Probably. The planet which prefers kilobytes of java (fphover) to a one-line onmouseover statement, never sets the page's background colour, and whose server extensions are (1) huge; (2) incredibly insecure; and (3) a rectal pain to install correctly? Been there, planted a flag, never going back.
There are plenty of PS pages, but it's likely that your (Windows based?) web browser isn't set up to display them, or is too thick to display them.
Also, PDF is essentially a proprietarised PS; think ``I am viewing a PostScript page'' next time you click on a link ending ``.pdf'' and you'll eventually pick the idea up. Bzip2'ed PS (document.ps.bz2) generally does much better than PDF spacewise, too.
Though nothing to write home about (compared to the superior IE5.5)
Superior? This is good, considering that IE 5.5 trashes the networking DLLs on Windows 95 (because, say M$, Windows 95 is no longer supported <conspiracy tone=evil>...so... why does it install on '95 at all? Scumbags!</conspiracy>) and 5.5sp1 occasionally knackers the name services on at least Windows 2000. Umm... security? Let's not go there.
Mozilla is still slow, although you can do some amazing things with it using XUL and friends. NS6, however, is even slower and buggier. So much for ``flagship'' status. Konqueror, although still obviously beta, absolutely hammers NS6. Even ``testbed'' browsers like Amaya are comparable, which is pretty disgraceful. I use Konqueror for most things, and occasionally Mozilla (M18). Both are useable (although I wish Mozilla didn't look so much like NS), both have taken a definitely encouraging direction, both are improving faster than IE. So: the future's so bright I've gotta adjust my gamma.
my graphics card is unsupported or else requires a more advanced version of XFree86
And this is not a problem for Windows NT? Oh, my! (-:
Seriously: many, many graphics cards (including this Banshee) run just fine out of the box, and new versions of things are not as risky to install under Linux as they are under Windows.
I have no idea where to look for config files. Don't tell me;
/etc - and don't give me any of that ``don't tell me'' crap, this isn't a write-only forum.
I'm afraid of the word "compile".
I'm afraid of the term ``painted into a corner,'' which is where you often wind up if you're unable (or unwilling, same thing in effect) to do a compile. Let's try one of these fearsome compiles, just to see how hard it is: ``make bzImage'' - ooh, tough one! Not that I've had to recompile a kernel for months, and I do a variety of Linux installation and support for a living.
I want things that I need to know about to jump out at me - I don't want to dig through unfamiliar directories via the command prompt.
They're there. Just click on the K or the footprint and select ``Configure.''
I want a folder called "Control Panels."
Would you settle for typing ``control-panel'' on a command line, or putting same behind an icon? Hey, it works for me! (-:
if you want more otherwise-capable computer users to go over to Linux, these are the things that have to be taken care of
Great, because they have been taken care of. And folks like Helix are working to make them ridiculously easy, and have been making good progress.
I'm not unsympathetic to issues about hardware mfgrs making drivers difficult to write but that doesn't change the fact that if my card don't work, my card don't work.
This seems to be your basic bitching point, and will only be fixed by Linux's popularity outweighing Microsoft's funny deals and lawyerisms. It's got sweet Fanny Adams to do with technical issues.
The move to platform-independent X drivers is a brilliant one in that OpenBSD and all of the other even-less-mainstream operating systems like The Hurd can have updated X drivers at the same time that Linux gets them. Would that this could also be done for Windows and other devices; the hardware manufacturers would be dancing and singing in the streets, flinging their hats in the air (and in some countries discharging firearms, hopefully skywards). As things stand, careful manufacturers are taking advantage of common-code designs and it won't be too long before they're producing one standard driver and one Windows driver.
Although we really are OT, since this is X not Linux and the change would apply to anything Unixoid on an x86 CPU.
But I would greatly enjoy a window, maybe 2/3 the size of the current screen, with a picture of a monitor on it that you could stretch and shrink and move around with your mouse in real time, having the corresponding effect on the actual display area within the monitor. Plus a little label that says ``Use Backspace to revert one step, Esc to revert to last known good parameters.'' (-:
the [US, presumably] NAVY uses Exchange for its mail system
I can't wait for the Outlook RemoteControlledAircraftCarrierOverSMTP virus... mind you, we only see a Yank carrier here in Perth every few months at best.
telnet enterprise.vessel.navy.mil 110
user falken
pass jason
rudd +10
engn 100 100 100 100
bsod *
quit
After seeing what Oz politicians have made of the Collins class sub, and a supply ship sized for European shipping pallets (Aussie pallets are slightly larger... oops), you can bet that the Oz Navy will be switching to an all-Microsoft shop any time now, just to stay in character.
Oh, they have Internet in the asylums these days? (-:
Seriously, if you were a committed carnivore, you would be committed to hospital within about two weeks unless you chose mostly fish and other relatively low-fat low-pollutant meats and ate them all raw and were happy with a lifespan of under 40 years. This has been tried before, several times.
