Hate to rain on your parade, but the mechanism you described (1,2,3) is called a feedback loop, and it's the most basic building block of robotics since forever. Every robotic system uses feedback in one form or another, even those ancient industrial giants doing the same thing over and over are constantly checking everything is in place and minimizing their position errors accordingly.
The nature of feedback is the ability to sense the unforeseen, and include it in the calculations for output. The robot is told what to do if it all goes right, and also what to do if the ball veers off course. The robot doesn't need to know the exact nature of the surface, the air-resistance or the balls weight. The same people that put the ball there tweaked the parameters until it's performance was good enough.
This is actually not very difficult to program in general, but like you said, each specific setup was probably very optimized, which is harder to do and results in a unique (and therefore, less useful) machine. Most of the work probably went into improving the sensors' sensitivities and motor, hardware and software performance, rather than developing machine-vision algorithms or complex AI.
Remember also that in MIB, Tommy checks these papers because he knows there's real news in there that won't ever be reported in the mainstream media. Not saying anything about this piece of news, just informing you that your example backfired.
You've got to be kidding. I'm sorry, but yes, resources are finite. There's no way to argue that.
Yes, resources are finite at any given time, but they're constantly growing, in case you haven't noticed. I don't mean the dwindling oil reserves, I mean that by the time we get to the bottom of the last oil well we'll already be tapping into new, much larger resources we might not even know of yet. Simply because we'd have to to survive. That's the way it's always been in the past and I don't think this generation will be the last one it holds true for, nor the next one or the one after that.
There's only so much arable land on this planet.
Yes, but how much of it just depends on how much effort you want to put into making it arable. The sands of the Sahara can become a fertile paradise if we take on the massive engineering challenge that is making it one. It will cost lots of money, energy and other resources, but if we have to, we'll do that as well.
There's only so much food you can get from an acre of farmland.
That's what Malthus said too, and since his time we've increased the amount of food we can get from an acre of farmland tenfold if not a hundered- or a thousand-fold. This statement is just false.
There's only so much energy available on this planet, most of it in fossil fuels.
Also false. As I said earlier, there's enough energy here - chemical, biological, mechanical, solar, nuclear and types we haven't heard of - to sustain the human race for millions of years to come. So far we've been picking the low-hanging fruit, but if we run out of those, we'll just have to invest some of that energy into opening new fields of vast energy to collect from. I believe you'd agree it's about time we started doing that, and look in the papers - surprise! We already are.
real estate is a limited resource on this planet and always will be.
Just like all your other suggested limitations, this one doesn't exist either. There is no shortage of living space on Earth. There's a tremendous shortage of living space inside cities because all of a sudden the entire rural population of Earth has decided they want to live in one. Guess what? That sort of massive flooding overwhelms cities and they become cramped. But look outside the most crowded cities and you'd see miles and miles of deserted countryside. We haven't really begun to efficiently use the amount of surface area we have, and most of it stands unused.
The only way to get more is to terraform a new planet
That time will come too. Luckily we have thousands of years before we need to.
As as for selfish bastards, who the fuck do you think you are to say that humans are more important than all the other lifeforms on this planet
Nice strawman. I never said this. I said animal extinction was caused by poverty, not overpopulation. I believe that if poverty was not an issue, we could double in population and still keep the ecological diversity in its place. Anyway, animal extinction is not exactly a resource per se, and so is only tangentially relevant to the discussion. I seems to me you only brought it up there to gain sympathy points, to which I have no sympathy. And if preferring living in peace with the animal world and still bringing more beautiful people into a world that can support them over sacrificing billions of real and potential human beings for dubious purposes makes me a selfish fuck, so be it.
For starters, haven't we discredited Malthusian economics yet? The notion that the human species lives on a finite amount of resources which will be exhausted once the population grows to a certain size has been introduced by many people throughout history and has been shown to be false each and every time. More people means more mouths to feed, but also more people to grow the food, at a better profit and with technology getting better all the time, with smaller land footprints. Not that we have a shortage of arable land, we just don't have enough people to cultivate each and every corner of the globe. Our planet is huge and mostly empty.
Secondly, regarding your main point, all these problems (AGW, deforestation etc.) are not caused by over-population as you suggest. These are caused instead by poverty. When people can't afford food they are desperate and will not listen to ivory-tower ecologists. If there's a forest nearby, they would raze it for a farm to grow food on; if there's an exotic animal nearby, they would kill it for food or for money. If we took poverty out of the equation, if everybody had all the money in the world (contradiction in terms, I know), we could solve all these in half an hour.
