Amusing that people who are content to rip off other people's hard work suddenly think they have the moral high ground when they're about to be ripped off themselves.
Are we talking about the CEO who laid off half the development team, required the remainder to work over time, and then gave himself a bonus by firing the rest after the product went gold or the pirates?
I say this because more than naught developers are underpaid for their work and then have the hounds released on them by the bean counters when quarter figures need to look better.
I don't say this to justify piracy (and I highly disapprove of it), but at the same time it could be developers work is being undermined by pirates when they are really getting the proverbial shaft by their management or publisher is often the real root of the bane of the developers.
Personally, I always buy direct from small time developers directly... It helps them more than having a large corporate structure of marketing types showing government officials powerpoint presentations on all their theoretical losses so they can get a tax break and still lay off their developers.
Then it would never be possible to be smarter than a robot that's exactly smart enough to design a robot as smart as itself.
Is your intelligence limited by your parents intelligence? How about limited by the intelligence of your professors or teachers?
We do learn a lot from people who are more intelligent than ourselves, but at some point we have to start learning the process of educating ourselves without the explicit help of others. This requires of course logic, reason, and self experimentation. Which is why a lot of higher college education is not about memorizing facts but learning the process of learning.
Therefore if we built a machine who could not learn on its own and become more intelligent by its own self experimentation and observation of the universe around it, then by definition the robot is not intelligent.
And if we did make a machine that could self improve and learn without human assistance, it wouldn't be restricted by organic limitations and capacity. Since the CPUs electrons travel near the speed of light gives it a far faster thinking ability than a humans slow moving chemical neurons. And since its memories are digital it does not need to memorize facts etc etc or suffer memory loss.
(Of course memory and memory loss might help with intelligence because a lot of intelligence requires one to simply ignore or disregard information that is unimportant to the task at hand. Which I think was the key feature behind Stanley's car at DARPA GC because rather than brute forcing all of the coordinates, it was better at disregarding information it didn't need and what information was important.)
* this is done by a big corporation.
* the owner of a huge botnet I remember a year ago I was playing around with some numbers and assumed that you needed 100 billion MIPS to have enough hardware power to brute force a brain simulation of every single neuron and that the AMD Athlon FX-60 (Dual Core) chip had about 20,000 MIPS.
So you would need about 5,000,000 computers running AMD Athlon FX-60s to run a brute force brain simulation. Since (at the time) an FX-60 was $1,000 a chip, this project would cost $5,000,000,000 on CPUs alone (not counting other parts and labor) so only a government with too much money on its hands could do this.
But if moore's law holds true then in 24 months years the price will be $2.5 billion and so on which is still alot but since its always by half, it only takes 10 years to drop the price to about $156 million which is in the range of any major corporation with plenty of cash (say Google).
However, if someone got a botnet today of 5,000,000 computers today (all with processors equal to or greater than the top of the line) they could acheive the possible the same results without spending all that money.
But this is of course assuming that you can get artificial intelligence but simply simulating all the neurons in a human brain and that you could get 100% CPU usage on all processors devoted to this task.
Interestingly enough is that the newer chips like Intel Core 2 QX6700 get 50,000 MIPs and cost roughly $1,000 today which would make it cost $62 million in 10 years from now.
But as an aside, once AI has been created and integrated into society the need for democracy will diminish since scarcity will be eliminated or at least subjugated to simple simulations. This may be a good or bad thing depending on how you look at it, but a singularity will happen someday or if not we'll simply not be here when the Earth is consumed by the sun.
Without technology there is no future for any life on earth. (Or in the universe if heat death turns out to be the final fate of the universe)
Fuck Web 2.0, IT departments are slow to move on any project except those that somehow benefit IT itself. We have an extraordinarily difficult time getting IT to update broken links on our website (we used to have access via the shitty CMS they were running but they now took that away too) nevermind solutions such as chat, online appointment scheduling, or additional databases to store information captured from web forms.
See, thats the thing. Right now, most corporate organizations use IT as a means to support the rest of the company rather than the other way around.
If one were take business as an act of war (Sun Tzu) they would reverse the roles as Clausewitz suggested in his book "On War" in that rather than the army being designed to support the nation, but nation's government and economic policies were designed to support the army which would be then be the extension of the nations will through diplomacy.
So rather having the IT simply be around to support the rest of the company, the company should become IT. Rather than the sole purpose of IT to keep the bean counters up and running, the HR, lawyers, and everyone else who is not in IT directly is sole purpose is to support the IT organization. Instead of the CEO and the VPs being independent and simply a court of well to dos, they would now be the head of IT like say Napoleon was the head of the army and the state rather than simply the head of state and just letting his generals of IT go forth without understanding any concepts of what IT does.
