Is the global computer network to blame for the current electricity crisis? Lackeys for the power industry want us to think so.
and nowhere in the text do they bring up a single claim of the computer-energy-crisis people without refuting it and pointing a finger at self-serving lobbyists. So where is Taco's unhappy commentary coming from? The point of Salon's discussion is that the net doesn't "consume a huge portion of the nation's electricity," and all the atricle's "good points" go towards demonstrating that!
----- Go ahead, blame me... I voted for Nader!
Re:This would make a good tampon
on
Nano-pants
·
· Score: 1
I really, really want to moderate this down, but that wouldn't get my point across.
You're right about TSS. But do you really think that profanity and personal insults are the best way to get your message out? Your assumption that the poster was being "not funny, juvenile, purile" instead of simply being uninformed, is inflammatory and unhelpful. Why attack someone who, to all appearances, simply made an unwarranted speculation?
Contrary to what seems to be a popular belief, getting angry at people does not encourage them to listen to you.
Well, bearing in mind that making broad statements about what pagans do and think is about as valid as making broad statements about "monotheists"...
There is a great effort not to vilify the winter. So, to the extent that Yule is a celebration, it's a celebration of what the season of cold and dark has taught us. I suppose it is also a collective sigh of relief that we're going back to a time of more pleasant weather and easier living. The Crone is a mean, scary old mother. Just because she brings you wisdom and takes away the things that need to die, doesn't mean that you're not glad when she's replaced by a hot young Maiden.
I don't think any pagans really think we need to ask the sun to come back. But there is an element of noticing and respecting what the natural world is doing and mirroring it in your own ceremonies. The pagans I celebrated with had one "calling back the sun" story as historical context.
This had to happen NOW, didn't it? I'm sure the sun will be just THRILLED to receive this insult, after deciding to be merciful and give in to our pleading. I'll bet now he decides to turn around and not end Winter after all.
Well done! The people who saw it no doubt immediately understood your commentary on the futility of blocking software. I'm sure not a one of them didn't fail to apprehend that this site shouldn't have been viewable, or that it was in place of more worthy ones. Moreover, I'm certain that not a single person walked out of that store thinking, oh, say, "the internet has some horrible smut on it! There ought to be a law!"
"K-Complex" spikes - anything up to 150Hz; very rare, short lived spikes thought by some to be linked to moments of profound insight. Virtually unheard of.
I was under the impression that K-complexes showed up as one moved from theta to delta sleep.
These suits, and indeed the entire Anime movement, are an unconscious desire to return to the violent certainties of old Japan, IMHO
Yes, but not entirely. The things you mention, along with all giant robo anime, from Neon Genesis Evangelion to Voltron, handle the universal phenomenon of nostalgia with the unique Japanese bent. They blend the technology and eclecticism of the modern world with the personal excellence and honor of the (romanticized) old. This is not an attempt to turn back the clock, but to hold on to the best parts of the past.
Personal note to KTB: I disagree with you here, but in general I consider you a white hat troll. On the other hand, the people who posted the "it's entertainment" responses are just being dumb.
I'm really tired of seeing these screeds from people who know nothing about criticism of popular culture. No, a television commercial doesn't have the inherent depth and complexity of Goethe or Keats or Walt Whitman -- but it reveals a lot more about the people and the common attitudes of its time. What were the cultural values that made an endorsement by someone who played a doctor on TV trustworthy? Did changing ideas about consumer sophistication and complicity accompany the move from straightforward informational advertisements to those perfume ads that are unrelated to the product? What are the beliefs about entertainment and lifestyle that made ABC's 1997 ads like "hobbies, schmobbies" and "It's a beautiful day... what are you doing outside" seem like a good idea?
I characterize postmodern criticism as psychology by proxy. It's part of the same movement that got historians looking at the diet and lifestyle of the 99% of humanity that wasn't declaring wars and lolling in opulent luxury. The fact that this stuff is important to great masses of people makes it worth trying to figure out, regardless of your personal opinions of it.
Lots of people are criticizing pop-up windows, their intrusiveness and waste of system resources. A website I've designed uses pop-ups to provide brief definitions and pieces of ancillary information without interrupting the flow of the parent page. I'd like to describe my use of pop-ups and find out whether they avoid the complaints here.
First of all, my pop-ups are backwards compatable. I use the code
for links, where openWin opens a popup called myWin. But if Javascript is unsupported or turned off, or if you choose "open in new window," it's interpreted as an ordinary link.
closeWin() closes myWin, ensuring that no more than one instance of it will be open at any time. Additionally, the parent page contains the tag , so that it won't hang around after they move on.
So, is this an improvement? Would you accept this kind of popup?
