> a set of regions locally ruled by governors, viceroys or client kings in the name of another
Empires come in different flavors, not just militaristic but economic, philosophical, legalistic, etc.
The American Empire partly arises from a careful weakening of the sovereign membrane between countries, such that they begin act as one, with direction from a power center outside of many of them. Some examples:
1. The US hooking into the European SWIFT financial network to monitor non-US transactions.
2. The US requiring air flights that _both_ originate and terminate in other countries, such as Canada, to comply with US laws, in _case_ the flight strays over US airspace (reciprocal rules do not apply re US flights that might stray into Canadian airspace).
3. US tracking of Canadian financial and medical transactions, because the companies in Canada are multinationals with offices in the US, and therefore such transaction data *leaks* across the border into various processing centers.
4. An effort to apply US copyright and patent laws around the world, for a more uniform legal environment.
5. The destruction of many privacy safeguards in Europe because the US finds they get in the way of security and business.
The US is dictating terms to other countries - it is not a give-and-take healthy interaction of equals, with foreign ideas having an equal chance to take root in the US. The other nations look more and more like those "client kings", ruling with the permisson of the multinationals, many of which are based in the US.
I'm NOT saying something silly like Bush is an emperor. I'm saying the US is calling the shots, for many countries. Probably a better term would be the American Hegemony - the dominance of one group over other groups, with or without the threat of force, to the extent that, for instance, the dominant party can dictate the terms of trade to its advantage; or more broadly, that cultural perspectives become skewed to favor the dominant group.
I've not read many books or editorials advising against living like that. Self-discipline certainly, so that you don't let schedules slide and never get done the things that need doing.
Indeed, some worklife experts talk about how the artificial distinction between work and personal in today's world causes stress. We have to put on our work faces and behaviors and become different people when we go to the office and sometimes forget to take them off when we come home.
And for creative people, like programmers, blending work and personal life increases creative productivity, providing that child-like imaginative environment implied by the top-poster.
In the future, all the grunt work will be done by machines, leaving the creative work for humans.
Uh, so what about those of us who are 'work as home self-employed consultants'? We have that same blur of mixing home and work that those silly 9-to-5'ers never seem to understand. One minute you're working and the next you're relaxing in the pool, in the middle of the day. And like day/night boundaries, weekends have no meaning, as you sometimes work them but take off days during the week.
I guess this is some of the child-like ways of living the topmost article is referring to.
Check out discountlaptops.com. They sell units w/o any OS preloaded and the Chembook/Asus A7V laptop I got runs Gentoo Linux very nicely.
You won't find the namebrand laptops there but those further up the food chain of laptops. But then you didn't think those namebrand laptops built their own, did you? Hopefully brand isn't important to you, re bragging rights around the office.
About a year ago I purchased my second laptop from www.discountlaptops.com, to avoid paying the Windows tax. Although they don't provide Linux support explicitly, they understand what it is, use it themselves, and don't push Windows or get huffy when doing warranty work under Linux. They also discuss on their website how the laptop market works, in that the brandnames you see on laptops do NOT produce the units themselves, so you'd do as well buying from the OEM.
You should also become familiar with the term "whitetops", which is the market where you buy the laptop frame from an OEM, and then add your own RAM, WiFi PCI, internal video card (in some cases), hard drive, DVD or CD, producing a totally custom box.
I run Gentoo, carefully tuned to the laptop, and it runs very fast and has become my primary desktop. No Windows on it anywhere. Also get absolutely as much RAM as you can, as its more important on a laptop than a desktop to minimize disk spin up.
I've collected my tweaks and experiences on my wiki at www.taupro.com/wiki/ChemBook/HomePage.
> The problem is exactly the opposite...Americans are TOO BUSY!
If one isn't outraged enough to do something about it, you aren't really outraged, just inconvenienced. Most Americans are only inconvenienced, and adapt.
> Do you wonder why you see people in the middle east out protesting in the middle of the > week? It's because they DON'T HAVE ANYTHING TO DO! They don't have jobs!
So that's why the recent immigration protests were so well attended - those people had nothing else to do? I assure many of those people (not only illegals protested BTW) have jobs, and took a cut in income to protest. Many are them are hourly - no work, no pay. Yet still they walked off their jobs and marched.
> It's hard to be politcally active after working 60 hours/week, then dealing with your kids/wife/friends/whatever.
Uh, those busy Americans, if they're so busy working, -do- have vacation days? And some personal days? And maybe even days w/o pay? They could spend some of those to be politically active.
