It works the same way as the safety foam in Demolition Man.
Though seriously that idea bothered me - it seems like if the foam could fill the inside of your car so quickly it would also fill your airways and kill you horribly.
This post is an inspiration to me. It shows you that no matter how rich and famous you get you still have time to argue about materials science fiction on slashdot.
Although the photograph displayed could represent what some people in the early 1950s contemplated a "home computer" might look like (based on the technology of the day), it isn't, as the accompanying text claims, a RAND Corporation illustration from 1954 of a prototype "home computer." The picture is actually an entry submitted to a Fark.com image modification competition, taken from an original photo of a submarine maneuvering room console found on the U.S. Navy web site, converted to grayscale, and modified to replace a modern display panel and TV screen with pictures of a decades-old teletype/printer and television (as well as to add the gray-suited man to the left-hand side of the photo)
How exactly does one promote "capitalism" as in the free and unfettered enterprise of individuals... while eliminating individualism. That's a contradiction. How does the state "get out of the way" AND destroy personal liberty ?
Capitalism is not necessarily about the free enterprise of individuals. If you look at China now are capitalist in the sense that they allowed private companies. In fact China's economic growth comes from the private sector - the state companies are only kept alive for legacy reasons.
Still it's very much not about individualism - the whole spiel of the Chinese "Communist" party is that Chinese people need to sacrifice individual freedoms now to make China a great country. The Communist era system of repression is still very much in place, but rather than repressing evil capitalists it's actually used to supress criticism of the government by ordinary people. Most of the rich people have serious poltical connections to the point that crticism of them is criticism of the government because the rich capitalists and the government are actually the same people.
The Roman Republic was also like this - the Senate was run by very rich people and there wasn't so much a state to speak or - even the armies were paid for by individuals. Wars generated slaves to pay off the soldiers man the estates of the plutocratic scum that dominated the Senate. Now the Roman Republic turned into an Empire and the Emperors had the power to confiscate the assets of their enemies. During the empire, even free workers were gradually turned into serfs as their right to leave their estate was gradually restricted. Of course a society which is 90% serfs and slaves working in agriculture has a serious tendency to stagnate and it did. Still such a system is unfortunately very stable - even after the Roman Empire fell the social system stayed in place for over a thousand years.
Of course collectivisation in the Soviet Union had much the same effect - the workers ended up forced into serfdom on a collective farm run by people who also controlled the army, the press, the secret police and the legal system.
Actually from what I've read the Nazis would have set up something similar - politically well connected and very rich people would have had factories and estates that run mostly on slave labour. The SS ended up owning a lot of companies, and older industrial giants were quite happy to join in the system. My guess is that the rights of even nominally free German workers would have slowly eroded over the centuries too and a similar process of stagnation would have set in.
Now the Nazis and Russian and Chinese Communist Party claimed to varying degrees to be Socialist. Still, objectively, neither of them were anything like Socialists or Social Democrats in democratic countries which were grass roots movements campaigning for more rights for workers and less power for bosses. Actually in the long run they were all movements that give bosses absolute power and reduce the workers to serfdom. It would be more accurate to call them Feudalist parties than Socialist ones.
Whenever this topic comes up someone tries to muddy the issue by bringing up the distinction between ephebophilia and pedofilia.
It's like a much creepier version of pointing out that downloading movies off bitorrent rather than paying a couple of bucks to rent them at Blockbuster is not theft, rather it is copyright infringement.
In 1981 questions were raised of how Kinsey and his staff gathered the information to produce some of the data in the Kinsey Reports. Attention was directed to Tables 30-34 of Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, which report observations of orgasms in over three hundred children between the ages of five months and fourteen years. Former and current directors of The Kinsey Institute confirmed that some of the information was gathered from nine pedophiles and that Kinsey chose not to report the pedophiles to the authorities, balancing what Kinsey saw as the need for their anonymity against the likelihood that their crimes would continue.
Still other researchers seem to agree that being sexually abused as a child is not a good thing in terms of mental health
I dunno, I think Sophie Scholl was very brave but probably she was not able to make a difference. I read some book about Germans who plotted against Hitler though and some of them were enormously likable.
