PREAMBLE TO THE CHARTER OF THE UNITED NATIONA
WE THE PEOPLES OF THE UNITED NATIONS DETERMINED
to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind, and
to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small, and
to establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained, and
to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom,
AND FOR THESE ENDS
to practice tolerance and live together in peace with one another as good neighbors, and
to unite our strength to maintain international peace and security, and
to ensure, by the acceptance of principles and the institution of methods, that armed force shall not be used, save in the common interest, and
to employ international machinery for the promotion of the economic and social advancement of all peoples,
HAVE RESOLVED TO COMBINE OUR EFFORTS TO ACCOMPLISH THESE AIMS
Accordingly, our respective Governments, through representatives assembled in the city of San Francisco, who have exhibited their full powers found to be in good and due form, have agreed to the present Charter of the United Nations and do hereby establish an international organization to be known as the United Nations.
Four-color high quality lithographic reproductions of all that art, with the proofs, the layout, the press-checks, sign-offs, specialty inks, and on and on would have cost $800 dollars. But what a book! My father took art history as an art-teaching major in the 50s and his professor swore by this one book. I think it was $200. My dad bought it. Full color reproductions of 50 master works. He still has it and used it every year in his teaching. Done right, this is an investment.
I write stories and have a book coming out next year so I have a dog in this one.
What I have seen and what I have been told by Tor is that ebooks will split the market. You will have a flood of cheaply produced, low-cost titles and you will have a small boutique market of high-end interactive books that cost a fortune and will be updated from year to year.
Every house wants their boutique titles. In the early 2000s those would have been the Harry Potter series. Tie-ins and marketing galore. That was a publisher's wet-dream. The boutique titles, as seen right now, will be a mixture of interactive magazine, tv show, and music video. Sort of like a subscription to a super-version of your favorite cable channel. Words will make up some of the content but a lot of it will be pictures and music. Like mystery novels? Think what you could do if you had four or five top writers pumping out a dozen titles, all tied together, and with it's own episodic tv show. Science fiction is a no-brainer, as are fantasy and spy 'novels'.
By the way, we already have all of this, only the stuff is spread out across a dozen studios and publishers. What will happen is a single house making all things. Okay, maybe a little cooperation.
On the other end of the scale are the books I will be writing. Text edited by a professional and thrown into an ebook template. IF my book sells and IF there is a little interest by Barnes & Nobel and IF I can pull together a tour, Tor *might* do an actual print run - paperback - very limited. Tor said they will help with some local tour dates in the midwest but all travel and hotel costs are mine to cover.
Nearly everyone can be published now. The downside is there isn't any more money to o around.
Once you weed out the people who can't handle it or have a life outside the company, or are just unwilling to place the well-being of a money-making enterprise before their own. The people left after the culling are enormously productive.
I think the question here isn't "is it productive", but "at what cost?"
We need a Bill of Digital Rights, one that underlies all of our national and international laws and keeps rights for citizens. Unless we have that the corporations will just write laws to keep the rights for themselves and citizens will be left with nothing.
And yes, 'corporations are people, my friend', 'Live free (as in beer) or die' and all that.;-)
There will come a time, friend, when you will cringe upon looking back at this statement. Sometime in the near future we will see the Internet blocked and an unblocked address will cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and only be available to corporations with very deep pockets. Right now we are on the cusp where individual sites are being blocked, but soon it will be more efficient simply to block everything and unblock "safe" sites.
"Allowing a candidate out of nowhere to use the profession of 'astronaut' when he hasn’t served in that profession recently is akin to allowing someone to use a title of 'sailor' when they no longer own or operate a ship," California GOP spokeswoman Jennifer Kerns said in a statement, according to the Times.
Most people who call themselves 'sailor' don't own or operate a ship. I mean, I know what he thinks he's saying, but my gawd does this come off as arrogant and elitist. Do these guys eve listen to themselves?
Nope. Most countries don't bother telling their citizens anything about their status in the world. The US just has a permanent inferiority complex from living in Europe's shadow for so long. Same with the UK and Russia.