Which means in order to be like this you must start with the IT department first and then build around that. Simply taking an old brick and mortar company and adding IT to it will not give you Web 2.0 or at least even in a way marketing envisions at a best case scenario.
That said, if your company makes the majority of its income though its web store front, this policy makes sense, because if IT fails then the site goes down and your company makes money. Which means if your company has to ever let people go in that situation it has to let non-IT staff go first because if the Web store goes down then there is no point in even having HR around.
Of course if you are a brick and mortar then you don't need this type of strategic thinking, but at the same time you really don't really need to be thinking about Web 2.0 either because chances are it will be just throwing cash at consultants who will make fancy logos for you and nothing more.
You are incorrect. You are assuming that living in social groups is inevitable, which I dispute.
It depends. If you look at human evolution for the past 2,000 years as a simply a survival of the fittest, then anyone who went against his local societies convention was put to death for even minor infractions. (In ancient Mesopotamia, if you built a house for someone and it collapsed and killed someone due to shoddy construction, then you were put to death)
It was only until the last 200 years did mankind generally start having any other punishment than death. So for the 5,000 years or so before that, civilization was basically was evolving by killing off anyone who had genetic traits of anti-sociality.
However, these traits would depend on which society you were in and based on their code or rules. A more tribal society might not have such things because punishment might not always be death but exile.
I do think, though, that a game put out by the Army that touts its realism can shape the ideas of what combat is like in impressionable minds, so I definitely have an ethical problem with them using it as part of a recruiting effort with people who are just coming into adulthood.
One of the first thing the Nazi's did when they came to power was to ban book like "All Quiet on the Western Front" because it portrayed combat in a bad light. The German army was the first to come up with the concept training of having soldiers actually shoot silhouettes of men rather than bull eye's target (to be fair this was not a Nazi creation but something from WWI) in which the belief you could desensitize soldiers to actually shooting the enemy by having them practice on man like objects first so that it would be a recorded hand eye movement so they didn't have to think of the killing.
Speaking of which... There was a study done by the US military that during WWII that only 1/3 of GI's actually shot at the enemy when given the choice. From what I've mostly read that most combat casualties on all sides (barring accidents, exposure to the elements, and starvation) in the war were via artillery, machine guns, or air attacks so it could that all sides simply had to use indirect fire to inflict casualties most of the time.
Given the nature of the game, it could be that AA would help in dehumanizing the enemy if the other side is seen as a video game opponent.
The winner of this race is the person who comes closest to the average time. No kidding. Mediocracy. I was so pizzed I quit organized sports forever.
Hrm... So if you had won the award? What then? Did it make your life better? Would you have money to live off of? How about going to college and saving money?
See that is the difference between the people in the US and elsewhere with people come here because we reward people.
People don't work hard in the US because of recognition or winning. They do it because it gives them money to buy things. They don't give a rat's ass about the employee of the month other than it gives them more money. Our sports is a good example... Players don't play to win for their home team because they are opportunistic mercenaries for the highest bidder.
A Football franchise owner doesn't want to win the Super Bowl just to win and make himself feel better... No, he wants to win for the publicity and more money. Same thing with corporate ladders and politics.
No one does it for the mere sake of "being better" than anyone. They do it for personal gain. Take it or leave it... That is how America works and it does have its benefits. Rather than having a wall covered in pointless awards, I'll put more effort into my job for a wallet full of money. Who gives a damn about winning the competition as long as the quarter earnings show a profit.
A presumed libertarian said that we ought to privatize 911 services and not provide it to everyone who can't pay (and let charity help the rest).
I would consider myself a libertarian (well I'm registered as one so I suppose its official) but I would be horrified of a privatized 911 system.
So simply type casting all libertarians as privatizing slogan shouters as the same group is most likely wrong.
There are two types of libertarians that I have seen and one is the full blown Free Market Libertarians who want to privatize everything and get rid of the government then there are libertarians who want government to do what it was originally intended to do (which I think is how I feel).
Kind of like Anarchists vs Jeffersonians libertarians.
I believe that it is in the best interest of society to keep things like the military, roads, utilities, and various other things in the hands of the government. Out of this I would like to see the State Governments take a lot more responsibility than a centralized Federal government.
And at the same time, I really feel that the current system of the Federal Reserve is a bit dubious and actually should be a part of the government overseen directly by the Department of Treasury as stated in the constitution rather than in the hands of a private organization.
So in that regards... Yes, you can be a libertarian rather than a complete Laize Faire economic privatization libertarian. (Maybe there should be a euphanism for "priva-libs" like neo-cons and then plain old conservatives)
And why in God's name should your teacher give you any respect?
