And the greater the urban population, the more likely it is that urban populations will implode to produce a postcivil world.
The Agricultural Foundation
With neolithic agriculture came civilization.
With the Internet and advances in shipping technology we can enter a postcivil era with social organization much closer to that of the Greek demes (kin-based agrarian populations of about 5,000) that gave rise to their Golden Age.
Not only can we enter such a postcivil era, we are entering it. The rate of evolution of human pathogens is much higher now. The availability of technologies that can destroy urban centers is much wider now. The population is much more concentrated now.
Postcivil society will be the result. The only question is how much human suffering can be prevented by taking action to empty the cities before they are forced to seek new abodes.
Decentralized production and local consumption of food is far more energy and capital efficient since it needn't be transported to urban centers. This needn't involve a return to old agrarian technologies--although from an examination of household leisure time remaining for most employees after work and other burdens of civilization, it is apparent that civilized jobs are little more efficient for food acquisition.
Moreover, the small residual needs for distribution of food to cover local shortage is far more viable now with "just in time" inventory systems based on efficient, decentralized and very robust communications infrastructure. For example, the trading pits are not a necessity--it can all be electronically distributed and decentralized with reputation networks.
Likewise, huge central repositories of grain and livestock yards are inefficient inventory policies vulnerable to attack and sabotage.
Chicago can go.
Similar arguments apply to almost all other urban areas due to their existence as mere levels of abstraction atop the thermodynamics of food. The primary value of such abstractions remains via the distributed networks of communication keeping alive inter-cultural dialogs for those who choose it.
For instance, as a seemingly trivial example but one which profoundly affects the preferences of a surprising number of urban dwellers, people are profoundly affected by the range of choice of restaurant cuisine. This is so easily dealt with it is quite obvious people haven't thought a great deal about it. For instance, I know a couple in a small town of about 1,000, an hour's drive from the nearest urban center, who moved there from major urban areas, and had a taste for international cuisine. They use the Internet to find recipes and instructions on growing herbs and spices to their taste. After developing a set of dishes they particularly like they started inviting friends over on a weekly basis to sample their latest Thai, Mexican, Chinese or what have you dinners. Reportedly they have developed quite a following and could start charging money but they've chosen to do it just for the fun of it and have started asking musicians and other performers to show up. This style of entertainment combines the old-style "gracious country living" that seems to have been relegated to the memory hole by mass media entertainment, with the Internet's access to cultural information.
Homeland Security
As recognized by Control Data Corporation founder, William Norris, in his project to create small, energy self-sufficient farms, and as recognized by founding fathers of the United States such as Thomas Jefferson in his effort to make Yeoman Farmer Conservatism the basis of federalism, centralized population structure creates vulnerabilities.
The obvious vulnerabilities, such as pandemics, bioweapons attacks, nuclear attacks, due to centralization of population, central stores and transportation hubs, need not be elaborated. A decent article on just the threat posed by corporate agriculture is given by the New Scientist bioterrorism special report: "Run, radish,
You can discredit guys like Pimentel virtually over night if you just remove pork barrel for ADM and the oil companies, charging oil companies importing oil the fair market value for the cost of military enforcement of trade routes to the middle east letting ADM sink or swim in the resulting price environment.
The same is true of virtually all other sources of biomass fuels.
Basically companies like ADM have, after clearing the people off their farm lands, decided that it is unnecessary to feed people so long as they can get government subsidies.
Some sort of combined use system is necessary in order to pay for the infrastructure costs, but if the engineering challenges can be overcome the payoff can be enormous: a reduction of ecological footprint of a factor of 1000 for developed (and soon to be developed) nations.
If one wishes to designate definition #4 of "religion", as enumerated by the American Heritage dictionary, what better adjective to use than "secular"?
religion (r-lj'n) pronunciation
n.
1.
1.1. Belief in and reverence for a supernatural power or powers regarded as creator and governor of the universe.
1.2. A personal or institutionalized system grounded in such belief and worship.
2. The life or condition of a person in a religious order.
3. A set of beliefs, values, and practices based on the teachings of a spiritual leader.
4. A cause, principle, or activity pursued with zeal or conscientious devotion.
"Zimbabwe's rate of inflation surged to 3,731.9%, driven by higher energy and food costs, and amplified by a drop in its currency, official figures show."