Oddly enough, two weeks is about how long people last on an all-MacDonalds' diet as well. Perhaps that's the typical amount of time can survive on recycled garbage before it tosses in the towel.
Development of galaxies may be quicker than originaly thought.
It certainly is, if that Arp astronomer that everyone loves to hate is even partially right. He has Quasars being baby galaxies, fired off from other galaxies... maybe, maybe not, but his re-interpretation of redshift (with extensive documentation and numerous showstopper examples) is certainly interesting, and is very much a Linux ``it can't be done, but that hasn't stopped it from happening'' paradigm-busting phenomenon.
The GP Hulls are constructed of one solid piece of some fantastic transparent and indestructable material. The inside surface is coated with a 'stasis field' conducting film making the ship indestructable and extremely safe. If a threat were detected, such as immenent collision or attack, the satsis field would flip on and further interaction with the space-time continuum would be cut off for anything within the field. The computer would set to deactivate the field in random intervals and poll for conditions. if it was safe (say the sun you crashed into finally blew up and cast you free), then you were back in real time and could continue your voyage.
Except that gravity gets through the hull. This is how it was discovered, in one Niven short story, that the Puppeteers' world had no moon (they didn't understand tides very well). Cost them a millions Stars' worth of bribery, could have been more.
Resting comfortably on the surface of a neutron star might be fine with your stasis field on, but if the computer flipped it off for a nanosecond to check outside conditions, you'd be so much raspberry jam on the downhill walls in much less than an eyeblink, even presuming that the equipment survived long enough to re-enable the stasis.
Figure it out: light goes at (more or less) 300,000km/s, and escape velocity for a neutron star must be pushing this, so if you were exposed to this kind of gravity field point-blank for a nanosecond you'd be doing many thousands of meters per second by the time the field was blocked again - so far past dead that only God could ``reassemble.''
These were ethnic conflicts in which both Catholics and Orthodox have a lot of blame to share.
Uh, ``in a word, bullshit.'' Do you also believe the crap on mainstream media channels about the former Yugoslavia today? Have you spoken to a variety of the people previously resident of tfY? Evidently not.
As to the rest of your post, you've got your trotters in a strange trough. You don't need to believe the revisionists, just read copies of the source documents from the time and make up your own mind. The picture you get will be dramatically different from your current view.
And if the RCC hadn't behaved as it did during and before WW2 it would have been entirely out of character, out of step with their entire history.
Principal differences - and what about Russia?
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Hair splitting by means of labels won't work.
There are some extremely basic, core differences in principle which don't show up in a careless overview of the resulting doctrines, but which make a huge behavioural difference.
Just because it happened doesn't make it one of Hitlers stated motivations.
Eh? Hitler went to the trouble of writing it down! Granted, some many 'roos were missing from his top paddock, and he was often rowing with only one oar, but he did say that such things should be done.
You're still down at least one explanation, in particular the USSR and the behaviour of Soviet Communism.
Trying to associate Nazi officials with the Catholic Church will get you tangled in web of contradictory historical references, that may leave you embarassed quoting revisionists.
I just go back to copies of the original documents, no revisionism required. I think you stopped researching at the wrong layer of revision. If the Roman heirarchy hadn't been involved, it would have been singularly out of character, and historical anomaly.
There are many Americans that claim to support Freedom of Religion and yet they continue to declare what is and isn't a religion. Take George W. Bush for example. He has been quoted to say the Wiccan belief system is not a religion. That is dangerous.
It is indeed. On the other hand, how do you decide whether a religion is bona fide? A government must decide or it can't govern the people involved. If I founded a religion whose primary premise is that paying more to Government institutions than to God's institutions was immoral (-: hmmm, sounds pretty reasonable when put that way:-) and then paid hardly anything to God's institutions, it would be pretty clear that this was tax evasion, not religion. You must draw a line somewhere.
I believe that the line should be the ``and'' line.
That is, if a religion has spiritual beliefs and those beliefs are overtly hostile to government, then for purposes of government we are not dealing with a religion here but a subversive organisation. Yes, you will get abuse of genuine freedom, but we've got that already: for a relatively benign example, when the government funds a parochial school it is violating the freedom-of-religion cause as much as if it had banned the school from something.
It's doing the same thing again when it overwhelmingly funds research into a particular unproven but popular theory, research that works strenuosly to uphold a particular set of beliefs (and never mind the less convenient observations) as opposed to all others.
Personally, I do not support what Germany is doing to CoS but I have no right to impose my American ideals onto the German people. To do so is also dangerous.
Absolutely! The Pilgrims came to America not for genuine freedom of their own, but in order to be able to oppress people in their own way (Blue Laws, for example). The US Constitution happened more or less as a reaction to this kind of thinking, and not before time, either.
write me a trojan/virus/worm hidden in a movie file and I will be quite happy to change my mind
Can you say ``subliminal advertising?'' Good, 'coz that's a movie Trojan. Changed your mind yet? (-:
Or were you after something like Independence Day, which portrays someone throwing together a virus in WinCE (hey, maybe they just used WinCE as it is) and uploading it (how?) into alien hardware and software to devastating effect (ie a normal Windows install)?