Human decency.
Adults should respect children as equals and not lesser beings. Otherwise the child will grow either submissive, subversive, or actively seek to make people submit to them as revenge. Just because you have lived longer, more intelligence, have more money, more titles, more friends in high places, more political power, or anything anyone else doesn't have doesn't mean you get the right to not show respect to them. At the same time, being younger or poorer doesn't give you the default right to disrespect people who are older or wealthier than you.
Given a complete stranger you should give them respect and only when they do not reciprocate (as in the child sass talks you or an adult cuts you off in traffic) is when this rule no longer applies.
By not respecting a person by default is just wrong.
And by respect... I mean the human decency kind in which you don't cut off in traffic, thrown trash in their yard, or flip them the bird kind of respect. If you mean the kind of "I respect so and so because they are a learned person in their profession" kind of respect, I think you and the grandparent are talking about two different things.
Respect of each other as equal humans is not earned, it should be given by default until the other party is no longer capable of leaving the other alone. I believe that is the key part of being a libertarian. Just respecting everyone else to leave everyone else alone to their personal being and property regardless of who they are. We are all born and die the same way. Nothing makes us any better than each other in the end so you should have the decency to respect by default rather than forcing people to submit to your requirements.
Well I don't think having a Nazi German government is a great idea for good government.;) I jest! I jest!
But all your examples were result from German ideas under Hitler:
German Autobahn German Airborne invasion of Crete And German scientists of the V2 projects used for the Apollo project
And secondly, I wouldn't credit the US Government for the project success but rather great men like Eisenhower who were able to get the job done without government interference.
Could you imagine the logistical problems if Congress or FDR had direct control over the Battle of D-Day? It wouldn't have turned out well.
But let's pretend that we believed that reincarnation claim. There was always the same guy on the throne. The same applies to most of the other Lamas, btw. So essentially the not only they had the same ruler all along, but they had the same guys as his councillors/cardinals/whatever-you-want-to-call-th em. It was the same gang at the top all along, uninterrupted.
The same thing could said about any European King who claimed his authority came from divine right or the Pope saying he was the official mouthpiece of god.
You either believe them or you don't, but chances are if you want economic or political change you have to stop playing their game. Martin Luther didn't come out and say "Don't listen to the Pope even though he is infallible and the mouth piece of god" and the same respect Lenin didn't come out and say "We have to start a communist state even though God ordained the Tsar's right to rule!"
No, they rejected both religious concepts on their own terms. Luther rejected the Pope's authority over religion and Lenin simply rejected religion all together.
So are we going to blame the Lama's for being an immortal religious entity responsible for several hundred years of failing to industrialize their nation or are we going to admit that they are just another system of feudal theocratic society that was isolated from the outside world and invaded by a foreign power.
Even if there is no such thing as afterlife and all religions are wrong (which I tend to lean towards more these days), it is wrong to invade and occupy an indigenous people just because you want to better them through force or change their beliefs.
The prospect that it's the end of the line at some point, is freakin' scary for a lot of people.
If you take it as a scientific standpoint, you could in theory say reincarnation is possible if the many world theories is correct. If other universes do exist or the universe is infinite beyond the observable boundary, then given infinite time you might experience conscious again.
If the universe and all that is observed has spontaneously come into existence through something like the big bang, then the possibility of it happening again after heat death in this universe or elsewhere could happen.
Now we are talking about time longer than any computer could record as a decimal place and long long after all the suns die, black holes evaporate, and all radiation dissipates and the universe dies either resulting in heat death or a big crunch.
A big crunch might result in another big bang and if other universes exist then a big bang could happen elsewhere in where the laws of physics are conducive to another big bang. As it is now we have no evidence of the laws of physics or even if there was anything around before the big bang.
So given enough time, just like a another universe spontaneously coming into existing, you might get reincarnated if the same exact conditions are met again. Of course no one knows what the conditions of conciousness are, but only that the observer sees itself to be conscious.
So logically, if you exist now, the possibility of you existing in the future does exist.
But it is most likely long after several big bangs or universe deaths that would be 10^10000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 00000000000000000000000000000000000000 years from now and I really doubt you'd be able to take your memories with you.
Their record for treatment of their own population isn't that great, butit gets glossed over by a west desperate to find a better path to their own enlightenment, whilst handily ignoring the impovorished state in which the peasants live, and have lived for a log time, long before the Chinese turned up.
Huh? Tibet has been occupied since the 1950's which if you compare it to the current world situation of the times, we Americans were still highly geared up for segregation and discrimination of African Americans in the South and only a handful of people were fighting to change it until the 1960's equal rights movement.