"April's inflation rate jumped up from the 2,200% recorded last month, the Central Statistical Office (CSO) said."
One might be forgiven for suspecting that the retards are those who show patience and restraint toward those who create situations like Zimbabwe in the name of their "beliefs". Of course, one might be forgiven only if one hadn't committed the unpardonable sin of thinking that race might really matter or that intimately mixing human ecologies with Africans running the show is a really really bad way to live life.
I bought a new puppy. But what to name him? It was a toss-up between "John Galt" and "Lexx". My wife and I went round and round about the crucial decision. We finally settled on "Lexx"; just in the nick of time it seems.
The basic problem is that IBM is a major corporate welfare recipient. That is the type of thing that can be sustained for a company that is creating US jobs. However, I don't see any reason for the US government to dole out that kind of sugar to what is essentially an Indian company. For that matter, the patents, copyrights IBM and the other large H-1b users hold can be quite easily nationalized.
There are lots of American companies around that can utilize virtually any non-proprietary technology. You don't see a lot of H-1b use at Redhat for example. I also think it is high time that we look seriously into treason charges for the senior managers, investment analysts and major investors that have created this mess.
Mahatmasoft is no better than Indian Business Machines...
A long time before MIX'07's announcement of Silverlight, I posted an approach I thought Microsoft should take to going "live" with their applications suite as software services. The approach still applies to others who might like to go "live" with software turned to "web" services. Translate from "Ray Ozzie" to "Linus", etc. and it applies to the present issue -- but with a big problem remaining of how to raise money for the prize.
Here's what I wrote back when there was still hope for Microsoft:
If I were in Ray Ozzie's shoes I would apply something like the The Hutter Prize for Lossless Compression of Human Knowledge to the entirety of MS's software services suite. This, of course, requires making a rigorous spec for testing purposes.
Make the engine, upon which the winning succinct byte code runs, a new W3C standard browser programming language (or at least virtual machine) and reduce the Microsoft OS CD to those components required to create a web-delivered application platform using the winning engine. Such an engine would, of course, have some features that dynamically encached expansions (and/or "memoizations") similar to the Hotspot optimization technology that originated with the Self programming language (and was later adopted by Sun's Java Virtual Machine). Hence it would make sense to have the OS CD contain a partially pre-expanded/optimized code base.
Then, for delivery of software services to pre-existing platforms, create a legacy port of the services code to pre-existing W3C standards like XForms implemented in a downloadable ECMAScript Client/SOA library in a manner similar to the way TIBET(tm) does. The idea is to go "Live", ie: web-delivered, with a fundamentally new W3C base (whatever engine won the prize) but support legacy W3C environments for migration.
Again, this prize-oriented strategy would, of course, require a rigorous specification of the software services so the testing could be largely automated.
This approach addresses Microsoft's 2 biggest problems deriving from the same fundamental reality: Everyone has needed their OS to interoperate with the bulk of the information industry.
The first problem is ethical and really goes beyond the scope of my professional opinions to my public opinions about the support of property rights. Suffice to say, I have no trouble with someone who goes after a natural monopoly position and succeeds. I have a problem with someone who then refuses to use that position of success to fix the bug in the society that made them inordinately rich and their technology inordinately influential.
The second problem is technical, which is what my argument here is really all about.
Basically Microsoft's code bloat problem derives from its monopoly position. This may seem like a truism since all of the software "profession" suffers from code bloat, but only Microsoft can take this to monopolistic proportions -- proportions that make Ma Bell's monopolistic complexities of yore look Spartan.
So Microsoft has this problem and it has many programmers (contributing to the code-bloat problem). It also has mountains of cash.
So how can Microsoft bust its own monopoly position turning its many programmers and mountains of cash into succinct code?
Monetary Incentives for the Programmers, ala the Hutter Prize:
S = size of uncompressed code-base
P = size of program outputting the uncompressed code-base
R = S/P (the compression ratio).