He also became involved in two abortive plots to assassinate Hitler, first in 1938 and again in 1939. His most audacious attempt was in planning, with Ewald von Kleist-Schmenzin, to capture and eliminate Hitler and the entire Nazi party before the invasion of Czechoslovakia. At this particular moment, von Kleist visited England secretly and discussed the situation with British MI6 and some high ranking politicians. There, the name of Canaris became widely known as the executive hand of von Kleist in the event of an anti-Nazi plot. The high ranking German military leaders believed that if Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia, or any other country, then Britain would declare war on Germany. MI6 was of the same opinion. However, the British reaction to Hitler's annexation of the Sudetenland was more cautious. At a meeting with Hitler in Munich, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain chose diplomacy over war. Munich was a severe disappointment for Kleist and Canaris. It gave Hitler's international reputation an important boost for two reasons: one, he was able to play the part of a man of reason and compromise; and two, he could boast that his predictions that England would not respond with war had proven to be correct. There are claims that Canaris, who was extremely shocked by this 'dishonest and stupid decision' (his own words), decided to be cautious and wait for a better time to act against Hitler.
In January 1939, Canaris manufactured the "Dutch War Scare", which gripped the British government. By January 23, 1939 the British government received information to the effect that Germany intended to invade the Netherlands in February 1939 with the aim of using Dutch air-fields to launch strategic bombing offensive intended to achieve a "knock-out" blow against Britain by razing British cities to the ground. All this information was false, and it was intended by Canaris to achieve a change in British foreign policy. In this, Canaris was successful, and the "Dutch War Scare" played a major role in causing Chamberlain to make the "continental commitment" (i.e. sending a large British ground force to the defense of France) in February 19
While I strongly disagree with this (if poor little babies have some urges, let adults not encourage them, let them go with people their age. Poor little babies have already too many stimuli from media for this reasoning to be acceptable), could you please explain how it affects Stallman's opinions on free software?
I think that it would be a waste NOT to use these organs. The prisoners will be executed either way, might as well make them contribute some good to society to offset whatever they were sentenced to death for. There is a possible conflict of interest, though, if the judges start getting paid off to sentence people to death...
"Excuse me comrade, what blood type are you" "AB+" "And wouldn'y you say that Li Peng is a fascist murderous dog?" "Well yes but don't tell any-"
I guess if you had hypothetically a country where all people executed were actually guilty of a real crime and the organs were used for the public good it would be different. China isn't like that - it's easy to get people bumped off for political reasons and organs have been sold abroad. It's by no means impossible that people were killed for their organs after being executed on trumped up charges.
In fact this cartoon was so close to the mark that the new pro Beijing owner of the paper axed Lily Wong. And consider the mechanics of doing it. Organs are only usable if the subject was alive when they were removed -
My wife's cousin was the head of surgery at a military hospital in China and he told us back in 1989 that they were harvesting organs from prisoners at execution time... he explained that they had to mortally wound the prisoner but not kill them so that the organs stayed in better condition while they immediately opened the victims to harvest the organs while in an ambulance on the way to a nearby hospital...
He explained that they only did this to criminals who were convicted of really horrible crimes, such as the guy who repeatedly shoved a large knife down the throat of his rape victim, a selfless young nurse.
Now I'm guessing be shot and then chopped up in an ambulance is a very nasty way to go. In fact the Doctor's comment that it only happened to 'really horrible criminals' basically confirms this. And of course anyone that opposes the government might well have found themselves being convicted of a 'really horrible crime' even they were innocent.
Still think it's a good idea? I don't trust any government with the power to do this sort of thing, least of all the Chinese one.
Dutch pedophiles have formed a political party to campaign for legalization.
I am skeptical of the claim that voluntarily pedophilia harms children. The arguments that it causes harm seem to be based on cases which aren't voluntary, which are then stretched by parents who are horrified by the idea that their little baby is maturing.
It's not that hard. Just ask someone on the forums and cut and paste the commands they post into a terminal.