Hell... We are talking about a 3rd world nation's history from prior to that we might as well be talking about the Tsar and how bad he was that make the Soviet Crimes acceptable or how great the Zulus had it because the British brought them civilization at the point of a gun. Tibet had no road infrastructure, no factories, no electricity, no telecommunications, no real constitution, and pretty much was a society comparable to same one of medieval or ancient times.
And you come to us and say that the Dali Llama and upper society was to blame for all this? Its kind of like expecting a medieval king of Europe in the 1300s to come out and say "Let's have an revolution for the people! Equal rights for all! Lets do away with Catholicism and all you believe in while we are at it."
Things like that need things like printing presses, universities, trade, burghers, factories, and everything else needed for a revolution and a change in culture. Even if the Dali Lama came out and said we need to get rid of the old system, the peasants of Tibet would have said "Reject hundred of years of tradition? The Dali Lama has gone mad! Time for a new Dali Lama!"
Yeah... China brought civilization and industrialization to Tibet, but they did it at a point of a gun just like Europe brought civilization to Africa. It is wrong and look how it turned out for a lot of places.
The same apartheid in South Africa is going on in Tibet. Native Tibetans are 3rd class citizens even if they reject Buddhism.
Of course the Tibetan lower class had it bad... Just like any other lower class in any third world nation. Its not something the leadership could correct even if they wanted to.
Secondly it has nothing to do with religion and backwardness. China as a sense of their own Manifest destiny.
Originally, Mao had claimed that Mongolia, Vietnam, and Korea have and always been a part of China just like Tibet. Stalin and the Red Army basically told him to can that idea.
Of course the Dali Lama got caught up in the web of the CIA and things went bad.
So don't tell us things sucked worse under the Lamas because it would have sucked anywhere, and it even sucks even worse with the current regimes policy towards non-ethnic Chinese.
Do you feel bad for IBM for selling tabulation machines to the WWII Nazi Germany that were used to help keep track of the Jewish genocide? Although, the genocide itself came as surprise to most people and even to most Germans, Nazi Germany's brutal policy of discrimination towards the Jews was no secret to most people before the war.
Not to Godwin this, but if you are a Tibetan Buddhist, Muslim, or Fallon Gong member you could relate to being a Jew in WWII Germany.
In my opinion, 2K Games has addressed the issues that have come up in a very rapid and appropriate way. When people started running into problems with the 2 active PC install issue, they bumped it up to 5, even though this technically lets 5 people pool their dollars to buy a single game.
It still doesn't change the fact SecuROM is a rootkit. No amount of reinstalls allotments will change that.
I mean, most people bitch that by itself Steam is evil incarnate, but its quite a saint compared to what Starforce and SecuROM does to your system.
Personally, I feel Steam and Gamer's Gate AB isn't a bad way to do things (you authenticate, checks the CD Key lets you install and your done) but installing anything else that disables programs and could potentially used as a method to root the system is a bad thing. No amount of freebies and patches will resolve that issue.
If you've got a distinguished and influential guest addressing your class, you need to show him respect.
Stalin was distinguished and influential when he was alive. They would give him standing ovations that would last longer than his speeches. Does that make him any less what he stands for any less evil? I'm not saying the MPAA is akin to Stalinism, but there comes a time when you need to disrespect your enemy because treating them like equals only appease them and makes others see their ideology as a valid decision.
If you listen to Richard Taylor, you might learn a few things and better understand his point of view.
The point of winning hearts and minds is sometimes to treat jerks as what they are instead of appeasing them in a gentleman's discussion because they are using lobbyists and government legislation in an all out battle to extract as much control and money from you.
It is what he is paid to do. He may or may not believe in his own cause, but his duty is to subvert public opinion by any means necessary to achieve a profit from the member's company share holders.
Anything less and he wouldn't be doing what he is being paid for.
Slashdot Mirror
Bt yu cn lv ot innr vwls and stll be mstly rdble.
BTW, ancient Hebrew has no vowels.
Amusing that people who are content to rip off other people's hard work suddenly think they have the moral high ground when they're about to be ripped off themselves.
Are we talking about the CEO who laid off half the development team, required the remainder to work over time, and then gave himself a bonus by firing the rest after the product went gold or the pirates?
I say this because more than naught developers are underpaid for their work and then have the hounds released on them by the bean counters when quarter figures need to look better.
I don't say this to justify piracy (and I highly disapprove of it), but at the same time it could be developers work is being undermined by pirates when they are really getting the proverbial shaft by their management or publisher is often the real root of the bane of the developers.