Lots of idiots worship Gates for donating his money to charity.
Gates of course became the world's richest man by trashing the potential of semicondoctors through their greatest increase of price/performance by occupying a monopoly position -- and he hasn't done anything to fix the bug in society that he exploited to do that. He's far worse than any black hat hacker no matter how much he donates to "worthy causes".
My PC world in which governments should have no "anti-discrimination" laws and in which euthanasia within the family setting is not prohibited by the government in exchange for no governmental obligations toward genetic defectives?
Gee... I guess I'll have to renew my membership in the Frankfurt School...
Sarkozy is a friend of the north African Arabs. Sarkozy is simply a slave trader in the old tradition of the Marano Jews. The game gets played by the slave-providing (frequently African) society with the slave-trading society (frequently Jewish) against the target territory (frequently European-controlled):
Get the elites of the target territory addicted to cheap labor.
Destroy the middle class (yeomen) of the target society by turning the elites against their own people.
Put enough "feet on the ground" in the form of slaves from the slave-providing society -- so many that it is impossible to repatriate them.
"Liberate" the slaves and destroy the remainder of the society you have already gutted of its yeomen/middle class.
Your family should stop breeding. It sounds like your gene pool is fucked.
Actually, although it is by no means an ethical duty of my family members to avoid passing on "defective" genes, the lines containing these genes are in-laws to my nuclear family and, yes, the Huntington gene is not being passed on -- although given the fact that the gene has been identified and may be amenable to editing even in the germ line in the near future renders it far less urgent that it not be passed on. The genetic susceptibility to aspergers is another matter entirely. Environmental triggers of autism spectrum have yet to be identified so it isn't reasonable to expect people with autism spectrum disorders to terminate their bloodlines simply because some corporations or governments have imposed environmental disaster upon them.
If you want people with genetic defects to stop having children then you should take your case up with Ashkenazi Jews who seem to have a preponderance of genetic disorders which are -- interestingly enough -- highly correlated with higher cognitive performance. You can tell them "correlation doesn't imply causation" or something to get them to disappear from the face of the earth... Go for it...
I have people in my family, people that depend upon me, that have conditions such as autism, aspergers, with strong genetic components, and even Huntington's, that is as close to being genetically determined as you can get -- and I oppose such "anti-discrimination" measures for a very good reason:
If we aren't allowed to "discriminate" on the basis of criteria we see fit, we are being denied the use of our most precious human asset: our neurons.
However, since the government insists on interfering in family matters by prohibiting euthanasia within the family setting -- the government thereby must pay the full costs of humane care for people thereby kept alive.
PS: I do not by the way consider it unethical to encourage my relatives to avail themselves of every benefit available to them under the law. I consider it unethical merely to fail to speak out against such laws given the benefits accruing to me indirectly via them. The same standards of behavior should hold for anyone who benefits from any form of "anti-discrimination" law.
Re:Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple
on
Google's Evil NDA
·
· Score: 1
One of the more endearing aspects of Jim Jones was the fact that he was so "over the top" about his cult.
Far more deadly are the cults that are most "civilized" precisely because they are less obvious in their destructive effects.
The cult of political correctness enforced by the governments and intergovernmental entities are perhaps the most extreme examples of this sort of "civil" cult.
So, if I was unfair to Google, it was because I didn't put its evil in proper perspective: dwarfed by the PC theocracy.
So, what makes a "cult" in my definition?
It's simple: If you can't leave, or if you attempt to leave and they think they're justified in going after you when your only "crime" is that you want to separate yourself from it, it is a cult.
Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple
on
Google's Evil NDA
·
· Score: 1
Jones panicked when he discovered the article was about to be published, and immediately ordered all his followers to grab their children and move to Jonestown, where he could make like John Galt on Viagra with his "flock". This allowed him some more time to sodomize his male followers and work them into a state of "compliance" leading to the fateful day when mothers, under the indoctrination of political correctness and under the guns of "security guards" stuffed cyanide in the mouths of their children to watch them die and then, assisted by the realization of the horror of what they had done, stuff cyanide in their own mouths to follow them to the rain forest topsoil.