But the main thing I wanted to say is - [rant] You selfish bastard! Who the fuck do you think you are? Who are you (or me, or anyone) to decide who starves to death and who can survive, how many people are allowed on this planet, whose babies can be born and which should be aborted? It is obvious that the only reason you can say such a horrible thing (asking whether it's good or bad to have all these poor people alive on this planet) is because you're one of the fucking elite and have no idea what it's like to go to sleep on an empty stomach. Did you think of asking this question of one of the homeless people in your town, begging for his next meal?[/rant]
;) Don't take that last one personally, it was meant more as an emotional catharsis than a logical argument.
We could easily feed the world if the industrial nations wouldn't insist on their daily hamburgers and steaks.
Though I agree that food production would be much more efficient and plentiful if the world turned vegetarian, it's important to note that the reason for world hunger is not shortage of food, but rather political reasons and general apathy. We could feed the world right now if we as a world put our mind to it without growing a single grain more than we do today.
Disclaimer - I'm a vegetarian, and I do believe that the more of us there are the better the food situation will be on our planet, I just don't kid myself that that's The Solution, or that everybody should eat like me.
I believe all children share an innate intrinsic motivation towards learning (if you have children, I guess you see that all the time).
Schools all over the world seem to spend enormous amounts of effort killing that intrinsic motivation, then spend tons more effort to try and revive it again. Problem is, they can only produce extrinsic motivations (like in TFA) that disappear when the children leave school, leaving them with no desire to learn anything ever again.
It's like what I heard someone say about socialism and taxes on/. (not that I necessarily share this POV) - that when people aren't forced to, people like to give and help their less fortunate neighbors, but when they're forced to do that all intrinsic motivation disappears and everybody starts looking for a way out. Then you have to back the taxes by guns (extrinsic motivation) so people would pay. I imagine if you then remove the threat, nobody pays and the poor starve.
Actually, I think that's a common misperception. The truth is the placibo effect, and other psychosomatic effects can be as real as any other. They may not be able to cure cancer, but they can help (or, in the case of adverse psychosomatic effects, cause damage) in objectively measurable ways.
Hate to rain on your parade, but the script Yonit Levi reads to you every night is very carefully written. Mainstream news and media (even "Eretz Nehederet") is very careful not to discuss any of several painful subjects, or to approach them from a very careful, government-approved angle so not to bite the hand that feeds them, with the ultimate result of the public having very little knowledge of these subjects, and a lot of very skewed views.
Here's a short list of some of these subjects:
1. Where are all the arabs that lived here before Zionistic settlements began? Where did they go? Why did they go?
2. What are human rights? Why do I have human rights but my friend Ahmed from Qalqilia does not?
3. If the conquered territories are in Israel, why is Israeli law not applicable there?
4. How come most Israelis want peace, but action towards continuous war has been ongoing since the establishment of this state?
5. How can a state be both "Jewish" and "Democratic"? Isn't that a contradiction?
Should I continue?
You may still be able to publish what you want (thank god for that, right?) but what you hear is carefully controlled.
Keeping the Israeli populace ignorant of the atrocities Israel performs takes huge amounts of propaganda, censorship and such tactics.
That's funny, because the people who would be actually doing these "atrocities" are, surprise surprise, Israelis! Israeli soldiers who go home every week and areWhen have you last seen the photo of a dead palestinian boy on the main cover or Yediot, or a story about what life in the conquered territories on the channel 2 news? completely free to tell their family, friends and the press about any atrocities they have witnessed. And yet this, somehow, doesn't happen. I wonder why?
This question has many answers.
By far the worst attrocities are not performed by a single bad soldier. The worst ones are created by a large, irresponsive and irresponsible military beurocracy. Do you know what a palestinian man has to go through to meed his daughter in another part of the conquered terrirories? Or god forbid, in Israeli prison. What one has to do there to maintain a job, to go to school, to have the life we Israelis take for granted?
Of the attrocities that are performed by single or few soldiers, they are indeed freely told (if the soldiers find it in their best interest to bring them up). Some end up in stories on such sites as B'tselem, but never reach the daily news. I also do hear, from time to time, people bragging about their prowess after doing some reserve time by mentioning what I would consider horrific abuses. Most Israelis are so brainwashed they think nothing of it.