Personally, I always buy direct from small time developers directly... It helps them more than having a large corporate structure of marketing types showing government officials powerpoint presentations on all their theoretical losses so they can get a tax break and still lay off their developers.
Why would anyone give this ultra-intelligent machine self-awareness?
If a being was more intelligent than any human that ever lived, I'm sure it would understand what the term "social engineering" means.
And it would put it to good use.
Then it would never be possible to be smarter than a robot that's exactly smart enough to design a robot as smart as itself.
Is your intelligence limited by your parents intelligence? How about limited by the intelligence of your professors or teachers?
We do learn a lot from people who are more intelligent than ourselves, but at some point we have to start learning the process of educating ourselves without the explicit help of others. This requires of course logic, reason, and self experimentation. Which is why a lot of higher college education is not about memorizing facts but learning the process of learning.
Therefore if we built a machine who could not learn on its own and become more intelligent by its own self experimentation and observation of the universe around it, then by definition the robot is not intelligent.
And if we did make a machine that could self improve and learn without human assistance, it wouldn't be restricted by organic limitations and capacity. Since the CPUs electrons travel near the speed of light gives it a far faster thinking ability than a humans slow moving chemical neurons. And since its memories are digital it does not need to memorize facts etc etc or suffer memory loss.
(Of course memory and memory loss might help with intelligence because a lot of intelligence requires one to simply ignore or disregard information that is unimportant to the task at hand. Which I think was the key feature behind Stanley's car at DARPA GC because rather than brute forcing all of the coordinates, it was better at disregarding information it didn't need and what information was important.)
* the owner of a huge botnet I remember a year ago I was playing around with some numbers and assumed that you needed 100 billion MIPS to have enough hardware power to brute force a brain simulation of every single neuron and that the AMD Athlon FX-60 (Dual Core) chip had about 20,000 MIPS.
So you would need about 5,000,000 computers running AMD Athlon FX-60s to run a brute force brain simulation. Since (at the time) an FX-60 was $1,000 a chip, this project would cost $5,000,000,000 on CPUs alone (not counting other parts and labor) so only a government with too much money on its hands could do this.
But if moore's law holds true then in 24 months years the price will be $2.5 billion and so on which is still alot but since its always by half, it only takes 10 years to drop the price to about $156 million which is in the range of any major corporation with plenty of cash (say Google).
However, if someone got a botnet today of 5,000,000 computers today (all with processors equal to or greater than the top of the line) they could acheive the possible the same results without spending all that money.
But this is of course assuming that you can get artificial intelligence but simply simulating all the neurons in a human brain and that you could get 100% CPU usage on all processors devoted to this task.
Interestingly enough is that the newer chips like Intel Core 2 QX6700 get 50,000 MIPs and cost roughly $1,000 today which would make it cost $62 million in 10 years from now.
But as an aside, once AI has been created and integrated into society the need for democracy will diminish since scarcity will be eliminated or at least subjugated to simple simulations. This may be a good or bad thing depending on how you look at it, but a singularity will happen someday or if not we'll simply not be here when the Earth is consumed by the sun.
Without technology there is no future for any life on earth. (Or in the universe if heat death turns out to be the final fate of the universe)
Fuck Web 2.0, IT departments are slow to move on any project except those that somehow benefit IT itself. We have an extraordinarily difficult time getting IT to update broken links on our website (we used to have access via the shitty CMS they were running but they now took that away too) nevermind solutions such as chat, online appointment scheduling, or additional databases to store information captured from web forms.
See, thats the thing. Right now, most corporate organizations use IT as a means to support the rest of the company rather than the other way around.
If one were take business as an act of war (Sun Tzu) they would reverse the roles as Clausewitz suggested in his book "On War" in that rather than the army being designed to support the nation, but nation's government and economic policies were designed to support the army which would be then be the extension of the nations will through diplomacy.
So rather having the IT simply be around to support the rest of the company, the company should become IT. Rather than the sole purpose of IT to keep the bean counters up and running, the HR, lawyers, and everyone else who is not in IT directly is sole purpose is to support the IT organization. Instead of the CEO and the VPs being independent and simply a court of well to dos, they would now be the head of IT like say Napoleon was the head of the army and the state rather than simply the head of state and just letting his generals of IT go forth without understanding any concepts of what IT does.
Which means in order to be like this you must start with the IT department first and then build around that. Simply taking an old brick and mortar company and adding IT to it will not give you Web 2.0 or at least even in a way marketing envisions at a best case scenario.