The merit of this sort of cult is the simplification it brings to the mantra from "Don't be evil." to, simply, "Don't be."
Quickbooks is the main economic anchor application for Windows. It keeps small businesses tied to MS. At present, a new service from Intuit called Quickbooks Online threatens to untie Quickbooks from Windows. All that has to happen is to remove dependence on ActiveX within Quickbooks Online and Ubuntu -- and other Linux distros -- will take off in a big way.
India has a "home grown" polar satellite launch vehicle now so if Gates wants people to take his stand in favor of unlimited H-1b engineers imported to the US seriously, he should launch himself to space on that vehicle.
The list of victims with photographs are now available and do not support the naive "Asian-chauvenist" raciosexual motive, although a raciosexual cause may still be valid hypothesizing a higher vulnerability of east Asian men to sexually vicious multicultural environments--hence a higher level of stress.
Moreover, an interesting fact is that it appears there are actually more "Asian" victims than one would expect by more than a factor of 2. However, these are divided between East Asian victims (Henry Lee and Mary Read) and other "Asians": South Asian victims (G.V. Loganathan, Partahi Lombantoruan, Minal Panchal, Reema Samaha) and West Asian victims (Ross Abdallah Alameddine and Reema Samaha both Lebonese--and we might include the Egyptian Waleed Mohammed Shaalan). There are a lot more dark skinned Asians among the victims than one would expect. Moreover, the sole female East Asian victim was Korean, "born on an Air Force base"--meaning she was probably sired by a white military man with a Korean mother. Given these nuances it is rather difficult to dismiss the raciosexual hypothesis altogether and indeed, it seems desirable to invoke a variant of the raciosexual hypothesis to explain the over-abundance of dark-skinned Asians among the victim list and the "coincidence" that the sole east Asian female victim was not only a conational of the killer but the product of an interracial marriage involving a Korean mother.
I'm not sure what makes you think the ratio should be 1 to 33 of Asian to non-Asian victims let alone why anyone "should" eat your shit if a single Asian was killed, but there is this for you to contend with:
BLACKSBURG, United States, April 16 (Xinhua)--No Chinese students have been found among the dozens of victims in Monday's shooting rampage on the campus of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech), in the eastern U.S. state of Virginia.
Ray Wang, a board member of the Association of Chinese Students and Scholars (ACSS) at Virginia Tech, told Xinhua that he was not at the scene of the shootings, but he had contacted quite a number of Chinese students and had so far got no word that Chinese students were injured or killed in the incident.
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2007-04/17/conte nt_5986983.htm
Slashdot Mirror
The Agricultural Foundation
With neolithic agriculture came civilization.
With the Internet and advances in shipping technology we can enter a postcivil era with social organization much closer to that of the Greek demes (kin-based agrarian populations of about 5,000) that gave rise to their Golden Age.
Not only can we enter such a postcivil era, we are entering it. The rate of evolution of human pathogens is much higher now. The availability of technologies that can destroy urban centers is much wider now. The population is much more concentrated now.
Postcivil society will be the result. The only question is how much human suffering can be prevented by taking action to empty the cities before they are forced to seek new abodes.
Decentralized production and local consumption of food is far more energy and capital efficient since it needn't be transported to urban centers. This needn't involve a return to old agrarian technologies--although from an examination of household leisure time remaining for most employees after work and other burdens of civilization, it is apparent that civilized jobs are little more efficient for food acquisition.
Moreover, the small residual needs for distribution of food to cover local shortage is far more viable now with "just in time" inventory systems based on efficient, decentralized and very robust communications infrastructure. For example, the trading pits are not a necessity--it can all be electronically distributed and decentralized with reputation networks.
Likewise, huge central repositories of grain and livestock yards are inefficient inventory policies vulnerable to attack and sabotage.
Chicago can go.
Similar arguments apply to almost all other urban areas due to their existence as mere levels of abstraction atop the thermodynamics of food. The primary value of such abstractions remains via the distributed networks of communication keeping alive inter-cultural dialogs for those who choose it.