We Linux users tend to be an intellectual elite, not like the Windows morons that run BritneySpearsNaked.jpg.exe from some stranger and trash their machines.
Slashdot Mirror
It works the same way as the safety foam in Demolition Man.
Though seriously that idea bothered me - it seems like if the foam could fill the inside of your car so quickly it would also fill your airways and kill you horribly.
This post is an inspiration to me. It shows you that no matter how rich and famous you get you still have time to argue about materials science fiction on slashdot.
I say we execute the people spouting buzzwords and go back to coding.
They generally pay pretty meager interest on deposits though (My primary financial institution is a credit union, I'm just sayin').
That's because they believing in providing cheap loans to the oppressed proletariat, not interest to the rentier class of rich capitalists like you.
this is why the National Corpse of Pendants needs new recruits.
If only there was a good way to attract the attention of pendants so that they could be recruited.
Also, I've seen this picture before. Two questions: one, is it real. Two: please tell me the steering wheel is to avoid computer crashes.
http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/hoaxes/computer.asp
Although the photograph displayed could represent what some people in the early 1950s contemplated a "home computer" might look like (based on the technology of the day), it isn't, as the accompanying text claims, a RAND Corporation illustration from 1954 of a prototype "home computer." The picture is actually an entry submitted to a Fark.com image modification competition, taken from an original photo of a submarine maneuvering room console found on the U.S. Navy web site, converted to grayscale, and modified to replace a modern display panel and TV screen with pictures of a decades-old teletype/printer and television (as well as to add the gray-suited man to the left-hand side of the photo)
How exactly does one promote "capitalism" as in the free and unfettered enterprise of individuals ... while eliminating individualism. That's a contradiction. How does the state "get out of the way" AND destroy personal liberty ?
Capitalism is not necessarily about the free enterprise of individuals. If you look at China now are capitalist in the sense that they allowed private companies. In fact China's economic growth comes from the private sector - the state companies are only kept alive for legacy reasons.
Still it's very much not about individualism - the whole spiel of the Chinese "Communist" party is that Chinese people need to sacrifice individual freedoms now to make China a great country. The Communist era system of repression is still very much in place, but rather than repressing evil capitalists it's actually used to supress criticism of the government by ordinary people. Most of the rich people have serious poltical connections to the point that crticism of them is criticism of the government because the rich capitalists and the government are actually the same people.
The Roman Republic was also like this - the Senate was run by very rich people and there wasn't so much a state to speak or - even the armies were paid for by individuals. Wars generated slaves to pay off the soldiers man the estates of the plutocratic scum that dominated the Senate. Now the Roman Republic turned into an Empire and the Emperors had the power to confiscate the assets of their enemies. During the empire, even free workers were gradually turned into serfs as their right to leave their estate was gradually restricted. Of course a society which is 90% serfs and slaves working in agriculture has a serious tendency to stagnate and it did. Still such a system is unfortunately very stable - even after the Roman Empire fell the social system stayed in place for over a thousand years.
Of course collectivisation in the Soviet Union had much the same effect - the workers ended up forced into serfdom on a collective farm run by people who also controlled the army, the press, the secret police and the legal system.
Actually from what I've read the Nazis would have set up something similar - politically well connected and very rich people would have had factories and estates that run mostly on slave labour. The SS ended up owning a lot of companies, and older industrial giants were quite happy to join in the system. My guess is that the rights of even nominally free German workers would have slowly eroded over the centuries too and a similar process of stagnation would have set in.
Now the Nazis and Russian and Chinese Communist Party claimed to varying degrees to be Socialist. Still, objectively, neither of them were anything like Socialists or Social Democrats in democratic countries which were grass roots movements campaigning for more rights for workers and less power for bosses. Actually in the long run they were all movements that give bosses absolute power and reduce the workers to serfdom. It would be more accurate to call them Feudalist parties than Socialist ones.
Actually I wish I'd written "you could troll them with blimps and then when they try to shoot them down you could troll them to death with an AC-130"
Whenever this topic comes up someone tries to muddy the issue by bringing up the distinction between ephebophilia and pedofilia.