(sigh). Let's go over this once more. 1) God gives man a bunch a rules to live by. 2) One of the rules is that "If you disobey God, then you will suffer horribly." 3) Another law is "If you kill then you will suffer horribly." 4) God goes to Abraham and asks him to kill his son. 5) God watches as Abraham decides he would rather cheese off God for killing his own son then for disobeying him. 6) At the last moment God says to Abraham "Psych! Just messin' with you, homey"
Please answer this question: Would Abraham have suffered horribly for killing his son, or would God just let that one slide? For extra points answer these questions: If God randomly gives someone a conflicting set of instructions and expects that person to know which instruction to follow 'just because', then is God a rational being? If God is not a rational being does it make sense to trust his promises and threats? If God is not rational and does not keep his promises or threats then is it rational to worship Him?
Well, um, except that those 'moral' teachings are A) either so obvious no one would bother to write them down or so ambiguous as to be nearly useless (Don't Kill, Sure thing. Don't covet your neighbor's oxen? You'll need to clarify that one) B) the moral teachings come wrapped in centuries of social and political manipulation (some of which arrived at the end of a sword) and c) the newest part of the book the teachings are based on comes from a time when 'the world' was the Roman Empire, communications went no faster or farther than the fastest ship or horse, and mental illness was proof of demon possession.
I promise I won't kill anyone unless it's in self-defence and that I will try to not mess with the lives of my neighbors or get too angry when they mess with mine. That pretty much covers the major topics of the moral code. As for the invisible guy who judges my eternal soul after I die -- not so much.
I went to school in the early 90s for a non-IT degree but wound up in IT because it paid more. I know seven of people who went the CS route, started out in that field and either burned out (3) or were shunted into support by managers who wanted to keep the head count but needed different roles filled (4). The truth is that as you age you want something more settled than job hopping and minding your own IRA and health insurance. Taking that IT job with the big corporation looks mighty good about then. So yourself a favor and go the safe route now. Keep your hand in on CS projects outside the company and always float your CV/Resume around. You never know when the next tech boom will happen.
GOVERNMENT IT WORKERS PAID LESS THAN SAME WORKERS IN PRIVATE SECTOR Obama claims government tightening belt PRIVATE SECTOR CONTRACTORS BILKING THE US Senate hearings commence in two weeks GOVERNMENT UNIONS KEEPING COSTS DOWN Union leaders praised for austerity GOVERNMENT UNION WORKERS FORCED TO WORK FOR LESS THAN PRIVATE SECTOR Bill O'Reily attacks unions for not protecting worker's rights
Here's what I think the 'real' spin should be: WORKERS AT DIFFERENT COMPANIES PAID DIFFERENTLY Film at eleven.
Yes but "they overwhelmingly benefit one corp". What exactly is the confusion here? Your life, liberty, freedom and government have been bought and paid for by mega-corporations, citizen. Smile and e happy you can serve your corporate overlords.
Umm, no. Twenty years ago my wife began having these bizarre pains whenever she ate. She was tested for different non-allergy problems and nothing turned up. Then some doctor told her she might have an allergy to a food. This was acceptable since her mom had an allergy to shell fish (iodine sensitivity). Two years later she was STILL having problems despite testing for wheat, all sorts of fruit, meat, and even alcohol. She was really suffering by this time and she couldn't figure out what was causing it. Finally a friend of hers suggested that she might be allergic to corn. She stopped eating corn (no small feat in the US) and she felt better. She still suffered. Then she found an article on line about cross-sensitivity to different foods and that corn allergy sufferers usually suffer from soy allergies, too. Twelve years of no corn and no soy and she is much happier.
You see, the doctors really didn't know about the corn allergies. It wasn't something they ran into a lot (it's like some ungodly small percentage of the population) but there were enough people on the internet, even back in the late nineties, to educate my wife about it. Did she wind up trying a lot of wrong diagnosis? Sure, but there were a lot of those from the doctors. Did she reach the correct conclusion by luck? Not really since she gave each diagnosis a fair trial (science).