Challenge - name ONE major religion which has NOT had many atrocities (sp?) carried out in its name
``Christianity'' is so diverse a group that you can't possibly lump them all in together and deal with them en bloc. Many subsections of Protestantism have clean hands in this regard.
The participants in the initially quiet Christian revolution (Ti Ping Revolution) in China many hundreds of years ago did well until the Romans discovered them and incited the neighbouring Shinto groups to wage war on them. They weren't even Protestant, as such, since they didn't know that Rome existed.
Likewise the ``St Thomas Christians'' in India until the Goan Inquisition was set up - thanks to whom modern STC are quite different to the originals.
(with the exception of Wicca.
Who, friendly and harmless as most Wiccans are, carry out their atrocities in such small pieces that they're often never discovered, let alone noticed.
And no, Bhuddism doesn't count as that is a philosohpy, not a religion per se).
Funny, Roman Catholicism inherited an awful lot of practices (e.g. indulgences) from a mere philosophy. People don't build and worship thumping great gold idols for a philosophy, however they will do that for a religion. End of story.
The other posters forgot some notable ones: Atheism (think Russia and China), and interesting groups like the Janaists, who wear cloth mouthguards and sweep their paths to avoid harming as much as an insect, but OTOH sent hundreds of assassins after Baghwan Shree Rajneesh becuase of his exclusionism (would you believe!).
Find me One religion that hasn't committed atrocities in the name of "God" (whoever that might be to them) and I'll eat my CPU.
Break out the sauce code. There are several flavours of Protestantism which are quite clean of atrocity on religious grounds (although Seventh-day Adventism recently took a bit of a hit by not preventing its people from becoming involved in the Rwandan wars, not that there was an enormous amount of choice).
And before you ask, yes, there are recorded instances of professed Atheists (e.g., Russian Communists, and some of the Nazi secret services - although many of the Reich were/are more or less Catholics) shooting members of various religions simply because they were not Atheists.
No, it doesn't. Very few Catholics were killed, and those only after the Roman Catholic Church decided that Hitler wasn't going to win, and deserted him (not as if he didn't deserve it). At the start of the war, Hitler publicly stated that he wanted to design the Reich along the same lines os the Jesuit organisation, and until they bailed out, the Roman Church were very strong supporters of him, so much so that they had to pedal very hard after the war to prevent the Pope from being tried as a war criminal.
OTOH millions of Orthodox believers in places like (wait for it) the former Yugoslavia were murdered around WWII time, not by gas ovens but by their Catholic neighbours as directed by gun-toting priests and the Ustashi, using methods like herding them into their own churches and then torching the building. Grandma or baby, in you went.
Lest we forget.
Recognition: the Church of the 4-day Work Week
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Oh, by the way, Has anyone noticed this trend to qualify religions? Bush doesn't recognise some beliefs as religions - therefore they don't get freedom of religious choice.
Does this mean that the Church of the Four Day Work Week doesn't get official sanction? Boo, hiss! (-:
Seriously, on one hand Bush's method is the reason that the US Constitution has been so badly eroded in pratice in recent years, and on the other hand there are several religions whose primary goal is not so much the veneration of anything or anyone (although this is often at least a secondary goal) as world domination and the promotion of the organisation itself rather than any particular diety or lack thereof.
BTW, does anyone know what the inside of a Church of Humanism looks like? Is there really a big mirror across the front? (-:
Cheaper than Scientology, works better too
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Scientology is not a religion, but a SCAM based on extorting money from its victims (low level adherents) and intimidating its opposition. It costs thousands of dollars to be made "clear" by the pseudoscientific nonsense of the Scientology witch doctors.
And it's a subset of TA anyway. Read Eric Berne's book What do you say after you say hello? and see a less nebulous engram-uprooting method for about $Oz10 instead of $US thousands.
The thing that boggles my mind is that Scientology has no particular end other than itself any more. It has bootstrapped itself beyond the need for reasons, and also beyond reason as that term is normally understood.
For the last souple of years (perhaps under the influence of this wife Malinda, perhaps not), Gates has been throwing money at various philanthropic targets.
Perhaps not. The upsurge in charitable spending (which is still, in relative terms, pathetic) started very shortly after someone calculated that Bill's personal giving, pro rata, was much, much lower than the average single Welfare mum's personal giving. Call it embarrassment, call it publicity, but please don't call it unadulterated altruism. Also, a lot of the donating that he does comes with the proviso that his name is loudly involved (like ``the Bill Gates building'' he donated to one university, which at the time of opening housed computers running ``a variety of operating systems'' or at least of Linux distributions).
That's not paranoia! That's Microsoft!