For instance, as a seemingly trivial example but one which profoundly affects the preferences of a surprising number of urban dwellers, people are profoundly affected by the range of choice of restaurant cuisine. This is so easily dealt with it is quite obvious people haven't thought a great deal about it. For instance, I know a couple in a small town of about 1,000, an hour's drive from the nearest urban center, who moved there from major urban areas, and had a taste for international cuisine. They use the Internet to find recipes and instructions on growing herbs and spices to their taste. After developing a set of dishes they particularly like they started inviting friends over on a weekly basis to sample their latest Thai, Mexican, Chinese or what have you dinners. Reportedly they have developed quite a following and could start charging money but they've chosen to do it just for the fun of it and have started asking musicians and other performers to show up. This style of entertainment combines the old-style "gracious country living" that seems to have been relegated to the memory hole by mass media entertainment, with the Internet's access to cultural information.
Homeland Security
As recognized by Control Data Corporation founder, William Norris, in his project to create small, energy self-sufficient farms, and as recognized by founding fathers of the United States such as Thomas Jefferson in his effort to make Yeoman Farmer Conservatism the basis of federalism, centralized population structure creates vulnerabilities.
The obvious vulnerabilities, such as pandemics, bioweapons attacks, nuclear attacks, due to centralization of population, central stores and transportation hubs, need not be elaborated. A decent article on just the threat posed by corporate agriculture is given by the New Scientist bioterrorism special report: "Run, radish,
You can discredit guys like Pimentel virtually over night if you just remove pork barrel for ADM and the oil companies, charging oil companies importing oil the fair market value for the cost of military enforcement of trade routes to the middle east letting ADM sink or swim in the resulting price environment.
The same is true of virtually all other sources of biomass fuels.
Basically companies like ADM have, after clearing the people off their farm lands, decided that it is unnecessary to feed people so long as they can get government subsidies.
As far as I can see, the only potential biomass replacement for fossil fuels is oil from algae -- but even that has severe problems, as is pointed out by the head of the algae pond experiments for NREL.
Some sort of combined use system is necessary in order to pay for the infrastructure costs, but if the engineering challenges can be overcome the payoff can be enormous: a reduction of ecological footprint of a factor of 1000 for developed (and soon to be developed) nations.
religion (r-lj'n) pronunciation
n.
1.
1.1. Belief in and reverence for a supernatural power or powers regarded as creator and governor of the universe.
1.2. A personal or institutionalized system grounded in such belief and worship.
2. The life or condition of a person in a religious order.
3. A set of beliefs, values, and practices based on the teachings of a spiritual leader.
4. A cause, principle, or activity pursued with zeal or conscientious devotion.
"April's inflation rate jumped up from the 2,200% recorded last month, the Central Statistical Office (CSO) said."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/6665749.stm
One might be forgiven for suspecting that the retards are those who show patience and restraint toward those who create situations like Zimbabwe in the name of their "beliefs". Of course, one might be forgiven only if one hadn't committed the unpardonable sin of thinking that race might really matter or that intimately mixing human ecologies with Africans running the show is a really really bad way to live life.
Idiot.
You have a supremacist belief and you impose it on everyone through government force you theocrat. That's what "sucks".
I bought a new puppy. But what to name him? It was a toss-up between "John Galt" and "Lexx". My wife and I went round and round about the crucial decision. We finally settled on "Lexx"; just in the nick of time it seems.
The "weird" definition of "poor" is called low net assets -- and it is "weird" only to psychotics, idiots and "think tank" economists.
Here's what I wrote back when there was still hope for Microsoft:
If I were in Ray Ozzie's shoes I would apply something like the The Hutter Prize for Lossless Compression of Human Knowledge to the entirety of MS's software services suite. This, of course, requires making a rigorous spec for testing purposes.