And since when is "dealing with your friends" (not wife/kids) an obligation that overrides your duties as a citizen? And perhaps those people listed can actually get involved as well, and the kids can be taught political activism as part of being a family?
Those in power have those "busy" people right where they want them -- in the office working overtime and in front of the TV.
Perhaps his bosses believe that in a communist country, everything is owned by the government and no profits are distributed to the company. Something about anti-capitalism and government ownership of the means of production, straight out of the 1960s.
I have no direct experience with how chinese society/business operates but China seems more of a Bureaucratic society than a Communist one, with a hybrid economic system. They don't fit the very plain vanilla definition of Marxism I was taught in the US.
Definition: Bureaucracy is a sociological concept of government and its institutions as an organizational structure characterized by regularized procedure, division of responsibility, hierarchy, and impersonal relationships.
Actually this doesn't help in most cases. While you can refuse to outsource your own company employees, when the customer wants a lower price because your competitors -are- outsourcing, and you can't afford to offer that price, you go out of business.
Running your own company just means you are accountable to a different set of people, not that you avoid accountability.
There is no escape. You just grouse about the state of the marketplace instead of your boss.
Magic, I don't understand what you're trying to do to your weekly paper, re "reducing the Google effect". If you don't want people to find you via Google, how are they going to find you at all? I, and many others, have no loyalty to a specific paper. We're not going to be a persistent "customer" for your paper to sell as a demographic to your advertisers. If you block Google from either indexing or referring to your paper, then few will know you exist. Your bandwidth problems will be solved.
I'm not being difficult, I'm scratching my head trying to figure out where you're coming from and what you want.
"The US is not going to relocate its populace into central locations and build a massive public transport project. China (or any other developing nation for the matter) is not going to tell 1.3 billion people that are always on the verge of a violent revolution to come out of poverty slowly so that they don't dump green house gases with their inefficient industries."
"Billions of people are coming out of poverty and starting to really consume for the first time. These people simply well not accept being told they can't live like the people in first world nations do."
Don't make the mistake that this is a negotiation. It is not. Those people will do the things you say, or they will die. It's as simple as that. Mother Nature does not negotiate. Politicians cannot spin the laws of physics, and stupid humans who cry "but it's not fair!" and refuse to change their ways will die all the same.
Some people seem to assume that its about money, or political balance or national ego. No, it's about life or death for millions, and many assume that it won't be them. But it won't be just the third world countries. And in times of such crisis, a strong government tends to rise, fascist or martial law or police state, call it what you will. But in desperate times when the people panic or fight for resources, your "rights" will go out the window.
Freedom will be the first casuality in this crisis, for the sake of preserving life. But what a life...
The novelty of space will wear off VERY quickly. It's not like there's anything you can do there, no nice weather, no beaches, no skiing, no or anything else rich people like to do on holiday.
How about zero-g sex? Does that novelty wear off?
I bought two copies, one for me and one to loan friends with a passing interest. That said, I wished for a bit _more_ depth, in some portions, contrary to the thread poster wishing for less.
Having been involved in Fidonet (I created the original Echomail feature), there was a lot of, I think, interesting politics as the Fidonet bureaucracy was impacted by the strong demand for Echomail.
Also nice would be a mention of the nickname for the layout of the Dallas net, that of "voodoo bondage network routing" and of which nets tended to lead, follow and generally cause trouble.
Anyway, I wished for a continuous storytelling thread tying together the history of Fidonet a bit more although that would have been harder to produce. Jason did a wonderful job of capturing raw material that will be studied in the years to come and, to be fair, has excellent coverage of the IFNA crisis.
It would not react to stimuli as a human does. The results of its actions would not be the same as those for a human. It would not perceive life as a human does. It would not be human.
I agree with your conclusions -- and those conclusions are bad why? That some of us seek to be more than human, to think differently and experience that which we cannot in our current form is a problem?
Is there insufficient room in our world for more than one sentient species? Would we not be stronger by combining such differences in life approaches?
Slashdot Mirror
> a set of regions locally ruled by governors, viceroys or client kings in the name of another
Empires come in different flavors, not just militaristic but economic, philosophical, legalistic, etc.
The American Empire partly arises from a careful weakening of the sovereign membrane between countries, such that they begin act as one, with direction from a power center outside of many of them. Some examples:
1. The US hooking into the European SWIFT financial network to monitor non-US transactions.
2. The US requiring air flights that _both_ originate and terminate in other countries, such as Canada, to comply with US laws, in _case_ the flight strays over US airspace (reciprocal rules do not apply re US flights that might stray into Canadian airspace).