So, you see, we aren't really weaker. We have a greater breadth of information to sift for truth, and while you might hear of massed-idiots with cuckoo beliefs you never hear of the ones and twos self-diagnosing correctly using the 'net. And yet there is the giant background roar of people who now know what they are allergic to because they have more information.
IANA M.D., but it seems to me that when people around your are actually DYING from serious illnesses like cholera, scarlet fever, small pox and many, many more, the medical professionals (who were not in any way gathering statistical information in the 1800s) would tend to disregard all instances of allergies as imagined illnesses. Actual life threatening epidemics sweeping the country EVERY YEAR have a way of sharpening the focus of those who deal human suffering. Are allergy rates rising? Sure, why not. I'd like to see your stats but I'm flexible on this. Are allergy rates higher than in the 1800s? Who knows. There aren't any stats.
Please don't state your OPINIONS as facts. That's what started this mess in the first place.
I am also old enough to remember chicken pox 'parties' where stupid parents would force their perfectly healthy children to 'go play' with fever-ridden children in horrible itchy agony. I bet you never actually contracted measles or chicken pox from one of those 'parties'.
Again, please bring me the stats on the number of people per year who don't 'survive' multiple vaccine injections. I'm curious as to what that would be. Do you think it would be higher or lower than the number of people killed in car accidents each year, or killed by lightning, or killed in trout-fishing accidents, or suffocated by eating too many marshmallows. My lord, lets outlaw Campfire Marshmallows in that case. Talk about your knee-jerk reactions.
Oh, and by the way, I have this for you about Rubella from Wikipedia: "During the epidemic in the US between 1962–1965, Rubella virus infections during pregnancy were estimated to have caused 30,000 still births and 20,000 children to be born impaired or disabled as a result of CRS (congenital rubella syndrome)." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubella Thank you but I for one respect life and want everyone to have a fair chance of being born WITHOUT PREVENTABLE BIRTH DEFECTS. Obviously you feel differently and that's your right.
My point exactly. Every endeavor had good as its aim but somewhere along the road to a better world the law of unintended consequences jumps out and hijacks the caravan. DDT was fantastic and it DID save lives. Communism is a wonderful theory to show the inherent evils of capitalism. High Fructose Corn Syrup is a great and cheap way to make sweet, low-cost foods. All of these things are good but the damage wreaked by these big ideas outweighs any benefits we could possibly obtain.
Oh, and the items on your list are the flip side of the coin. These are the things that -- so far -- no one has managed to screw up. With the exception of atomic energy. I think one might go on my list after this year.
Communism Fascism Eugenics Killing off all bothersome insects with DDT Endless suburbs A car in every garage The Atomic Bomb Perfect White Bread Cheap sweeteners Eliminating all infectious disease with antibiotics
I know I don't trust big ideas because those ideas are usually the ones that lead to big problems.
Normal, rational view:
"Sign them up NOW. This product is a gold mine and it doesn't cost us anything. Now if you'll excuse me I'm going to go swim in all of our money."
Corporate Board-Room view:
"Mozilla accounts for most of our profits. That means they are taking internet share away from OUR browser. Cut these guys off at the knees!"
Gosh, I'm vexed as to which way Google will go. Yep, that's a puzzler./sarcasm
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah. Sure thing there genius.
And if I want to, say, hunt down who you are and hate-speech, ridicule, belittle and bully you into a public melt-down that's all right then?
Fantastic, because all of your private moments are now public and if I have the means and the motive I most certainly will have the opportunity.
Welcome to America 2.0. Freedom+$$$ vs Privacy+$$$. Let's see which one wins!
The State of Minnesota will do the following for people who have Coursera degrees:
They will not hire you
If you work at a company that has a State contract you may not work on the State project in any capacity.
Fines, lawsuits, etc.
I worked for the state for about three years. They have a lot of contracts in the private sector.
But feel free to take the courses. I'm sure it will all work out.