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It would be very hard to do business if everybody suspected the software of having alterior motives.
Now, who would suspect, say, Outlook of having ulterior motives? Blue Mountain Greeting Cards? Never! Microsoft, Microsoft, uber alles - and Netscape programmers are weenies!
Microsoft, Scientologists and the Inquisition
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Scientology:They were afraid there were security risks from using software from a Scientologist. No joke.
Many will be shocked to know that this is indeed a serious risk, and one which Open Source is much better at averting. Scientologists, as with some other groups (see below) are duty-bound to further the cause of Scientology before considering the morality of their actions or their own welfare. Following this principle, they have been quite happy to work at subverting courts, governments, any person or institution which they (the organisation) perceive as an opponent.
I'm sure there are many followers of Scientology who have contributed Open Source code, but I'd be surprised if any of it made a serious security breach, firstly because not everything a Scientologist does is necessarily subversive and secondly because if they did, this random-peer-review thingy would have them straightened out in no time.
Microsoft:And for some strange reason they weren't afraid of security risks from Microsoft itself? Or the NSA? Or even the insecure-by-design philosopy that let MS itself get hacked by a kiddie?
Amusing piece of doublethink, methinks. (-: Willing to deal with one devil but, oh my goodness, not that other devil...
Inquisition: There are many large social groups whose charter require them to act on the same principles as the Scientology organisation does, but perhaps the scariest and traditionally most destructive has been and is the Roman Church. If Cardinal Ratzinger (current head of what was once called the Inquisition) gets to be the next Pope, and maybe even if not, Church-dominated countries like Germany will find that Scientology is really both small and amateur on the politics and skullduggery fronts. Millions of confessionals and staff worldwide provide a political information resource about which Scientology can only dream enviously, and with nearly a billion adherents, only China could hope to field as many ``troops'' if it came down to a matter of open conflict.
If you think I'm kidding, find out about the Goan Inquisition. More than a million people died in it, many of them good, strong Catholics, only a few hundred years ago - and yet evidence even of its existence is already scarce. If an organisation can sweep a million deaths at one location under the carpet, what about elsewhere? Goa was only a branch office of the Spanish Inquisition.
Religion and politics are dangerous bedfellows. If you're going to choose a religion, choose one which carefully keeps them separate. This eliminates many forms of Christianity, Bhuddism, Judaism, Islam and Atheism. Is there anyone that I haven't offended yet? It should take about three seconds to moderate this through the floor... with postings like this one, who needs a karma cap? (-:
Lafayette Ronald Hubbard died screaming...
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...at his ``body thetans,'' so if he's the empitome of Scientology, I want none of it, thank you. OTOH, I did enjoy his war-and-peace ``Battlefield Earth'' SciFi novel...
They also have this pulled-from-the-air idea that the Earth is 75 million years old, a figure which puzzles evolutionists and creationists alike.
A Scientologist here in Perth sat me down and offered me ``control of my life'' while she herself was clearly incapable of controlling her own smoking habit. This sounds a lot like Microsoft and security, so perhaps the utility is more compatible than Germany thinks. (-:
Many years ago (1980?) my sister and I did one of their timed tests. I pre-scanned it before beginning to answer, and it seemed fairly clear from the questions that they wanted a total mercenary, so... they got one! I romped through the questions, quickly choosing the mercenary answer each time, almost always the most self-seving answer as well, and I think not by coincidence. Sister, being the sensitive, emotive type, scored very low. I got ``Uh... well... you did very well indeed on this test, but we can still help you...'' I love it when a basically honest person run up against policy and the honesty wins! (-:
If you're seeking more WOW from the real and original Signal11, he found the bulk comment here poisoned by fascist management, so now inhabits Kuro5hin instead.
Everywhere, school administrators pandered and panicked, rushing to show that they were highly sensitive to parent's fears, even if they were oblivious to the needs and problems of many of their students.
Here we have illustrated a key issue not often understood about schools: schools do not exist for the students. Simple enough? Schools, which are there - in theory - solely because of the students, are not for the students. When you understand why schools as they are today exist, then it all makes perfect sense.
This Sheldon Richman article, ``Horrors! Maybe the Schools are Working Just Fine'' explains it well, as does John Taylor Gatto, whom he references. Schools as we see them today were not designed for the good of students, they were designed for the good of the state, and in particular, to mass-produce good little unquestioning soldiers after Prussia's embarrassing defeat at the hands of the amateur Napoleon, which was a PR disaster for mercenary-powered Prussia near as big as Microsoft's recent demonstration of system security (-: BTW, has anyone found w2ksrc.zip 420763k on a warez site yet?;-). Prussia, to survive as it was, thought it had to thoroughly subvert the needs of the individual to the needs of the State, and did. Schools (the regimentation, the systems of grading and competition, age segregation, large classes etc ad mauseum) were a big part of this, and we've inherited them.