3. US tracking of Canadian financial and medical transactions, because the companies in Canada are multinationals with offices in the US, and therefore such transaction data *leaks* across the border into various processing centers.
4. An effort to apply US copyright and patent laws around the world, for a more uniform legal environment.
5. The destruction of many privacy safeguards in Europe because the US finds they get in the way of security and business.
The US is dictating terms to other countries - it is not a give-and-take healthy interaction of equals, with foreign ideas having an equal chance to take root in the US. The other nations look more and more like those "client kings", ruling with the permisson of the multinationals, many of which are based in the US.
I'm NOT saying something silly like Bush is an emperor. I'm saying the US is calling the shots, for many countries. Probably a better term would be the American Hegemony - the dominance of one group over other groups, with or without the threat of force, to the extent that, for instance, the dominant party can dictate the terms of trade to its advantage; or more broadly, that cultural perspectives become skewed to favor the dominant group.
I've not read many books or editorials advising against living like that. Self-discipline certainly, so that you don't let schedules slide and never get done the things that need doing.
Indeed, some worklife experts talk about how the artificial distinction between work and personal in today's world causes stress. We have to put on our work faces and behaviors and become different people when we go to the office and sometimes forget to take them off when we come home.
And for creative people, like programmers, blending work and personal life increases creative productivity, providing that child-like imaginative environment implied by the top-poster.
In the future, all the grunt work will be done by machines, leaving the creative work for humans.
Uh, so what about those of us who are 'work as home self-employed consultants'? We have that same blur of mixing home and work that those silly 9-to-5'ers never seem to understand. One minute you're working and the next you're relaxing in the pool, in the middle of the day. And like day/night boundaries, weekends have no meaning, as you sometimes work them but take off days during the week.
I guess this is some of the child-like ways of living the topmost article is referring to.
Check out discountlaptops.com. They sell units w/o any OS preloaded and the Chembook/Asus A7V laptop I got runs Gentoo Linux very nicely.
You won't find the namebrand laptops there but those further up the food chain of laptops. But then you didn't think those namebrand laptops built their own, did you? Hopefully brand isn't important to you, re bragging rights around the office.
About a year ago I purchased my second laptop from www.discountlaptops.com, to avoid paying the Windows tax. Although they don't provide Linux support explicitly, they understand what it is, use it themselves, and don't push Windows or get huffy when doing warranty work under Linux. They also discuss on their website how the laptop market works, in that the brandnames you see on laptops do NOT produce the units themselves, so you'd do as well buying from the OEM.
You should also become familiar with the term "whitetops", which is the market where you buy the laptop frame from an OEM, and then add your own RAM, WiFi PCI, internal video card (in some cases), hard drive, DVD or CD, producing a totally custom box.
I run Gentoo, carefully tuned to the laptop, and it runs very fast and has become my primary desktop. No Windows on it anywhere. Also get absolutely as much RAM as you can, as its more important on a laptop than a desktop to minimize disk spin up.
I've collected my tweaks and experiences on my wiki at www.taupro.com/wiki/ChemBook/HomePage.
> The problem is exactly the opposite...Americans are TOO BUSY!
If one isn't outraged enough to do something about it, you aren't really outraged, just inconvenienced. Most Americans are only inconvenienced, and adapt.
> Do you wonder why you see people in the middle east out protesting in the middle of the
> week? It's because they DON'T HAVE ANYTHING TO DO! They don't have jobs!
So that's why the recent immigration protests were so well attended - those people had nothing else to do? I assure many of those people (not only illegals protested BTW) have jobs, and took a cut in income to protest. Many are them are hourly - no work, no pay. Yet still they walked off their jobs and marched.
> It's hard to be politcally active after working 60 hours/week, then dealing with your kids/wife/friends/whatever.
Uh, those busy Americans, if they're so busy working, -do- have vacation days? And some personal days? And maybe even days w/o pay? They could spend some of those to be politically active.
And since when is "dealing with your friends" (not wife/kids) an obligation that overrides your duties as a citizen? And perhaps those people listed can actually get involved as well, and the kids can be taught political activism as part of being a family?
Those in power have those "busy" people right where they want them -- in the office working overtime and in front of the TV.