Have you served in the army?
Yes, I have served in the army. That is not however something I like to admit. But as an 18 year-old boy, I had nothing but my parents' advice to guide me, and they said I should, so I did.
Do you have friends in the army?
Most of my friends serve in the military. I can't make them see my point of view, since this is such a powerful part of being Israeli, there is no chance they will change their mind. I also have a few friends who agree with me and do not serve anymore. To each his own, I won't turn anyones hand.
Are you (or anyone else) witnessing attocities that are not reporting to the press? You do realize this is a free country. Go ahead, tell the world about it.
Most of the stuff "they" don't want you to see isn't censured. Some of it is, but most of it is just marginalized and spun beyond recognition. Those who want to know what's going on have to turn to human rights organisations to tell them, because you can't trust the kind of materials they put in the mainstream channels. God, we're like a country that has only Fox News to watch. BTW, it all gets "reported to the press", the problem is, it's then the press that picks, chooses and distorts what it then reports to the public.
This will end up being by used by the Israeli Left wing fascists to jail anyone who opposes the forced expulsion of Jews from their homes in areas the government wants to turn over to the Arabs.
What? Left-wing fascists? Sharon, while arguably fascist, was no left-wing bleeding heart. It was he who suggested that crazy idea about pulling settlements out of the ground. A better plan would have been just to stop funding for defense in the Gaza strip, leaving those settlers to defend for themselves.
There is poetic justice to Sharon's plan though, since kicking people out of their homes is what got us into this mess in the first place.
You seem to forget the thousands of teenagers who were jailed without trial for demonstrating against the expulsion of the Jews from Gaza.
I didn't forget, it just didn't seem relevant to the post I was making. You are right. People (be they settlers, palestinians, right or left wing adherants, jews or arabs) have the right to assemble and speak their mind without being charged, prosecuted or harmed. But don't you see that by saying to people all this time "these people (palestinians) are sub-human and therefore have no rights.", by robbing them of their rights, our own rights are at risk of being obviated? Because now people think "if I can shoot into a crowd in one demonstration, why can't I in another?" - repression is a frame of mind, which the settlers may have seen, for once, the back side of.
You're right. If you're a right-wing Zionist tax-paying army-serving traditional Jewish Israeli citizen, you have nothing to be afraid of, and this systems benefits far out-weigh their risk to you.
and like any Israeli, for 28 days a year, I become a soldier.
This is a very delicate subject, and as one Israeli to another, as we both know, if it wasn't in an anonymous internet forum I wouldn't dare raise such a question, how can you explain giving a twelfth of your life away to an organisation obsessed with harassing, repressing, dividing, locking in, shutting out, abusing and killing people for the sole reason that they lived in your country before your parents/grand-parents arrived and drove them off their land?
And don't give me this "the IDF is the most moral army in the world" line, we both know how wrong that is. I could give enough examples to make both of us blush, but I won't (it's my country too damn it!). Looking at the way the IDF operates, I see the sole purpose of its actions in the conquered territories as to make the inhabitants' lives as painful and difficult as possible. How can you collaborate to that?
Full disclosure: yes I did my full three years back when I didn't know what was actually going on. I couldn't keep doing it once I found out. How do you find it possible? Is the boogie-man of terrorism that intimidating?
How long until some uniformed Israeli soldier struts up to a family and arrogantly demands, "Your papers. Immediately!"
Try fourty years ago.
I would bet the majority of Jews around the world and in Israel are horrified by this measure
Don't know about Jews living outside of Israel, since this is of no concern to them, but the vast majority of Jews living in Israel wouldn't blink when they hear the news. This is old news, and they're used to being treated in this way for a long time. This reminds me of a story I heard about a frog and a tea-pot...
Mod parent up. This is a point I argue hotly here in Israel, with all the indoctrinated people (the vast majority of them). They assume that since they can vote, they live in a democracy. Never mind our votes count for pip-squat. Never mind a third of the population is classed as third-class non-citizens with no rights that can be shot or mistreated in any other way without repercussions and can not vote (huh, I made myself laugh and cry a little at the same time), never mind that most of our politicians are former generals. Never mind the stronghold the orthodox Jews had over the government and over peoples lives until a few years ago (and still do in some areas of life like marriage, childbirth and death). Nevermind the mandatory service in an army that has long since forgot it's initials were Israel DEFENSEForce.