PREAMBLE TO THE CHARTER OF THE UNITED NATIONA
WE THE PEOPLES OF THE UNITED NATIONS DETERMINED
to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind, and
to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small, and
to establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained, and
to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom,
AND FOR THESE ENDS
to practice tolerance and live together in peace with one another as good neighbors, and
to unite our strength to maintain international peace and security, and
to ensure, by the acceptance of principles and the institution of methods, that armed force shall not be used, save in the common interest, and
to employ international machinery for the promotion of the economic and social advancement of all peoples,
HAVE RESOLVED TO COMBINE OUR EFFORTS TO ACCOMPLISH THESE AIMS
Accordingly, our respective Governments, through representatives assembled in the city of San Francisco, who have exhibited their full powers found to be in good and due form, have agreed to the present Charter of the United Nations and do hereby establish an international organization to be known as the United Nations.
http://www.un.org/en/documents/charter/preamble.shtml
Four-color high quality lithographic reproductions of all that art, with the proofs, the layout, the press-checks, sign-offs, specialty inks, and on and on would have cost $800 dollars.
But what a book!
My father took art history as an art-teaching major in the 50s and his professor swore by this one book. I think it was $200. My dad bought it. Full color reproductions of 50 master works. He still has it and used it every year in his teaching. Done right, this is an investment.
I write stories and have a book coming out next year so I have a dog in this one.
What I have seen and what I have been told by Tor is that ebooks will split the market. You will have a flood of cheaply produced, low-cost titles and you will have a small boutique market of high-end interactive books that cost a fortune and will be updated from year to year.
Every house wants their boutique titles. In the early 2000s those would have been the Harry Potter series. Tie-ins and marketing galore. That was a publisher's wet-dream. The boutique titles, as seen right now, will be a mixture of interactive magazine, tv show, and music video. Sort of like a subscription to a super-version of your favorite cable channel. Words will make up some of the content but a lot of it will be pictures and music. Like mystery novels? Think what you could do if you had four or five top writers pumping out a dozen titles, all tied together, and with it's own episodic tv show. Science fiction is a no-brainer, as are fantasy and spy 'novels'.
By the way, we already have all of this, only the stuff is spread out across a dozen studios and publishers. What will happen is a single house making all things. Okay, maybe a little cooperation.
On the other end of the scale are the books I will be writing. Text edited by a professional and thrown into an ebook template. IF my book sells and IF there is a little interest by Barnes & Nobel and IF I can pull together a tour, Tor *might* do an actual print run - paperback - very limited. Tor said they will help with some local tour dates in the midwest but all travel and hotel costs are mine to cover.
Nearly everyone can be published now. The downside is there isn't any more money to o around.
Welcome to the new publishing.
Once you weed out the people who can't handle it or have a life outside the company, or are just unwilling to place the well-being of a money-making enterprise before their own. The people left after the culling are enormously productive.
I think the question here isn't "is it productive", but "at what cost?"
We need a Bill of Digital Rights, one that underlies all of our national and international laws and keeps rights for citizens. Unless we have that the corporations will just write laws to keep the rights for themselves and citizens will be left with nothing.
And yes, 'corporations are people, my friend', 'Live free (as in beer) or die' and all that. ;-)
It's where NASA films all their best stuff.
There will come a time, friend, when you will cringe upon looking back at this statement. Sometime in the near future we will see the Internet blocked and an unblocked address will cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and only be available to corporations with very deep pockets. Right now we are on the cusp where individual sites are being blocked, but soon it will be more efficient simply to block everything and unblock "safe" sites.
Then we will all be safe, citizen.
Sleep tight.
"Allowing a candidate out of nowhere to use the profession of 'astronaut' when he hasn’t served in that profession recently is akin to allowing someone to use a title of 'sailor' when they no longer own or operate a ship," California GOP spokeswoman Jennifer Kerns said in a statement, according to the Times.
Most people who call themselves 'sailor' don't own or operate a ship. I mean, I know what he thinks he's saying, but my gawd does this come off as arrogant and elitist. Do these guys eve listen to themselves?