That's why school seems insane if viewed as a haven for the principle of learning: they're not, it's a proletariat-worker factory which would be deserting its founding principles should it (God forbid) become a Realschulen and start actually fostering any bona fide learning.
I also commend to you Karl Bunday's site for many different reasons that school is bad for students, and you in particular.
So how about a chapter on this topic, Jon? I won't even ask for credit! <g,d,r>
Slashdot Mirror
what planet are you from? planet FrontPage?
Probably. The planet which prefers kilobytes of java (fphover) to a one-line onmouseover statement, never sets the page's background colour, and whose server extensions are (1) huge; (2) incredibly insecure; and (3) a rectal pain to install correctly? Been there, planted a flag, never going back.
There are plenty of PS pages, but it's likely that your (Windows based?) web browser isn't set up to display them, or is too thick to display them.
Also, PDF is essentially a proprietarised PS; think ``I am viewing a PostScript page'' next time you click on a link ending ``.pdf'' and you'll eventually pick the idea up. Bzip2'ed PS (document.ps.bz2) generally does much better than PDF spacewise, too.
Though nothing to write home about (compared to the superior IE5.5)
Superior? This is good, considering that IE 5.5 trashes the networking DLLs on Windows 95 (because, say M$, Windows 95 is no longer supported <conspiracy tone=evil>...so... why does it install on '95 at all? Scumbags!</conspiracy>) and 5.5sp1 occasionally knackers the name services on at least Windows 2000. Umm... security? Let's not go there.
Mozilla is still slow, although you can do some amazing things with it using XUL and friends. NS6, however, is even slower and buggier. So much for ``flagship'' status. Konqueror, although still obviously beta, absolutely hammers NS6. Even ``testbed'' browsers like Amaya are comparable, which is pretty disgraceful. I use Konqueror for most things, and occasionally Mozilla (M18). Both are useable (although I wish Mozilla didn't look so much like NS), both have taken a definitely encouraging direction, both are improving faster than IE. So: the future's so bright I've gotta adjust my gamma.
my graphics card is unsupported or else requires a more advanced version of XFree86
And this is not a problem for Windows NT? Oh, my! (-:
Seriously: many, many graphics cards (including this Banshee) run just fine out of the box, and new versions of things are not as risky to install under Linux as they are under Windows.
I have no idea where to look for config files. Don't tell me;
/etc - and don't give me any of that ``don't tell me'' crap, this isn't a write-only forum.
I'm afraid of the word "compile".
I'm afraid of the term ``painted into a corner,'' which is where you often wind up if you're unable (or unwilling, same thing in effect) to do a compile. Let's try one of these fearsome compiles, just to see how hard it is: ``make bzImage'' - ooh, tough one! Not that I've had to recompile a kernel for months, and I do a variety of Linux installation and support for a living.
I want things that I need to know about to jump out at me - I don't want to dig through unfamiliar directories via the command prompt.
They're there. Just click on the K or the footprint and select ``Configure.''
I want a folder called "Control Panels."
Would you settle for typing ``control-panel'' on a command line, or putting same behind an icon? Hey, it works for me! (-:
if you want more otherwise-capable computer users to go over to Linux, these are the things that have to be taken care of
Great, because they have been taken care of. And folks like Helix are working to make them ridiculously easy, and have been making good progress.
I'm not unsympathetic to issues about hardware mfgrs making drivers difficult to write but that doesn't change the fact that if my card don't work, my card don't work.
This seems to be your basic bitching point, and will only be fixed by Linux's popularity outweighing Microsoft's funny deals and lawyerisms. It's got sweet Fanny Adams to do with technical issues.
The move to platform-independent X drivers is a brilliant one in that OpenBSD and all of the other even-less-mainstream operating systems like The Hurd can have updated X drivers at the same time that Linux gets them. Would that this could also be done for Windows and other devices; the hardware manufacturers would be dancing and singing in the streets, flinging their hats in the air (and in some countries discharging firearms, hopefully skywards). As things stand, careful manufacturers are taking advantage of common-code designs and it won't be too long before they're producing one standard driver and one Windows driver.
Although we really are OT, since this is X not Linux and the change would apply to anything Unixoid on an x86 CPU.
But I would greatly enjoy a window, maybe 2/3 the size of the current screen, with a picture of a monitor on it that you could stretch and shrink and move around with your mouse in real time, having the corresponding effect on the actual display area within the monitor. Plus a little label that says ``Use Backspace to revert one step, Esc to revert to last known good parameters.'' (-:
the [US, presumably] NAVY uses Exchange for its mail system
I can't wait for the Outlook RemoteControlledAircraftCarrierOverSMTP virus... mind you, we only see a Yank carrier here in Perth every few months at best.
telnet enterprise.vessel.navy.mil 110
user falken
pass jason
rudd +10
engn 100 100 100 100
bsod *
quit
After seeing what Oz politicians have made of the Collins class sub, and a supply ship sized for European shipping pallets (Aussie pallets are slightly larger... oops), you can bet that the Oz Navy will be switching to an all-Microsoft shop any time now, just to stay in character.