People remain blissfully certain they live in one of the most enlightened democracies in Europe. Sometimes I'd like to shake them and yell at them "WAKE UP! We're not in Amsterdam, you're living in a military faschist war machine. The sooner you wake up to it, the sooner you can start fighting it.
[/rant]
Slashdot Mirror
And this is how it starts...
The latest TED talk is oddly appropriate, though also off-topic. http://bit.ly/aIvkyO
Strike one.
Dear Sir, Your ideas intrigue me and I would like to subscribe to your newsletter. What?! $5? ...Forget it then.
Hate to rain on your parade, but the mechanism you described (1,2,3) is called a feedback loop, and it's the most basic building block of robotics since forever. Every robotic system uses feedback in one form or another, even those ancient industrial giants doing the same thing over and over are constantly checking everything is in place and minimizing their position errors accordingly.
The nature of feedback is the ability to sense the unforeseen, and include it in the calculations for output. The robot is told what to do if it all goes right, and also what to do if the ball veers off course. The robot doesn't need to know the exact nature of the surface, the air-resistance or the balls weight. The same people that put the ball there tweaked the parameters until it's performance was good enough.
This is actually not very difficult to program in general, but like you said, each specific setup was probably very optimized, which is harder to do and results in a unique (and therefore, less useful) machine. Most of the work probably went into improving the sensors' sensitivities and motor, hardware and software performance, rather than developing machine-vision algorithms or complex AI.
Obviously, you've never had to fight drugs yourself. If you want to win, you need to cut off the flowers.
Remember also that in MIB, Tommy checks these papers because he knows there's real news in there that won't ever be reported in the mainstream media. Not saying anything about this piece of news, just informing you that your example backfired.
Yes, resources are finite at any given time, but they're constantly growing, in case you haven't noticed. I don't mean the dwindling oil reserves, I mean that by the time we get to the bottom of the last oil well we'll already be tapping into new, much larger resources we might not even know of yet. Simply because we'd have to to survive. That's the way it's always been in the past and I don't think this generation will be the last one it holds true for, nor the next one or the one after that.
Yes, but how much of it just depends on how much effort you want to put into making it arable. The sands of the Sahara can become a fertile paradise if we take on the massive engineering challenge that is making it one. It will cost lots of money, energy and other resources, but if we have to, we'll do that as well.
That's what Malthus said too, and since his time we've increased the amount of food we can get from an acre of farmland tenfold if not a hundered- or a thousand-fold. This statement is just false.
Also false. As I said earlier, there's enough energy here - chemical, biological, mechanical, solar, nuclear and types we haven't heard of - to sustain the human race for millions of years to come. So far we've been picking the low-hanging fruit, but if we run out of those, we'll just have to invest some of that energy into opening new fields of vast energy to collect from. I believe you'd agree it's about time we started doing that, and look in the papers - surprise! We already are.
Just like all your other suggested limitations, this one doesn't exist either. There is no shortage of living space on Earth. There's a tremendous shortage of living space inside cities because all of a sudden the entire rural population of Earth has decided they want to live in one. Guess what? That sort of massive flooding overwhelms cities and they become cramped. But look outside the most crowded cities and you'd see miles and miles of deserted countryside. We haven't really begun to efficiently use the amount of surface area we have, and most of it stands unused.
That time will come too. Luckily we have thousands of years before we need to.
Nice strawman. I never said this. I said animal extinction was caused by poverty, not overpopulation. I believe that if poverty was not an issue, we could double in population and still keep the ecological diversity in its place. Anyway, animal extinction is not exactly a resource per se, and so is only tangentially relevant to the discussion. I seems to me you only brought it up there to gain sympathy points, to which I have no sympathy. And if preferring living in peace with the animal world and still bringing more beautiful people into a world that can support them over sacrificing billions of real and potential human beings for dubious purposes makes me a selfish fuck, so be it.
For starters, haven't we discredited Malthusian economics yet? The notion that the human species lives on a finite amount of resources which will be exhausted once the population grows to a certain size has been introduced by many people throughout history and has been shown to be false each and every time. More people means more mouths to feed, but also more people to grow the food, at a better profit and with technology getting better all the time, with smaller land footprints. Not that we have a shortage of arable land, we just don't have enough people to cultivate each and every corner of the globe. Our planet is huge and mostly empty.