Nope. Most countries don't bother telling their citizens anything about their status in the world. The US just has a permanent inferiority complex from living in Europe's shadow for so long. Same with the UK and Russia.
I post serial fiction on my blog at Wordpress which gets cross-posted to Facebook. You just gave me the text for my next story.
Thanks, Slashdot!
Do you mean 'tentative'?
Can I have your job, Mr. Editor?
Wow! Apple has a two year lead in the... talking... cell-phone ... market.
YAWN!
Wake me when they start treating it as if it were a real computer rather than a toy.
I agree one hundred percent! The point of a debate is to way public opinion.
Unfortunately for all of those who want public opinion to matter in science, it doesn't.
(sigh). Let's go over this once more.
1) God gives man a bunch a rules to live by.
2) One of the rules is that "If you disobey God, then you will suffer horribly."
3) Another law is "If you kill then you will suffer horribly."
4) God goes to Abraham and asks him to kill his son.
5) God watches as Abraham decides he would rather cheese off God for killing his own son then for disobeying him.
6) At the last moment God says to Abraham "Psych! Just messin' with you, homey"
Please answer this question: Would Abraham have suffered horribly for killing his son, or would God just let that one slide?
For extra points answer these questions:
If God randomly gives someone a conflicting set of instructions and expects that person to know which instruction to follow 'just because', then is God a rational being?
If God is not a rational being does it make sense to trust his promises and threats?
If God is not rational and does not keep his promises or threats then is it rational to worship Him?
Well, um, except that those 'moral' teachings are A) either so obvious no one would bother to write them down or so ambiguous as to be nearly useless (Don't Kill, Sure thing. Don't covet your neighbor's oxen? You'll need to clarify that one) B) the moral teachings come wrapped in centuries of social and political manipulation (some of which arrived at the end of a sword) and c) the newest part of the book the teachings are based on comes from a time when 'the world' was the Roman Empire, communications went no faster or farther than the fastest ship or horse, and mental illness was proof of demon possession.
I promise I won't kill anyone unless it's in self-defence and that I will try to not mess with the lives of my neighbors or get too angry when they mess with mine. That pretty much covers the major topics of the moral code. As for the invisible guy who judges my eternal soul after I die -- not so much.
I went to school in the early 90s for a non-IT degree but wound up in IT because it paid more. I know seven of people who went the CS route, started out in that field and either burned out (3) or were shunted into support by managers who wanted to keep the head count but needed different roles filled (4). The truth is that as you age you want something more settled than job hopping and minding your own IRA and health insurance. Taking that IT job with the big corporation looks mighty good about then.
So yourself a favor and go the safe route now. Keep your hand in on CS projects outside the company and always float your CV/Resume around. You never know when the next tech boom will happen.
Let me try spinning this
GOVERNMENT IT WORKERS PAID LESS THAN SAME WORKERS IN PRIVATE SECTOR
Obama claims government tightening belt
PRIVATE SECTOR CONTRACTORS BILKING THE US
Senate hearings commence in two weeks
GOVERNMENT UNIONS KEEPING COSTS DOWN
Union leaders praised for austerity
GOVERNMENT UNION WORKERS FORCED TO WORK FOR LESS THAN PRIVATE SECTOR
Bill O'Reily attacks unions for not protecting worker's rights
Here's what I think the 'real' spin should be:
WORKERS AT DIFFERENT COMPANIES PAID DIFFERENTLY
Film at eleven.
Yes but "they overwhelmingly benefit one corp". What exactly is the confusion here? Your life, liberty, freedom and government have been bought and paid for by mega-corporations, citizen. Smile and e happy you can serve your corporate overlords.
Umm, no. Twenty years ago my wife began having these bizarre pains whenever she ate. She was tested for different non-allergy problems and nothing turned up. Then some doctor told her she might have an allergy to a food. This was acceptable since her mom had an allergy to shell fish (iodine sensitivity).
