading. It is encrypted. It's the digital equivalent of locking something away and then throwing the key into the sea.
It was probably Gibson's way of saying he's trying to forget whatever made him make Agrippa in the first place. I also think he did it knowing full well that the text will be recovered. Dunno what this means in the context of the work (it's not a poem, although it contains a poem).
At this point, you're probably pondering if Gibson really gave that much thought to what was essentially a side-project for him. He did. He's careful like that.
Imagine being a recovering drug addict, walking into Walgreens to get aspirin for a headache, as you are paying for it, you see behind the cashier "ICE BRAND METH $40".
As a recovering drug addict, a new dose of your poison of choice would be no more than a couple phone calls or a short walk away, at any time.
some people are incapable of controlling themselves when it comes to escaping reality. These people will binge and binge and binge on drugs until they die, and cause some really bad things to happen in their communities.
First: do you have any evidence of this? Would you smoke yourself to death by smoke intoxication or anoxia if you started smoking again? I bet not. You see, a big feature of the addictive personality is the strong urge for the next fix. As in, the one after this one. The prospect of dying and thus not getting it is quite unappealing to your average junkie. Have you noticed how many rich addicts are also health freaks?
Second, admitting your flawed argument for the sake of discussion: will the harm caused by some junkies dosing themselves to death on, say, cheap, legal heroin in the privacy of their (unkempt) homes be more or less than that caused by the same people right now, when they have to steal, turn tricks and generally behave in an illegal and harmful (to others) manner to sustain their habit?
Or, more accurately, a "right" with no government-backed means of enforcement is no right at all.
Hobbes much?
The original intent of the copyright laws was in fact not to enforce the rights of creators, but to curtail them, in extent and duration, to such limits as "society deemed acceptable".
rant What do governments have to do with your rights to life, liberty, safety in your person and private effects, free speech, privacy, property - other than curtailing them?
Governments do not even attempt to protect the governed people's lives or right to live (check out the charter of any police force). Governments place and enforce limits on what people can own, do, say or keep secret, on where they can go, who they can kill or fuck, how they live in general and how they are allowed to die.
Rights are not created by governments - rather, one of the main functions of government is to prevent citizens from exercising certain rights in certain ways./rant
Slashdot Mirror
Where are my mod points when I need them?
Stalin didn't give a hoot either way. The blueprints for Soviet (a misnomer, the Soviets were crushed by the Bolshevik) society were drawn up by Lenin in a huge series of short, rambling articles and notes which were later to be collected, edited and used as a sort of a "communist Gospel" by Stalin. By the way, the planned end-state was not communism per se, but rather "dictatorship of the proletariat".
There's not some super-secret version of the Bible that you only get to look at after 15 years of faithful service and huge stacks of cash donations to the Vatican.
How do you know that?
It's known, for instance, that the Church suppressed the Gospel of Thomas. The only remaining full copy that we know of was found at Nag Hammadi in the 20th century. It escaped the purge by virtue of being hidden for 1800 years or so.
If the Scientologists are ultimately successful in suppressing Operation Clambake and similar efforts, it's conceivable that the full text of LRH's teachings will similarly disappear from history, to be replaced in the public consciousness with a less controversial, Church-sanitized version.
Yes. That's exactly what I'm talking about. I exemplified with low-level waste from LANL as a (likely) source of radioactive contaminants. Also, a 1000-something ton truck would be mighty big ;).
I would think that a rogue state would actually use a limited supply of radioactive material to actually produce conventional munitions that spread far more deadly radioactive material around by simple explosion than try to build a suitcase nuke.
Chemical agents are much, much more effective and way cheaper.
(or plus radiation if it was dispersed in the explosion)
No. A nuclear explosion activates material around it. A fertilizer bomb does not, no matter how many used Tyvek suits from Los Alamos you stuff it with.
Card cloning. Possible. Trivial even. "Properly made new SIMs" is a small subset of all SIMs.
The strongest, healthiest, smartest, and most stable were sent into battle
Not the smartest, actually. It was the stupid and the unlucky who got sent. The US had a draft-dodger president a while ago, no?
Excessive risk-taking behaviour is inheritable. So are bad eyesight, poor proprioception and lousy motor co-ordination (to name just a few of the many factors which may have contributed to that accident).
Two minor nits to pick, because, well, although the OP is a frother, you come across as unnecessarily condescending and I feel righteous today:
By default nearly every Windows program released in the past decade puts its main files in Program Files. Shared libraries go in Program Files/Common Files (difficult to remember, I know). User settings are stored under the user's home directory inside the Application Data folder
Except when they aren't. How many programs store stuff in their own directories in Program Files or in registry keys under HKLM? Good luck switching Windows installs with all your program settings and user data intact. It's simply not possible, unless you're willing to rebuild the registry by hand.