I am a committed carnivore
Oh, they have Internet in the asylums these days? (-:
Seriously, if you were a committed carnivore, you would be committed to hospital within about two weeks unless you chose mostly fish and other relatively low-fat low-pollutant meats and ate them all raw and were happy with a lifespan of under 40 years. This has been tried before, several times.
Oddly enough, two weeks is about how long people last on an all-MacDonalds' diet as well. Perhaps that's the typical amount of time can survive on recycled garbage before it tosses in the towel.
I prefer my food first-hand... (-:
Development of galaxies may be quicker than originaly thought. It certainly is, if that Arp astronomer that everyone loves to hate is even partially right. He has Quasars being baby galaxies, fired off from other galaxies... maybe, maybe not, but his re-interpretation of redshift (with extensive documentation and numerous showstopper examples) is certainly interesting, and is very much a Linux ``it can't be done, but that hasn't stopped it from happening'' paradigm-busting phenomenon.
The GP Hulls are constructed of one solid piece of some fantastic transparent and indestructable material. The inside surface is coated with a 'stasis field' conducting film making the ship indestructable and extremely safe. If a threat were detected, such as immenent collision or attack, the satsis field would flip on and further interaction with the space-time continuum would be cut off for anything within the field. The computer would set to deactivate the field in random intervals and poll for conditions. if it was safe (say the sun you crashed into finally blew up and cast you free), then you were back in real time and could continue your voyage.
Except that gravity gets through the hull. This is how it was discovered, in one Niven short story, that the Puppeteers' world had no moon (they didn't understand tides very well). Cost them a millions Stars' worth of bribery, could have been more.
Resting comfortably on the surface of a neutron star might be fine with your stasis field on, but if the computer flipped it off for a nanosecond to check outside conditions, you'd be so much raspberry jam on the downhill walls in much less than an eyeblink, even presuming that the equipment survived long enough to re-enable the stasis.
Figure it out: light goes at (more or less) 300,000km/s, and escape velocity for a neutron star must be pushing this, so if you were exposed to this kind of gravity field point-blank for a nanosecond you'd be doing many thousands of meters per second by the time the field was blocked again - so far past dead that only God could ``reassemble.''
These were ethnic conflicts in which both Catholics and Orthodox have a lot of blame to share.
Uh, ``in a word, bullshit.'' Do you also believe the crap on mainstream media channels about the former Yugoslavia today? Have you spoken to a variety of the people previously resident of tfY? Evidently not.
As to the rest of your post, you've got your trotters in a strange trough. You don't need to believe the revisionists, just read copies of the source documents from the time and make up your own mind. The picture you get will be dramatically different from your current view.
And if the RCC hadn't behaved as it did during and before WW2 it would have been entirely out of character, out of step with their entire history.
Hair splitting by means of labels won't work.
There are some extremely basic, core differences in principle which don't show up in a careless overview of the resulting doctrines, but which make a huge behavioural difference.
Just because it happened doesn't make it one of Hitlers stated motivations.
Eh? Hitler went to the trouble of writing it down! Granted, some many 'roos were missing from his top paddock, and he was often rowing with only one oar, but he did say that such things should be done.
You're still down at least one explanation, in particular the USSR and the behaviour of Soviet Communism.
Trying to associate Nazi officials with the Catholic Church will get you tangled in web of contradictory historical references, that may leave you embarassed quoting revisionists.
I just go back to copies of the original documents, no revisionism required. I think you stopped researching at the wrong layer of revision. If the Roman heirarchy hadn't been involved, it would have been singularly out of character, and historical anomaly.
There are many Americans that claim to support Freedom of Religion and yet they continue to declare what is and isn't a religion. Take George W. Bush for example. He has been quoted to say the Wiccan belief system is not a religion. That is dangerous.
:-) and then paid hardly anything to God's institutions, it would be pretty clear that this was tax evasion, not religion. You must draw a line somewhere.
It is indeed. On the other hand, how do you decide whether a religion is bona fide? A government must decide or it can't govern the people involved. If I founded a religion whose primary premise is that paying more to Government institutions than to God's institutions was immoral (-: hmmm, sounds pretty reasonable when put that way
I believe that the line should be the ``and'' line.
That is, if a religion has spiritual beliefs and those beliefs are overtly hostile to government, then for purposes of government we are not dealing with a religion here but a subversive organisation. Yes, you will get abuse of genuine freedom, but we've got that already: for a relatively benign example, when the government funds a parochial school it is violating the freedom-of-religion cause as much as if it had banned the school from something.
It's doing the same thing again when it overwhelmingly funds research into a particular unproven but popular theory, research that works strenuosly to uphold a particular set of beliefs (and never mind the less convenient observations) as opposed to all others.