That said, if your company makes the majority of its income though its web store front, this policy makes sense, because if IT fails then the site goes down and your company makes money. Which means if your company has to ever let people go in that situation it has to let non-IT staff go first because if the Web store goes down then there is no point in even having HR around.
Of course if you are a brick and mortar then you don't need this type of strategic thinking, but at the same time you really don't really need to be thinking about Web 2.0 either because chances are it will be just throwing cash at consultants who will make fancy logos for you and nothing more.
...once you take land out of agricultural use, it is never used for agriculture again...Once a building is there, that's it.
Nothing 5,000 LBs of TNT dropped from a B-52 couldn't solve.
(I'm presuming a webcam for cube-to-remote-cube talking to add those all important hand gestures)
I'm not sure about you, but those hand gestures are usually the cause of the office drama and pink slips.
And sometimes the result of said drama and pink slips...
You are incorrect. You are assuming that living in social groups is inevitable, which I dispute.
It depends. If you look at human evolution for the past 2,000 years as a simply a survival of the fittest, then anyone who went against his local societies convention was put to death for even minor infractions. (In ancient Mesopotamia, if you built a house for someone and it collapsed and killed someone due to shoddy construction, then you were put to death)
It was only until the last 200 years did mankind generally start having any other punishment than death. So for the 5,000 years or so before that, civilization was basically was evolving by killing off anyone who had genetic traits of anti-sociality.
However, these traits would depend on which society you were in and based on their code or rules. A more tribal society might not have such things because punishment might not always be death but exile.
I do think, though, that a game put out by the Army that touts its realism can shape the ideas of what combat is like in impressionable minds, so I definitely have an ethical problem with them using it as part of a recruiting effort with people who are just coming into adulthood.
One of the first thing the Nazi's did when they came to power was to ban book like "All Quiet on the Western Front" because it portrayed combat in a bad light. The German army was the first to come up with the concept training of having soldiers actually shoot silhouettes of men rather than bull eye's target (to be fair this was not a Nazi creation but something from WWI) in which the belief you could desensitize soldiers to actually shooting the enemy by having them practice on man like objects first so that it would be a recorded hand eye movement so they didn't have to think of the killing.
Speaking of which... There was a study done by the US military that during WWII that only 1/3 of GI's actually shot at the enemy when given the choice. From what I've mostly read that most combat casualties on all sides (barring accidents, exposure to the elements, and starvation) in the war were via artillery, machine guns, or air attacks so it could that all sides simply had to use indirect fire to inflict casualties most of the time.
Given the nature of the game, it could be that AA would help in dehumanizing the enemy if the other side is seen as a video game opponent.
property isn't the centre of human life
So you are saying that the human body, which is property of the person who inhabits it, is not the center of human life?
The winner of this race is the person who comes closest to the average time. No kidding. Mediocracy. I was so pizzed I quit organized sports forever.
Hrm... So if you had won the award? What then? Did it make your life better? Would you have money to live off of? How about going to college and saving money?
See that is the difference between the people in the US and elsewhere with people come here because we reward people.
People don't work hard in the US because of recognition or winning. They do it because it gives them money to buy things. They don't give a rat's ass about the employee of the month other than it gives them more money. Our sports is a good example... Players don't play to win for their home team because they are opportunistic mercenaries for the highest bidder.
A Football franchise owner doesn't want to win the Super Bowl just to win and make himself feel better... No, he wants to win for the publicity and more money. Same thing with corporate ladders and politics.
No one does it for the mere sake of "being better" than anyone. They do it for personal gain. Take it or leave it... That is how America works and it does have its benefits. Rather than having a wall covered in pointless awards, I'll put more effort into my job for a wallet full of money. Who gives a damn about winning the competition as long as the quarter earnings show a profit.
A presumed libertarian said that we ought to privatize 911 services and not provide it to everyone who can't pay (and let charity help the rest).
I would consider myself a libertarian (well I'm registered as one so I suppose its official) but I would be horrified of a privatized 911 system.
So simply type casting all libertarians as privatizing slogan shouters as the same group is most likely wrong.
There are two types of libertarians that I have seen and one is the full blown Free Market Libertarians who want to privatize everything and get rid of the government then there are libertarians who want government to do what it was originally intended to do (which I think is how I feel).
Kind of like Anarchists vs Jeffersonians libertarians.
I believe that it is in the best interest of society to keep things like the military, roads, utilities, and various other things in the hands of the government. Out of this I would like to see the State Governments take a lot more responsibility than a centralized Federal government.
And at the same time, I really feel that the current system of the Federal Reserve is a bit dubious and actually should be a part of the government overseen directly by the Department of Treasury as stated in the constitution rather than in the hands of a private organization.