Make the engine, upon which the winning succinct byte code runs, a new W3C standard browser programming language (or at least virtual machine) and reduce the Microsoft OS CD to those components required to create a web-delivered application platform using the winning engine. Such an engine would, of course, have some features that dynamically encached expansions (and/or "memoizations") similar to the Hotspot optimization technology that originated with the Self programming language (and was later adopted by Sun's Java Virtual Machine). Hence it would make sense to have the OS CD contain a partially pre-expanded/optimized code base.
Then, for delivery of software services to pre-existing platforms, create a legacy port of the services code to pre-existing W3C standards like XForms implemented in a downloadable ECMAScript Client/SOA library in a manner similar to the way TIBET(tm) does. The idea is to go "Live", ie: web-delivered, with a fundamentally new W3C base (whatever engine won the prize) but support legacy W3C environments for migration.
Again, this prize-oriented strategy would, of course, require a rigorous specification of the software services so the testing could be largely automated.
This approach addresses Microsoft's 2 biggest problems deriving from the same fundamental reality: Everyone has needed their OS to interoperate with the bulk of the information industry.
The first problem is ethical and really goes beyond the scope of my professional opinions to my public opinions about the support of property rights. Suffice to say, I have no trouble with someone who goes after a natural monopoly position and succeeds. I have a problem with someone who then refuses to use that position of success to fix the bug in the society that made them inordinately rich and their technology inordinately influential.
The second problem is technical, which is what my argument here is really all about.
Basically Microsoft's code bloat problem derives from its monopoly position. This may seem like a truism since all of the software "profession" suffers from code bloat, but only Microsoft can take this to monopolistic proportions -- proportions that make Ma Bell's monopolistic complexities of yore look Spartan.
So Microsoft has this problem and it has many programmers (contributing to the code-bloat problem). It also has mountains of cash.
So how can Microsoft bust its own monopoly position turning its many programmers and mountains of cash into succinct code?
Monetary Incentives for the Programmers, ala the Hutter Prize:
S = size of uncompressed code-base
P = size of program outputting the uncompressed code-base
R = S/P (the compression ratio).
Award monies in a manner similar to the M-Prize:
Previous record ratio: R0
New record ratio: R1=R0+X
Fund contains: $Z at the time of the new record
Winner receives: $Z * (X/(R0+X))
What happens very rapidly is the programmers first apply their skills to maximally refactoring
Gates of course became the world's richest man by trashing the potential of semicondoctors through their greatest increase of price/performance by occupying a monopoly position -- and he hasn't done anything to fix the bug in society that he exploited to do that. He's far worse than any black hat hacker no matter how much he donates to "worthy causes".
My PC world in which governments should have no "anti-discrimination" laws and in which euthanasia within the family setting is not prohibited by the government in exchange for no governmental obligations toward genetic defectives?
Gee... I guess I'll have to renew my membership in the Frankfurt School...
Actually, although it is by no means an ethical duty of my family members to avoid passing on "defective" genes, the lines containing these genes are in-laws to my nuclear family and, yes, the Huntington gene is not being passed on -- although given the fact that the gene has been identified and may be amenable to editing even in the germ line in the near future renders it far less urgent that it not be passed on. The genetic susceptibility to aspergers is another matter entirely. Environmental triggers of autism spectrum have yet to be identified so it isn't reasonable to expect people with autism spectrum disorders to terminate their bloodlines simply because some corporations or governments have imposed environmental disaster upon them.
If you want people with genetic defects to stop having children then you should take your case up with Ashkenazi Jews who seem to have a preponderance of genetic disorders which are -- interestingly enough -- highly correlated with higher cognitive performance. You can tell them "correlation doesn't imply causation" or something to get them to disappear from the face of the earth... Go for it...
If we aren't allowed to "discriminate" on the basis of criteria we see fit, we are being denied the use of our most precious human asset: our neurons.
However, since the government insists on interfering in family matters by prohibiting euthanasia within the family setting -- the government thereby must pay the full costs of humane care for people thereby kept alive.
PS: I do not by the way consider it unethical to encourage my relatives to avail themselves of every benefit available to them under the law. I consider it unethical merely to fail to speak out against such laws given the benefits accruing to me indirectly via them. The same standards of behavior should hold for anyone who benefits from any form of "anti-discrimination" law.