Personally, I do not support what Germany is doing to CoS but I have no right to impose my American ideals onto the German people. To do so is also dangerous.
Absolutely! The Pilgrims came to America not for genuine freedom of their own, but in order to be able to oppress people in their own way (Blue Laws, for example). The US Constitution happened more or less as a reaction to this kind of thinking, and not before time, either.
write me a trojan/virus/worm hidden in a movie file and I will be quite happy to change my mind
Can you say ``subliminal advertising?'' Good, 'coz that's a movie Trojan. Changed your mind yet? (-:
Or were you after something like Independence Day, which portrays someone throwing together a virus in WinCE (hey, maybe they just used WinCE as it is) and uploading it (how?) into alien hardware and software to devastating effect (ie a normal Windows install)?
Challenge - name ONE major religion which has NOT had many atrocities (sp?) carried out in its name
``Christianity'' is so diverse a group that you can't possibly lump them all in together and deal with them en bloc. Many subsections of Protestantism have clean hands in this regard.
The participants in the initially quiet Christian revolution (Ti Ping Revolution) in China many hundreds of years ago did well until the Romans discovered them and incited the neighbouring Shinto groups to wage war on them. They weren't even Protestant, as such, since they didn't know that Rome existed.
Likewise the ``St Thomas Christians'' in India until the Goan Inquisition was set up - thanks to whom modern STC are quite different to the originals.
(with the exception of Wicca.
Who, friendly and harmless as most Wiccans are, carry out their atrocities in such small pieces that they're often never discovered, let alone noticed.
And no, Bhuddism doesn't count as that is a philosohpy, not a religion per se).
Funny, Roman Catholicism inherited an awful lot of practices (e.g. indulgences) from a mere philosophy. People don't build and worship thumping great gold idols for a philosophy, however they will do that for a religion. End of story.
The other posters forgot some notable ones: Atheism (think Russia and China), and interesting groups like the Janaists, who wear cloth mouthguards and sweep their paths to avoid harming as much as an insect, but OTOH sent hundreds of assassins after Baghwan Shree Rajneesh becuase of his exclusionism (would you believe!).
But you did spell ``atrocities'' right. (-:
Find me One religion that hasn't committed atrocities in the name of "God" (whoever that might be to them) and I'll eat my CPU.
Break out the sauce code. There are several flavours of Protestantism which are quite clean of atrocity on religious grounds (although Seventh-day Adventism recently took a bit of a hit by not preventing its people from becoming involved in the Rwandan wars, not that there was an enormous amount of choice).
And before you ask, yes, there are recorded instances of professed Atheists (e.g., Russian Communists, and some of the Nazi secret services - although many of the Reich were/are more or less Catholics) shooting members of various religions simply because they were not Atheists.
No, it doesn't. Very few Catholics were killed, and those only after the Roman Catholic Church decided that Hitler wasn't going to win, and deserted him (not as if he didn't deserve it). At the start of the war, Hitler publicly stated that he wanted to design the Reich along the same lines os the Jesuit organisation, and until they bailed out, the Roman Church were very strong supporters of him, so much so that they had to pedal very hard after the war to prevent the Pope from being tried as a war criminal.
OTOH millions of Orthodox believers in places like (wait for it) the former Yugoslavia were murdered around WWII time, not by gas ovens but by their Catholic neighbours as directed by gun-toting priests and the Ustashi, using methods like herding them into their own churches and then torching the building. Grandma or baby, in you went.
Lest we forget.
Oh, by the way, Has anyone noticed this trend to qualify religions? Bush doesn't recognise some beliefs as religions - therefore they don't get freedom of religious choice.
Does this mean that the Church of the Four Day Work Week doesn't get official sanction? Boo, hiss! (-:
Seriously, on one hand Bush's method is the reason that the US Constitution has been so badly eroded in pratice in recent years, and on the other hand there are several religions whose primary goal is not so much the veneration of anything or anyone (although this is often at least a secondary goal) as world domination and the promotion of the organisation itself rather than any particular diety or lack thereof.
BTW, does anyone know what the inside of a Church of Humanism looks like? Is there really a big mirror across the front? (-:
Scientology is not a religion, but a SCAM based on extorting money from its victims (low level adherents) and intimidating its opposition. It costs thousands of dollars to be made "clear" by the pseudoscientific nonsense of the Scientology witch doctors.
And it's a subset of TA anyway. Read Eric Berne's book What do you say after you say hello? and see a less nebulous engram-uprooting method for about $Oz10 instead of $US thousands.
The thing that boggles my mind is that Scientology has no particular end other than itself any more. It has bootstrapped itself beyond the need for reasons, and also beyond reason as that term is normally understood.
For the last souple of years (perhaps under the influence of this wife Malinda, perhaps not), Gates has been throwing money at various philanthropic targets.