;) Don't take that last one personally, it was meant more as an emotional catharsis than a logical argument.
Secondly, regarding your main point, all these problems (AGW, deforestation etc.) are not caused by over-population as you suggest. These are caused instead by poverty. When people can't afford food they are desperate and will not listen to ivory-tower ecologists. If there's a forest nearby, they would raze it for a farm to grow food on; if there's an exotic animal nearby, they would kill it for food or for money. If we took poverty out of the equation, if everybody had all the money in the world (contradiction in terms, I know), we could solve all these in half an hour.
But the main thing I wanted to say is - [rant] You selfish bastard! Who the fuck do you think you are? Who are you (or me, or anyone) to decide who starves to death and who can survive, how many people are allowed on this planet, whose babies can be born and which should be aborted? It is obvious that the only reason you can say such a horrible thing (asking whether it's good or bad to have all these poor people alive on this planet) is because you're one of the fucking elite and have no idea what it's like to go to sleep on an empty stomach. Did you think of asking this question of one of the homeless people in your town, begging for his next meal?[/rant]
Though I agree that food production would be much more efficient and plentiful if the world turned vegetarian, it's important to note that the reason for world hunger is not shortage of food, but rather political reasons and general apathy. We could feed the world right now if we as a world put our mind to it without growing a single grain more than we do today.
Disclaimer - I'm a vegetarian, and I do believe that the more of us there are the better the food situation will be on our planet, I just don't kid myself that that's The Solution, or that everybody should eat like me.
What, like this guy did?
I believe all children share an innate intrinsic motivation towards learning (if you have children, I guess you see that all the time).
/. (not that I necessarily share this POV) - that when people aren't forced to, people like to give and help their less fortunate neighbors, but when they're forced to do that all intrinsic motivation disappears and everybody starts looking for a way out. Then you have to back the taxes by guns (extrinsic motivation) so people would pay. I imagine if you then remove the threat, nobody pays and the poor starve.
Schools all over the world seem to spend enormous amounts of effort killing that intrinsic motivation, then spend tons more effort to try and revive it again. Problem is, they can only produce extrinsic motivations (like in TFA) that disappear when the children leave school, leaving them with no desire to learn anything ever again.
It's like what I heard someone say about socialism and taxes on
Same thing with kids and learning, I think.
Too bad that approach won't work in the US, I hear they've hardened their servers
Ah, you mean Synaptic!
Actually, I think that's a common misperception. The truth is the placibo effect, and other psychosomatic effects can be as real as any other. They may not be able to cure cancer, but they can help (or, in the case of adverse psychosomatic effects, cause damage) in objectively measurable ways.
Painting Elephant
Hate to rain on your parade, but the script Yonit Levi reads to you every night is very carefully written. Mainstream news and media (even "Eretz Nehederet") is very careful not to discuss any of several painful subjects, or to approach them from a very careful, government-approved angle so not to bite the hand that feeds them, with the ultimate result of the public having very little knowledge of these subjects, and a lot of very skewed views.
Here's a short list of some of these subjects:
1. Where are all the arabs that lived here before Zionistic settlements began? Where did they go? Why did they go?
2. What are human rights? Why do I have human rights but my friend Ahmed from Qalqilia does not?
3. If the conquered territories are in Israel, why is Israeli law not applicable there?
4. How come most Israelis want peace, but action towards continuous war has been ongoing since the establishment of this state?
5. How can a state be both "Jewish" and "Democratic"? Isn't that a contradiction?
Should I continue?
You may still be able to publish what you want (thank god for that, right?) but what you hear is carefully controlled.
This question has many answers. By far the worst attrocities are not performed by a single bad soldier. The worst ones are created by a large, irresponsive and irresponsible military beurocracy. Do you know what a palestinian man has to go through to meed his daughter in another part of the conquered terrirories? Or god forbid, in Israeli prison. What one has to do there to maintain a job, to go to school, to have the life we Israelis take for granted? Of the attrocities that are performed by single or few soldiers, they are indeed freely told (if the soldiers find it in their best interest to bring them up). Some end up in stories on such sites as B'tselem, but never reach the daily news. I also do hear, from time to time, people bragging about their prowess after doing some reserve time by mentioning what I would consider horrific abuses. Most Israelis are so brainwashed they think nothing of it.