Hey, what are you trying to pull? I checked the website, and the emperor's name is Kuzco, not Dali. Anyway, what does this movie have to do with Buddhism?
I think that those who live the Buddhist way of life with peace and vitality do find it personally satisfying. This may be because they have cultivate a point of view which includes others inside their ego. But any life which can be sustained is not a life of emotional suffering and lack of fulfillment. I suggest that my analysis of Scooby-doo and your description of Buddhism have a lot in common -- people have developed skills and points of view that allow them to feel good about doing good. But this is much more evident in a show of arete like solving a mystery than it is in the modesty and hard-learned self-denial of the Bodhisattva.
Besides, to return to the original point of this thread, Scooby-Doo teaches skepticism and empiricism. These are not hard-hearted; they are a prerequisite to being able to help people effectively.
First of all, I recommend you take the advice of the "throw a football" contingent with the proper seasoning. Yes, you don't want to raise this kid to be an outcast. But you also don't want to cheat him of the best developmental period he'll ever have. Being a preadolescent genius isn't just an opportunity to learn some stuff a few years before everyone else -- it's an opportunity to get that matertial into a brain that's still plastic and growing. People who learn math at that age have an opportunity to think in ways that come very hard to anyone older.
I would say absolutely push this kid to learn challenging material (I'll get to the content in a moment). Also do the big brother stuff, or find someone who can. I'm not sure about pushing peer-group interactions, because it would be hard to find a peer group. Dumping him with other kids his own age might just enforce the perspective that most people are dumb and not worth his time. Teaching him to look for information and answers from other people, online, might be a start. It would be nice to find others on his emotional and intellectual levels, but I can't tell you where to look.
As for material to study, I would stay away from the "bleeding edge." You never know what will collapse, or what will be radically reconceptualized. Anyway, the best programmers (just for example) aren't the ones who have been writing C since they were five; they're the ones who have a deep understanding of the mathematics that underly all programming and automatic systems. These are the people who will always be valuable, who can understand any new development. They'll still be advancing our understanding after the market-glutters who learned perl and java for two years in college are used up and discarded.
Rather than specific fields, then, look at the commonalities among the big trends in science and/or computers, and see what their basis is. Don't study nanotech, study physics. Don't study cloning; study cell biology. Aim for knowledge that won't become obsolete, and will create a firm foundation for whatever comes.
Apropos of the pop neurology above, I'd recommend the more arcane / symbolic fields like math and logic. It's a rare opportunity to be able to build those things into the brain on a low level, and should not be discarded. This is probably also a good time to teach music, even though the idea is somewhat tainted by prodigies who had their lives ruined by overbearing tutors.
I think my advice is good. But to put it to proper use, you'll need compassion and sensitivity. The most important thing is to foster a love of learning, not to crush it. So make sure that at every step, your charge is studying something he loves; make sure he knows why it's valuable and just how cool it is.
I'd say that Scooby-Doo teaches the best kind of compassion. The gang is constantly helping others, even against their own misgivings and at some peril. Now, they also do this because they love solving mysteries and have confidence in their abilities. But so what? Throughgoing selflessness, with no concern for one's own comfort or fulfillment, is not a viable way of life. In Scooby-Doo, the characters live for the exercise of deliberately developed faculties which make them happy at the same time as they help those in need. This is the secret to a good and enjoyable life: not sacrifice, but the cultivation of personality for which valuable behavior is natural and satisfying.
I don't see this as a particularly serious problem. Informative material is informative. If he'd lay off the plagiarism, I wouldn't begrudge him his karma. A polite note to that effect might have more influence than a public "exposè".
Not fair. Note that the first telegraph, the first phone message, etc, are the first ones anyone knew about -- the first ones sent to another person. I'll bet that Bell had two phones hooked together in his laboratory before he sent his famous message to Watson, but no one claims that the first telephone transmission was line noise, or Bell whistling to himself.
A more fair comparison would be the first message sent to another person. According to the article, this was a description of e-mail and how to use it. Still not an earth-shaker, granted, but not such cause for derision.
Now we see why the story was down! You must have used your Pentagon connections to get Satirewire taken out so your post would get more points! K**ra w***h!
Thanks to everyone who modded this out of sight. I had no idea people would take my post seriously. It was intended as a humorous reference to the GNU / GNU/Linux and free software / open source debates. Anyone who had any doubt, you have been trolled. Except that it wasn't a troll, just a mistargeted joke.
For afficionados of science fiction, psychology, and mysticism, -- and especially for those who found Stranger sappy and idealistic -- I recommend an exercise:
Compare Stranger to Dune.