It's like a much creepier version of pointing out that downloading movies off bitorrent rather than paying a couple of bucks to rent them at Blockbuster is not theft, rather it is copyright infringement.
Well yeah, he got the data from interviews with pedophiles. They were hardly likely to say they were traumatising their victims
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Kinsey#Interviews_with_pedophiles
In 1981 questions were raised of how Kinsey and his staff gathered the information to produce some of the data in the Kinsey Reports. Attention was directed to Tables 30-34 of Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, which report observations of orgasms in over three hundred children between the ages of five months and fourteen years. Former and current directors of The Kinsey Institute confirmed that some of the information was gathered from nine pedophiles and that Kinsey chose not to report the pedophiles to the authorities, balancing what Kinsey saw as the need for their anonymity against the likelihood that their crimes would continue.
Still other researchers seem to agree that being sexually abused as a child is not a good thing in terms of mental health
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_sexual_abuse
Which, let's face it, is hardly surprising.
great depression can be the underlying catalyst for great artistic expression.
Maybe, but the vast majority of depressives will never produce a single thing of value in their whole miserable lives.
Remember: Down the street, not across the road.
I dunno, I think Sophie Scholl was very brave but probably she was not able to make a difference. I read some book about Germans who plotted against Hitler though and some of them were enormously likable.
E.g. Wilhelm Canaris
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_Canaris
After Adolf Hitler's rise to power in 1933, Canaris was made head of the Abwehr, Germany's official military intelligence agency, on January 1, 1935. Later that year, he was promoted to Rear Admiral. During the period 1935-36, he made contacts in Spain to organize a German spy network there. His excellent Spanish made him the very man for the job. He was the moving force behind the decision that sided Germany with Francisco Franco during the Spanish Civil War, despite Hitler's initial hesitation to get involved in such an adventure. In 1937 he was still a supporter of Hitler, considering him to be the only solution against communism and a hope for the national revival of Germany. By 1938, however, he had realised that Hitler's policies and plans would lead Germany to disaster and secretly began to work against the régime. His personal style as a gentleman was incompatible with the thuggish behaviour of most of the Nazi party members. A letter from a Spanish contact of his has been preserved and unambiguously confirms his opposition to the Nazi regime. He tried to hinder Hitler's attempts to absorb Czechoslovakia and advised Franco not to permit German passage through Spain for the purposes of capturing Gibraltar. According to written sources, all of Francoâ(TM)s arguments on this stance were studied and dictated in detail by Canaris, and that simultaneously, a significant sum of money had been deposited by the British in Swiss accounts for Franco and his generals to further convince them to be neutral.
He also became involved in two abortive plots to assassinate Hitler, first in 1938 and again in 1939. His most audacious attempt was in planning, with Ewald von Kleist-Schmenzin, to capture and eliminate Hitler and the entire Nazi party before the invasion of Czechoslovakia. At this particular moment, von Kleist visited England secretly and discussed the situation with British MI6 and some high ranking politicians. There, the name of Canaris became widely known as the executive hand of von Kleist in the event of an anti-Nazi plot. The high ranking German military leaders believed that if Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia, or any other country, then Britain would declare war on Germany. MI6 was of the same opinion. However, the British reaction to Hitler's annexation of the Sudetenland was more cautious. At a meeting with Hitler in Munich, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain chose diplomacy over war. Munich was a severe disappointment for Kleist and Canaris. It gave Hitler's international reputation an important boost for two reasons: one, he was able to play the part of a man of reason and compromise; and two, he could boast that his predictions that England would not respond with war had proven to be correct. There are claims that Canaris, who was extremely shocked by this 'dishonest and stupid decision' (his own words), decided to be cautious and wait for a better time to act against Hitler.