Far more deadly are the cults that are most "civilized" precisely because they are less obvious in their destructive effects.
The cult of political correctness enforced by the governments and intergovernmental entities are perhaps the most extreme examples of this sort of "civil" cult.
So, if I was unfair to Google, it was because I didn't put its evil in proper perspective: dwarfed by the PC theocracy.
So, what makes a "cult" in my definition?
It's simple: If you can't leave, or if you attempt to leave and they think they're justified in going after you when your only "crime" is that you want to separate yourself from it, it is a cult.
Most people probably aren't aware that the trigger event for the massacre of over 900 people in Jonestown was a "New West" article on Jim Jones which included damning interviews of former members of People's Temple. Moreover, the cult had a "don't be evil" mantra -- which took the form of preaching anti-racist, anti-homophobic doctrine (essentially the state religion of political correctness) thereby shielding it from journalistic or governmental scrutiny.
Jones panicked when he discovered the article was about to be published, and immediately ordered all his followers to grab their children and move to Jonestown, where he could make like John Galt on Viagra with his "flock". This allowed him some more time to sodomize his male followers and work them into a state of "compliance" leading to the fateful day when mothers, under the indoctrination of political correctness and under the guns of "security guards" stuffed cyanide in the mouths of their children to watch them die and then, assisted by the realization of the horror of what they had done, stuff cyanide in their own mouths to follow them to the rain forest topsoil.
The merit of this sort of cult is the simplification it brings to the mantra from "Don't be evil." to, simply, "Don't be."
It sucks worse than Quickbooks. Yes, I know... Hard to believe...
Quickbooks is the main economic anchor application for Windows. It keeps small businesses tied to MS. At present, a new service from Intuit called Quickbooks Online threatens to untie Quickbooks from Windows. All that has to happen is to remove dependence on ActiveX within Quickbooks Online and Ubuntu -- and other Linux distros -- will take off in a big way.
Meanwhile, I noticed they didn't include the latest winner of the Hutter Prize, which is unfortunate since its latest entry looks like it will come in at nearly a 10% improvement over all prior text compressors using novel semantic modeling techniques.
The list of victims with photographs are now available and do not support the naive "Asian-chauvenist" raciosexual motive, although a raciosexual cause may still be valid hypothesizing a higher vulnerability of east Asian men to sexually vicious multicultural environments--hence a higher level of stress.
Moreover, an interesting fact is that it appears there are actually more "Asian" victims than one would expect by more than a factor of 2. However, these are divided between East Asian victims (Henry Lee and Mary Read) and other "Asians": South Asian victims (G.V. Loganathan, Partahi Lombantoruan, Minal Panchal, Reema Samaha) and West Asian victims (Ross Abdallah Alameddine and Reema Samaha both Lebonese--and we might include the Egyptian Waleed Mohammed Shaalan). There are a lot more dark skinned Asians among the victims than one would expect. Moreover, the sole female East Asian victim was Korean, "born on an Air Force base"--meaning she was probably sired by a white military man with a Korean mother. Given these nuances it is rather difficult to dismiss the raciosexual hypothesis altogether and indeed, it seems desirable to invoke a variant of the raciosexual hypothesis to explain the over-abundance of dark-skinned Asians among the victim list and the "coincidence" that the sole east Asian female victim was not only a conational of the killer but the product of an interracial marriage involving a Korean mother.
I'm not sure what makes you think the ratio should be 1 to 33 of Asian to non-Asian victims let alone why anyone "should" eat your shit if a single Asian was killed, but there is this for you to contend with: BLACKSBURG, United States, April 16 (Xinhua)--No Chinese students have been found among the dozens of victims in Monday's shooting rampage on the campus of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech), in the eastern U.S. state of Virginia. Ray Wang, a board member of the Association of Chinese Students and Scholars (ACSS) at Virginia Tech, told Xinhua that he was not at the scene of the shootings, but he had contacted quite a number of Chinese students and had so far got no word that Chinese students were injured or killed in the incident. http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2007-04/17/conte nt_5986983.htm