The only things I install today that require a reboot are things like SQL Server or something that needs to modify system files that are currently in use
Like Adobe Reader. And Java. And the VB runtime And any drivers. And some software with DRM up the yin-yang, like, say, WMP. And stuff that's just flaky. And antivirus programs, did I mention those?
Yes, this is it. Welcome to the world of semantic innuendo and sloppy taxonomies, don't come crying to me when it all devolves into white noise.
You think comment and link spam is bad? Wait until "SEO specialists" get their grubby mitts on RDFa.
Also, who owns (controls/regulates) the namespace?
A functioning immune system will give you arthritis over time, if you're a mammal. It's one of those design tradeoff things.
Would you like to try going without cereals, soy and meat in your diet for 20 years or so?
Does he? Witness the race riots that followed his death, the Black Panthers, Malcolm X and the disgusting frauds that came in his wake and purported to carry on his teachings while bilking the oppressors and the oppressed alike.
For the time it takes to burn through the available fuel, yes, the reaction is self-sustaining.
Yes, which is why you have successive governments making up weaselly ways to ignore it or work around it.
Perhaps your laws and regulations should be equally hard to change (maybe with a constitutionally-set expiry interval)?
A bunch of senators who are in Osama's back pocket might get into office (in another Diebold-enabled rigged election).
Afterwards, the campaign to allow the foreign-born to become President could be run on Ahrnold's behalf, so as to avoid scaring the horses.
Way to miss the point.
Make the coil gun longer, much longer, launch on a tangent instead of straight up.
Yes, it would be even more horrifically inefficient, but it doesn't matter, since the energy is free. You could apply a comfortable 8-9 g to people for a minute or so and just be done with it.
With free energy, everything else becomes free, don't you see? Humanity's only problem would then be how to radiate enough waste heat, but even that can be solved. We'd probably multiply like cockroaches.
Hmm... I wonder if the answer to the Fermi paradox is that advanced species come 'round every once in a while to exterminate any upstarts that get fusion power.
An end to poverty is immediately weaponizable. The military planners are just too dumb to think beyond crushing stuff for now - although the recent talk of "hearts and minds" is leading them in the right direction.
Think of the destabilizing effect a large middle class would have if it appeared overnight in China or Russia.
A net-positive and self-sustaining fusion experiment has been successfully constructed - it's called a thermonuclear bomb.
Quite cheap, as these things go, and eminently repeatable. Bit unwieldy for power generation, is all.
not running it from inside windows where the Conficker is already running
Why not? It seems to work allright.
Old enough to get it, are you? Hrm. haven't gone far enough in your thinking though. The text is not destroyed after reading. It is encrypted. It's the digital equivalent of locking something away and then throwing the key into the sea.
It was probably Gibson's way of saying he's trying to forget whatever made him make Agrippa in the first place. I also think he did it knowing full well that the text will be recovered. Dunno what this means in the context of the work (it's not a poem, although it contains a poem).
At this point, you're probably pondering if Gibson really gave that much thought to what was essentially a side-project for him. He did. He's careful like that.
Imagine being a recovering drug addict, walking into Walgreens to get aspirin for a headache, as you are paying for it, you see behind the cashier "ICE BRAND METH $40".
As a recovering drug addict, a new dose of your poison of choice would be no more than a couple phone calls or a short walk away, at any time.
some people are incapable of controlling themselves when it comes to escaping reality. These people will binge and binge and binge on drugs until they die, and cause some really bad things to happen in their communities.
First: do you have any evidence of this?
Would you smoke yourself to death by smoke intoxication or anoxia if you started smoking again? I bet not. You see, a big feature of the addictive personality is the strong urge for the next fix. As in, the one after this one. The prospect of dying and thus not getting it is quite unappealing to your average junkie. Have you noticed how many rich addicts are also health freaks?
Second, admitting your flawed argument for the sake of discussion: will the harm caused by some junkies dosing themselves to death on, say, cheap, legal heroin in the privacy of their (unkempt) homes be more or less than that caused by the same people right now, when they have to steal, turn tricks and generally behave in an illegal and harmful (to others) manner to sustain their habit?
Or, more accurately, a "right" with no government-backed means of enforcement is no right at all.
Hobbes much?
The original intent of the copyright laws was in fact not to enforce the rights of creators, but to curtail them, in extent and duration, to such limits as "society deemed acceptable".
rant
What do governments have to do with your rights to life, liberty, safety in your person and private effects, free speech, privacy, property - other than curtailing them?
Governments do not even attempt to protect the governed people's lives or right to live (check out the charter of any police force). Governments place and enforce limits on what people can own, do, say or keep secret, on where they can go, who they can kill or fuck, how they live in general and how they are allowed to die.
Rights are not created by governments - rather, one of the main functions of government is to prevent citizens from exercising certain rights in certain ways. /rant