Two years later she was STILL having problems despite testing for wheat, all sorts of fruit, meat, and even alcohol. She was really suffering by this time and she couldn't figure out what was causing it. Finally a friend of hers suggested that she might be allergic to corn. She stopped eating corn (no small feat in the US) and she felt better. She still suffered. Then she found an article on line about cross-sensitivity to different foods and that corn allergy sufferers usually suffer from soy allergies, too. Twelve years of no corn and no soy and she is much happier.
You see, the doctors really didn't know about the corn allergies. It wasn't something they ran into a lot (it's like some ungodly small percentage of the population) but there were enough people on the internet, even back in the late nineties, to educate my wife about it. Did she wind up trying a lot of wrong diagnosis? Sure, but there were a lot of those from the doctors. Did she reach the correct conclusion by luck? Not really since she gave each diagnosis a fair trial (science).
So, you see, we aren't really weaker. We have a greater breadth of information to sift for truth, and while you might hear of massed-idiots with cuckoo beliefs you never hear of the ones and twos self-diagnosing correctly using the 'net. And yet there is the giant background roar of people who now know what they are allergic to because they have more information.
IANA M.D., but it seems to me that when people around your are actually DYING from serious illnesses like cholera, scarlet fever, small pox and many, many more, the medical professionals (who were not in any way gathering statistical information in the 1800s) would tend to disregard all instances of allergies as imagined illnesses. Actual life threatening epidemics sweeping the country EVERY YEAR have a way of sharpening the focus of those who deal human suffering. Are allergy rates rising? Sure, why not. I'd like to see your stats but I'm flexible on this. Are allergy rates higher than in the 1800s? Who knows. There aren't any stats.
Please don't state your OPINIONS as facts. That's what started this mess in the first place.
I am also old enough to remember chicken pox 'parties' where stupid parents would force their perfectly healthy children to 'go play' with fever-ridden children in horrible itchy agony. I bet you never actually contracted measles or chicken pox from one of those 'parties'.
Again, please bring me the stats on the number of people per year who don't 'survive' multiple vaccine injections. I'm curious as to what that would be. Do you think it would be higher or lower than the number of people killed in car accidents each year, or killed by lightning, or killed in trout-fishing accidents, or suffocated by eating too many marshmallows. My lord, lets outlaw Campfire Marshmallows in that case. Talk about your knee-jerk reactions.
Oh, and by the way, I have this for you about Rubella from Wikipedia:
"During the epidemic in the US between 1962–1965, Rubella virus infections during pregnancy were estimated to have caused 30,000 still births and 20,000 children to be born impaired or disabled as a result of CRS (congenital rubella syndrome)." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubella
Thank you but I for one respect life and want everyone to have a fair chance of being born WITHOUT PREVENTABLE BIRTH DEFECTS. Obviously you feel differently and that's your right.
My point exactly. Every endeavor had good as its aim but somewhere along the road to a better world the law of unintended consequences jumps out and hijacks the caravan. DDT was fantastic and it DID save lives. Communism is a wonderful theory to show the inherent evils of capitalism. High Fructose Corn Syrup is a great and cheap way to make sweet, low-cost foods. All of these things are good but the damage wreaked by these big ideas outweighs any benefits we could possibly obtain.
Oh, and the items on your list are the flip side of the coin. These are the things that -- so far -- no one has managed to screw up. With the exception of atomic energy. I think one might go on my list after this year.
Communism
Fascism
Eugenics
Killing off all bothersome insects with DDT
Endless suburbs
A car in every garage
The Atomic Bomb
Perfect White Bread
Cheap sweeteners
Eliminating all infectious disease with antibiotics
I know I don't trust big ideas because those ideas are usually the ones that lead to big problems.
Normal, rational view: "Sign them up NOW. This product is a gold mine and it doesn't cost us anything. Now if you'll excuse me I'm going to go swim in all of our money." Corporate Board-Room view: "Mozilla accounts for most of our profits. That means they are taking internet share away from OUR browser. Cut these guys off at the knees!" Gosh, I'm vexed as to which way Google will go. Yep, that's a puzzler. /sarcasm