Perhaps not. The upsurge in charitable spending (which is still, in relative terms, pathetic) started very shortly after someone calculated that Bill's personal giving, pro rata, was much, much lower than the average single Welfare mum's personal giving. Call it embarrassment, call it publicity, but please don't call it unadulterated altruism. Also, a lot of the donating that he does comes with the proviso that his name is loudly involved (like ``the Bill Gates building'' he donated to one university, which at the time of opening housed computers running ``a variety of operating systems'' or at least of Linux distributions).
It would be very hard to do business if everybody suspected the software of having alterior motives.
Now, who would suspect, say, Outlook of having ulterior motives? Blue Mountain Greeting Cards? Never! Microsoft, Microsoft, uber alles - and Netscape programmers are weenies!
I'm sure there are many followers of Scientology who have contributed Open Source code, but I'd be surprised if any of it made a serious security breach, firstly because not everything a Scientologist does is necessarily subversive and secondly because if they did, this random-peer-review thingy would have them straightened out in no time.
Microsoft: And for some strange reason they weren't afraid of security risks from Microsoft itself? Or the NSA? Or even the insecure-by-design philosopy that let MS itself get hacked by a kiddie?
Amusing piece of doublethink, methinks. (-: Willing to deal with one devil but, oh my goodness, not that other devil...
Inquisition: There are many large social groups whose charter require them to act on the same principles as the Scientology organisation does, but perhaps the scariest and traditionally most destructive has been and is the Roman Church. If Cardinal Ratzinger (current head of what was once called the Inquisition) gets to be the next Pope, and maybe even if not, Church-dominated countries like Germany will find that Scientology is really both small and amateur on the politics and skullduggery fronts. Millions of confessionals and staff worldwide provide a political information resource about which Scientology can only dream enviously, and with nearly a billion adherents, only China could hope to field as many ``troops'' if it came down to a matter of open conflict.
If you think I'm kidding, find out about the Goan Inquisition. More than a million people died in it, many of them good, strong Catholics, only a few hundred years ago - and yet evidence even of its existence is already scarce. If an organisation can sweep a million deaths at one location under the carpet, what about elsewhere? Goa was only a branch office of the Spanish Inquisition.
Religion and politics are dangerous bedfellows. If you're going to choose a religion, choose one which carefully keeps them separate. This eliminates many forms of Christianity, Bhuddism, Judaism, Islam and Atheism. Is there anyone that I haven't offended yet? It should take about three seconds to moderate this through the floor... with postings like this one, who needs a karma cap? (-:
...at his ``body thetans,'' so if he's the empitome of Scientology, I want none of it, thank you. OTOH, I did enjoy his war-and-peace ``Battlefield Earth'' SciFi novel...
They also have this pulled-from-the-air idea that the Earth is 75 million years old, a figure which puzzles evolutionists and creationists alike.
A Scientologist here in Perth sat me down and offered me ``control of my life'' while she herself was clearly incapable of controlling her own smoking habit. This sounds a lot like Microsoft and security, so perhaps the utility is more compatible than Germany thinks. (-:
Many years ago (1980?) my sister and I did one of their timed tests. I pre-scanned it before beginning to answer, and it seemed fairly clear from the questions that they wanted a total mercenary, so... they got one! I romped through the questions, quickly choosing the mercenary answer each time, almost always the most self-seving answer as well, and I think not by coincidence. Sister, being the sensitive, emotive type, scored very low. I got ``Uh... well... you did very well indeed on this test, but we can still help you...'' I love it when a basically honest person run up against policy and the honesty wins! (-:
If you're seeking more WOW from the real and original Signal11, he found the bulk comment here poisoned by fascist management, so now inhabits Kuro5hin instead.
Here we have illustrated a key issue not often understood about schools: schools do not exist for the students. Simple enough? Schools, which are there - in theory - solely because of the students, are not for the students. When you understand why schools as they are today exist, then it all makes perfect sense.
This Sheldon Richman article, ``Horrors! Maybe the Schools are Working Just Fine'' explains it well, as does John Taylor Gatto, whom he references. Schools as we see them today were not designed for the good of students, they were designed for the good of the state, and in particular, to mass-produce good little unquestioning soldiers after Prussia's embarrassing defeat at the hands of the amateur Napoleon, which was a PR disaster for mercenary-powered Prussia near as big as Microsoft's recent demonstration of system security (-: BTW, has anyone found w2ksrc.zip 420763k on a warez site yet? ;-). Prussia, to survive as it was, thought it had to thoroughly subvert the needs of the individual to the needs of the State, and did. Schools (the regimentation, the systems of grading and competition, age segregation, large classes etc ad mauseum) were a big part of this, and we've inherited them.
That's why school seems insane if viewed as a haven for the principle of learning: they're not, it's a proletariat-worker factory which would be deserting its founding principles should it (God forbid) become a Realschulen and start actually fostering any bona fide learning.
I also commend to you Karl Bunday's site for many different reasons that school is bad for students, and you in particular.
So how about a chapter on this topic, Jon? I won't even ask for credit! <g,d,r>