Yes, I have served in the army. That is not however something I like to admit. But as an 18 year-old boy, I had nothing but my parents' advice to guide me, and they said I should, so I did.
Most of my friends serve in the military. I can't make them see my point of view, since this is such a powerful part of being Israeli, there is no chance they will change their mind. I also have a few friends who agree with me and do not serve anymore. To each his own, I won't turn anyones hand.
Most of the stuff "they" don't want you to see isn't censured. Some of it is, but most of it is just marginalized and spun beyond recognition. Those who want to know what's going on have to turn to human rights organisations to tell them, because you can't trust the kind of materials they put in the mainstream channels. God, we're like a country that has only Fox News to watch. BTW, it all gets "reported to the press", the problem is, it's then the press that picks, chooses and distorts what it then reports to the public.
I can give you hundreds.
What? Left-wing fascists? Sharon, while arguably fascist, was no left-wing bleeding heart. It was he who suggested that crazy idea about pulling settlements out of the ground. A better plan would have been just to stop funding for defense in the Gaza strip, leaving those settlers to defend for themselves.
There is poetic justice to Sharon's plan though, since kicking people out of their homes is what got us into this mess in the first place.
I didn't forget, it just didn't seem relevant to the post I was making. You are right. People (be they settlers, palestinians, right or left wing adherants, jews or arabs) have the right to assemble and speak their mind without being charged, prosecuted or harmed. But don't you see that by saying to people all this time "these people (palestinians) are sub-human and therefore have no rights.", by robbing them of their rights, our own rights are at risk of being obviated? Because now people think "if I can shoot into a crowd in one demonstration, why can't I in another?" - repression is a frame of mind, which the settlers may have seen, for once, the back side of.
See, it's this kind of reasoning that gives people the incentive to go and do terrorist attacks.
I fail to grasp how the idea of killing millions of people you never met can be so attractive to so many people.
Sadly (and P.S-ly), I'm very very afraid I'll have to wake you up soon.
The Bedouin sometimes join the army as expert trackers.
You're right. If you're a right-wing Zionist tax-paying army-serving traditional Jewish Israeli citizen, you have nothing to be afraid of, and this systems benefits far out-weigh their risk to you.
This is a very delicate subject, and as one Israeli to another, as we both know, if it wasn't in an anonymous internet forum I wouldn't dare raise such a question, how can you explain giving a twelfth of your life away to an organisation obsessed with harassing, repressing, dividing, locking in, shutting out, abusing and killing people for the sole reason that they lived in your country before your parents/grand-parents arrived and drove them off their land?
And don't give me this "the IDF is the most moral army in the world" line, we both know how wrong that is. I could give enough examples to make both of us blush, but I won't (it's my country too damn it!). Looking at the way the IDF operates, I see the sole purpose of its actions in the conquered territories as to make the inhabitants' lives as painful and difficult as possible. How can you collaborate to that?
Full disclosure: yes I did my full three years back when I didn't know what was actually going on. I couldn't keep doing it once I found out. How do you find it possible? Is the boogie-man of terrorism that intimidating?
Try fourty years ago.
Don't know about Jews living outside of Israel, since this is of no concern to them, but the vast majority of Jews living in Israel wouldn't blink when they hear the news. This is old news, and they're used to being treated in this way for a long time. This reminds me of a story I heard about a frog and a tea-pot...
Mod parent up. This is a point I argue hotly here in Israel, with all the indoctrinated people (the vast majority of them). They assume that since they can vote, they live in a democracy. Never mind our votes count for pip-squat. Never mind a third of the population is classed as third-class non-citizens with no rights that can be shot or mistreated in any other way without repercussions and can not vote (huh, I made myself laugh and cry a little at the same time), never mind that most of our politicians are former generals. Never mind the stronghold the orthodox Jews had over the government and over peoples lives until a few years ago (and still do in some areas of life like marriage, childbirth and death). Nevermind the mandatory service in an army that has long since forgot it's initials were Israel DEFENSE Force.
People remain blissfully certain they live in one of the most enlightened democracies in Europe. Sometimes I'd like to shake them and yell at them "WAKE UP! We're not in Amsterdam, you're living in a military faschist war machine. The sooner you wake up to it, the sooner you can start fighting it.
[/rant]