So in that regards... Yes, you can be a libertarian rather than a complete Laize Faire economic privatization libertarian. (Maybe there should be a euphanism for "priva-libs" like neo-cons and then plain old conservatives)
And why in God's name should your teacher give you any respect?
Human decency.
Adults should respect children as equals and not lesser beings. Otherwise the child will grow either submissive, subversive, or actively seek to make people submit to them as revenge. Just because you have lived longer, more intelligence, have more money, more titles, more friends in high places, more political power, or anything anyone else doesn't have doesn't mean you get the right to not show respect to them. At the same time, being younger or poorer doesn't give you the default right to disrespect people who are older or wealthier than you.
Given a complete stranger you should give them respect and only when they do not reciprocate (as in the child sass talks you or an adult cuts you off in traffic) is when this rule no longer applies.
By not respecting a person by default is just wrong.
And by respect... I mean the human decency kind in which you don't cut off in traffic, thrown trash in their yard, or flip them the bird kind of respect. If you mean the kind of "I respect so and so because they are a learned person in their profession" kind of respect, I think you and the grandparent are talking about two different things.
Respect of each other as equal humans is not earned, it should be given by default until the other party is no longer capable of leaving the other alone. I believe that is the key part of being a libertarian. Just respecting everyone else to leave everyone else alone to their personal being and property regardless of who they are. We are all born and die the same way. Nothing makes us any better than each other in the end so you should have the decency to respect by default rather than forcing people to submit to your requirements.
Client? What client?
The one that doesn't have polonium.
That caustic edge left me wondering if maybe he was a nut case.
A SciFi writer who isn't a nut case is like a musician who doesn't do drugs.
Its easier to hang out with them, but they make boring art.
Well I don't think having a Nazi German government is a great idea for good government. ;) I jest! I jest!
But all your examples were result from German ideas under Hitler:
German Autobahn
German Airborne invasion of Crete
And German scientists of the V2 projects used for the Apollo project
And secondly, I wouldn't credit the US Government for the project success but rather great men like Eisenhower who were able to get the job done without government interference.
Could you imagine the logistical problems if Congress or FDR had direct control over the Battle of D-Day? It wouldn't have turned out well.
But let's pretend that we believed that reincarnation claim. There was always the same guy on the throne. The same applies to most of the other Lamas, btw. So essentially the not only they had the same ruler all along, but they had the same guys as his councillors/cardinals/whatever-you-want-to-call-th em. It was the same gang at the top all along, uninterrupted.
The same thing could said about any European King who claimed his authority came from divine right or the Pope saying he was the official mouthpiece of god.
You either believe them or you don't, but chances are if you want economic or political change you have to stop playing their game. Martin Luther didn't come out and say "Don't listen to the Pope even though he is infallible and the mouth piece of god" and the same respect Lenin didn't come out and say "We have to start a communist state even though God ordained the Tsar's right to rule!"
No, they rejected both religious concepts on their own terms. Luther rejected the Pope's authority over religion and Lenin simply rejected religion all together.
So are we going to blame the Lama's for being an immortal religious entity responsible for several hundred years of failing to industrialize their nation or are we going to admit that they are just another system of feudal theocratic society that was isolated from the outside world and invaded by a foreign power.
Even if there is no such thing as afterlife and all religions are wrong (which I tend to lean towards more these days), it is wrong to invade and occupy an indigenous people just because you want to better them through force or change their beliefs.
The prospect that it's the end of the line at some point, is freakin' scary for a lot of people.
0 00000000000000000000000000000000000000 years from now and I really doubt you'd be able to take your memories with you.
If you take it as a scientific standpoint, you could in theory say reincarnation is possible if the many world theories is correct. If other universes do exist or the universe is infinite beyond the observable boundary, then given infinite time you might experience conscious again.
If the universe and all that is observed has spontaneously come into existence through something like the big bang, then the possibility of it happening again after heat death in this universe or elsewhere could happen.
Now we are talking about time longer than any computer could record as a decimal place and long long after all the suns die, black holes evaporate, and all radiation dissipates and the universe dies either resulting in heat death or a big crunch.
A big crunch might result in another big bang and if other universes exist then a big bang could happen elsewhere in where the laws of physics are conducive to another big bang. As it is now we have no evidence of the laws of physics or even if there was anything around before the big bang.
So given enough time, just like a another universe spontaneously coming into existing, you might get reincarnated if the same exact conditions are met again. Of course no one knows what the conditions of conciousness are, but only that the observer sees itself to be conscious.
So logically, if you exist now, the possibility of you existing in the future does exist.