Perhaps his bosses believe that in a communist country, everything is owned by the government and no profits are distributed to the company. Something about anti-capitalism and government ownership of the means of production, straight out of the 1960s.
I have no direct experience with how chinese society/business operates but China seems more of a Bureaucratic society than a Communist one, with a hybrid economic system. They don't fit the very plain vanilla definition of Marxism I was taught in the US.
Definition: Bureaucracy is a sociological concept of government and its institutions as an organizational structure characterized by regularized procedure, division of responsibility, hierarchy, and impersonal relationships.
> Own the company.
Actually this doesn't help in most cases. While you can refuse to outsource your own company employees, when the customer wants a lower price because your competitors -are- outsourcing, and you can't afford to offer that price, you go out of business.
Running your own company just means you are accountable to a different set of people, not that you avoid accountability.
There is no escape. You just grouse about the state of the marketplace instead of your boss.
> ... in hopes of being bought out by the big guys, making a killing, and retiring to a tropical island at 30-something.
What a boring goal to chase. If you're good and 30-something, you don't want to retire, you want to stay in the game...
Magic, I don't understand what you're trying to do to your weekly paper, re "reducing the Google effect". If you don't want people to find you via Google, how are they going to find you at all? I, and many others, have no loyalty to a specific paper. We're not going to be a persistent "customer" for your paper to sell as a demographic to your advertisers. If you block Google from either indexing or referring to your paper, then few will know you exist. Your bandwidth problems will be solved.
I'm not being difficult, I'm scratching my head trying to figure out where you're coming from and what you want.
"The US is not going to relocate its populace into central locations and build a massive public transport project. China (or any other developing nation for the matter) is not going to tell 1.3 billion people that are always on the verge of a violent revolution to come out of poverty slowly so that they don't dump green house gases with their inefficient industries."
"Billions of people are coming out of poverty and starting to really consume for the first time. These people simply well not accept being told they can't live like the people in first world nations do."
Don't make the mistake that this is a negotiation. It is not. Those people will do the things you say, or they will die. It's as simple as that. Mother Nature does not negotiate. Politicians cannot spin the laws of physics, and stupid humans who cry "but it's not fair!" and refuse to change their ways will die all the same.
Some people seem to assume that its about money, or political balance or national ego. No, it's about life or death for millions, and many assume that it won't be them. But it won't be just the third world countries. And in times of such crisis, a strong government tends to rise, fascist or martial law or police state, call it what you will. But in desperate times when the people panic or fight for resources, your "rights" will go out the window.
Freedom will be the first casuality in this crisis, for the sake of preserving life. But what a life...
The novelty of space will wear off VERY quickly. It's not like there's anything you can do there, no nice weather, no beaches, no skiing, no or anything else rich people like to do on holiday.
How about zero-g sex? Does that novelty wear off?
I bought two copies, one for me and one to loan friends with a passing interest. That said, I wished for a bit _more_ depth, in some portions, contrary to the thread poster wishing for less.
Having been involved in Fidonet (I created the original Echomail feature), there was a lot of, I think, interesting politics as the Fidonet bureaucracy was impacted by the strong demand for Echomail.
Also nice would be a mention of the nickname for the layout of the Dallas net, that of "voodoo bondage network routing" and of which nets tended to lead, follow and generally cause trouble.
Anyway, I wished for a continuous storytelling thread tying together the history of Fidonet a bit more although that would have been harder to produce. Jason did a wonderful job of capturing raw material that will be studied in the years to come and, to be fair, has excellent coverage of the IFNA crisis.
That's why they call it (P)olitically (C)orrect.
It would not react to stimuli as a human does. The results of its actions would not be the same as those for a human. It would not perceive life as a human does. It would not be human.
I agree with your conclusions -- and those conclusions are bad why? That some of us seek to be more than human, to think differently and experience that which we cannot in our current form is a problem? Is there insufficient room in our world for more than one sentient species? Would we not be stronger by combining such differences in life approaches?
And for the Python programmers, we have LivePage, as part of the Twisted framework, distributed with Nevow.
http://www.divmod.org/projects/nevow
It attempts to do what AJAX does, albeit at a simpler level.
"The elevator will be anchored to an offshore sea platform near the equator in the Pacific Ocean, and to a small counterweight in space."
> Within each party there are vast differences, but with some 'core' values.
You've GOT to be kidding. From someone outside the traditional party system, from 10,000 feet they ALL look the same.
The issues some of us care about aren't even on the radar of those parties, and would scare them s***less if they were.
The Singularity is Coming.