In January 1939, Canaris manufactured the "Dutch War Scare", which gripped the British government. By January 23, 1939 the British government received information to the effect that Germany intended to invade the Netherlands in February 1939 with the aim of using Dutch air-fields to launch strategic bombing offensive intended to achieve a "knock-out" blow against Britain by razing British cities to the ground. All this information was false, and it was intended by Canaris to achieve a change in British foreign policy. In this, Canaris was successful, and the "Dutch War Scare" played a major role in causing Chamberlain to make the "continental commitment" (i.e. sending a large British ground force to the defense of France) in February 19
While I strongly disagree with this (if poor little babies have some urges, let adults not encourage them, let them go with people their age. Poor little babies have already too many stimuli from media for this reasoning to be acceptable), could you please explain how it affects Stallman's opinions on free software?
Read the post I was replying to.
You can't tell that the guy that got executed is actually guilty of anything.
The USA does better at homicide. In all categories.
I think that it would be a waste NOT to use these organs. The prisoners will be executed either way, might as well make them contribute some good to society to offset whatever they were sentenced to death for. There is a possible conflict of interest, though, if the judges start getting paid off to sentence people to death...
http://www.lilywong.net/archive/arc990426.htm
The last but one cartoon -
"Excuse me comrade, what blood type are you"
"AB+"
"And wouldn'y you say that Li Peng is a fascist murderous dog?"
"Well yes but don't tell any-"
I guess if you had hypothetically a country where all people executed were actually guilty of a real crime and the organs were used for the public good it would be different. China isn't like that - it's easy to get people bumped off for political reasons and organs have been sold abroad. It's by no means impossible that people were killed for their organs after being executed on trumped up charges.
In fact this cartoon was so close to the mark that the new pro Beijing owner of the paper axed Lily Wong. And consider the mechanics of doing it. Organs are only usable if the subject was alive when they were removed -
http://www.forumosa.com/taiwan/viewtopic.php?p=929793&sid=b0e8f5caf5b2cda82f9fee83f4b4a5e9#p929793
My wife's cousin was the head of surgery at a military hospital in China and he told us back in 1989 that they were harvesting organs from prisoners at execution time... he explained that they had to mortally wound the prisoner but not kill them so that the organs stayed in better condition while they immediately opened the victims to harvest the organs while in an ambulance on the way to a nearby hospital...
He explained that they only did this to criminals who were convicted of really horrible crimes, such as the guy who repeatedly shoved a large knife down the throat of his rape victim, a selfless young nurse.
Now I'm guessing be shot and then chopped up in an ambulance is a very nasty way to go. In fact the Doctor's comment that it only happened to 'really horrible criminals' basically confirms this. And of course anyone that opposes the government might well have found themselves being convicted of a 'really horrible crime' even they were innocent.
Still think it's a good idea? I don't trust any government with the power to do this sort of thing, least of all the Chinese one.
http://www.stallman.org/archives/2006-may-aug.html#05%20June%202006%20(Dutch%20paedophiles%20form%20political%20party)
Dutch pedophiles have formed a political party to campaign for legalization.
I am skeptical of the claim that voluntarily pedophilia harms children. The arguments that it causes harm seem to be based on cases which aren't voluntary, which are then stretched by parents who are horrified by the idea that their little baby is maturing.
Have you ever seen
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0472062/
There's a funny seen where Joanne Herring, played by a very glamorous Julia Roberts, talks knowlegably about "Dashukas" while she's doing her makeup.
How did they shoot them down? Guns or missiles?
Seems like if the Taliban hate blimps you could troll them with blimps listen for fire and then kill them.
Maybe he has an Electric Environmentalist - a machine that worries for him so he has more time to post on slashdot.
I'm just angry that everyone is so damn caught up with climate change. There are other problems that exist now like heavy metal
[AIR GUITARS]
WYLD STALLIONS!
Keyboards are very powerhogging too. Best remove it and use dip switches instead.
> Sigs are like bumperstickers. Once in a while they are amusing, but usually they are irrelevant and irritating.
That would make an excellent sig or bumpersticker.
It's not that hard. Just ask someone on the forums and cut and paste the commands they post into a terminal.
We Linux users tend to be an intellectual elite, not like the Windows morons that run BritneySpearsNaked.jpg.exe from some stranger and trash their machines.
I'm not saying that I only encounter this in Linux...just that in my own experiences, it seems to really perpetuate the Linux culture.
I've never had this problem.