But it is most likely long after several big bangs or universe deaths that would be 10^1000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
Their record for treatment of their own population isn't that great, butit gets glossed over by a west desperate to find a better path to their own enlightenment, whilst handily ignoring the impovorished state in which the peasants live, and have lived for a log time, long before the Chinese turned up.
Huh? Tibet has been occupied since the 1950's which if you compare it to the current world situation of the times, we Americans were still highly geared up for segregation and discrimination of African Americans in the South and only a handful of people were fighting to change it until the 1960's equal rights movement.
Hell... We are talking about a 3rd world nation's history from prior to that we might as well be talking about the Tsar and how bad he was that make the Soviet Crimes acceptable or how great the Zulus had it because the British brought them civilization at the point of a gun. Tibet had no road infrastructure, no factories, no electricity, no telecommunications, no real constitution, and pretty much was a society comparable to same one of medieval or ancient times.
And you come to us and say that the Dali Llama and upper society was to blame for all this? Its kind of like expecting a medieval king of Europe in the 1300s to come out and say "Let's have an revolution for the people! Equal rights for all! Lets do away with Catholicism and all you believe in while we are at it."
Things like that need things like printing presses, universities, trade, burghers, factories, and everything else needed for a revolution and a change in culture. Even if the Dali Lama came out and said we need to get rid of the old system, the peasants of Tibet would have said "Reject hundred of years of tradition? The Dali Lama has gone mad! Time for a new Dali Lama!"
Yeah... China brought civilization and industrialization to Tibet, but they did it at a point of a gun just like Europe brought civilization to Africa. It is wrong and look how it turned out for a lot of places.
The same apartheid in South Africa is going on in Tibet. Native Tibetans are 3rd class citizens even if they reject Buddhism.
Of course the Tibetan lower class had it bad... Just like any other lower class in any third world nation. Its not something the leadership could correct even if they wanted to.
Secondly it has nothing to do with religion and backwardness. China as a sense of their own Manifest destiny.
Originally, Mao had claimed that Mongolia, Vietnam, and Korea have and always been a part of China just like Tibet. Stalin and the Red Army basically told him to can that idea.
Of course the Dali Lama got caught up in the web of the CIA and things went bad.
So don't tell us things sucked worse under the Lamas because it would have sucked anywhere, and it even sucks even worse with the current regimes policy towards non-ethnic Chinese.
No, they were hanged because the orders were illegal.
The orders were legal in Germany.
Secondly, Soviets, Communist Chinese, and Serbian partisans did some pretty bad things and were never brought to justice.
Of course what they did was perfectly legal in their jurisdictions.
I actually feel bad for Yahoo in a way.
Do you feel bad for IBM for selling tabulation machines to the WWII Nazi Germany that were used to help keep track of the Jewish genocide? Although, the genocide itself came as surprise to most people and even to most Germans, Nazi Germany's brutal policy of discrimination towards the Jews was no secret to most people before the war.
Not to Godwin this, but if you are a Tibetan Buddhist, Muslim, or Fallon Gong member you could relate to being a Jew in WWII Germany.
In my opinion, 2K Games has addressed the issues that have come up in a very rapid and appropriate way. When people started running into problems with the 2 active PC install issue, they bumped it up to 5, even though this technically lets 5 people pool their dollars to buy a single game.
It still doesn't change the fact SecuROM is a rootkit. No amount of reinstalls allotments will change that.
I mean, most people bitch that by itself Steam is evil incarnate, but its quite a saint compared to what Starforce and SecuROM does to your system.
Personally, I feel Steam and Gamer's Gate AB isn't a bad way to do things (you authenticate, checks the CD Key lets you install and your done) but installing anything else that disables programs and could potentially used as a method to root the system is a bad thing. No amount of freebies and patches will resolve that issue.
If you've got a distinguished and influential guest addressing your class, you need to show him respect.
Stalin was distinguished and influential when he was alive. They would give him standing ovations that would last longer than his speeches. Does that make him any less what he stands for any less evil? I'm not saying the MPAA is akin to Stalinism, but there comes a time when you need to disrespect your enemy because treating them like equals only appease them and makes others see their ideology as a valid decision.
If you listen to Richard Taylor, you might learn a few things and better understand his point of view.
The point of winning hearts and minds is sometimes to treat jerks as what they are instead of appeasing them in a gentleman's discussion because they are using lobbyists and government legislation in an all out battle to extract as much control and money from you.
It is what he is paid to do. He may or may not believe in his own cause, but his duty is to subvert public opinion by any means necessary to achieve a profit from the member's company share holders.
Anything less and he wouldn't be doing what he is being paid for.
I see three red lights on my Microsoft 360.