One is full of love, compassion, and freedom, while the other is about hardness, amorality, and discipline. The contrast between water-sharing and water murder is particularly strong. However, at bottom I think they're the same story: a story of what humanity can be when our true will is placed above everything else. Paul and Mike are both superhuman badaasses, but one of their most salient -- and emulatable -- qualities is that they don't get distracted. I think this juxtaposition hardens our view of Mike, and makes the strength beneeath his soft lovieness more evident. That, in turn, makes the story a good deal harder to dismiss as naively utopian.
Didn't the recent tragedy in Australia teach us anything about intermixing our vital activities with the internet? Let's just wait until we all need a satellite connection to go to the toilet... and thena misplaced anchor takes out one of the main fiber lines. Nationwide chaos!
"Sir, the line's been cut! We're spewing data all over the place."
"That's not all that's being spewed, Johnson. May God have mercy on us."
I thank you for your post and agree with you to the extent that somber reverence is certainly not the only appropriate way to respond to death. I feel the proper response is one that commemorates and investigates the life of the deceased -- and equally importantly, one that helps the memorializers to stay between the poles of denial and morbid depression. There is time for mourning and there is time for vivacious rememberance. Humor that is not directly insulting to the survivors is certainly proper if it helps us to see the goodness or importance of the person we lost. In this case, the jokes certainly help point out the ubiquity of Muuss' work, and in that sense they are very fitting.
So you have the choice between drooling on yourself or saying "deja vu," which has more syllables, tone changes, and stops than its nearest competitors. Plus the danger of the illiterate calling it "day-JAH-voo."
Slashdot Mirror
I thought it was funny. Thanks.
-----
Go ahead, blame me... I voted for Nader!
-----
Go ahead, blame me... I voted for Nader!
I really, really want to moderate this down, but that wouldn't get my point across.
You're right about TSS. But do you really think that profanity and personal insults are the best way to get your message out? Your assumption that the poster was being "not funny, juvenile, purile" instead of simply being uninformed, is inflammatory and unhelpful. Why attack someone who, to all appearances, simply made an unwarranted speculation?
Contrary to what seems to be a popular belief, getting angry at people does not encourage them to listen to you.
-----
Go ahead, blame me... I voted for Nader!
Well, bearing in mind that making broad statements about what pagans do and think is about as valid as making broad statements about "monotheists"...
There is a great effort not to vilify the winter. So, to the extent that Yule is a celebration, it's a celebration of what the season of cold and dark has taught us. I suppose it is also a collective sigh of relief that we're going back to a time of more pleasant weather and easier living. The Crone is a mean, scary old mother. Just because she brings you wisdom and takes away the things that need to die, doesn't mean that you're not glad when she's replaced by a hot young Maiden.
I don't think any pagans really think we need to ask the sun to come back. But there is an element of noticing and respecting what the natural world is doing and mirroring it in your own ceremonies. The pagans I celebrated with had one "calling back the sun" story as historical context.
But anyway, my initial message was a joke...
-----
Go ahead, blame me... I voted for Nader!
This had to happen NOW, didn't it? I'm sure the sun will be just THRILLED to receive this insult, after deciding to be merciful and give in to our pleading. I'll bet now he decides to turn around and not end Winter after all.
-----
Go ahead, blame me... I voted for Nader!
Well done! The people who saw it no doubt immediately understood your commentary on the futility of blocking software. I'm sure not a one of them didn't fail to apprehend that this site shouldn't have been viewable, or that it was in place of more worthy ones. Moreover, I'm certain that not a single person walked out of that store thinking, oh, say, "the internet has some horrible smut on it! There ought to be a law!"
- Michael
-----
Go ahead, blame me... I voted for Nader!
Yeah, and if that bothers you think how badly it sucks for me...
Michael Cohn, B.A. Psychology
-----
Go ahead, blame me... I voted for Nader!
"K-Complex" spikes - anything up to 150Hz; very rare, short lived spikes thought by some to be linked to moments of profound insight. Virtually unheard of.
I was under the impression that K-complexes showed up as one moved from theta to delta sleep.
-----
Go ahead, blame me... I voted for Nader!
These suits, and indeed the entire Anime movement, are an unconscious desire to return to the violent certainties of old Japan, IMHO
Yes, but not entirely. The things you mention, along with all giant robo anime, from Neon Genesis Evangelion to Voltron, handle the universal phenomenon of nostalgia with the unique Japanese bent. They blend the technology and eclecticism of the modern world with the personal excellence and honor of the (romanticized) old. This is not an attempt to turn back the clock, but to hold on to the best parts of the past.
Personal note to KTB: I disagree with you here, but in general I consider you a white hat troll. On the other hand, the people who posted the "it's entertainment" responses are just being dumb.
-----
Go ahead, blame me... I voted for Nader!
I'm really tired of seeing these screeds from people who know nothing about criticism of popular culture. No, a television commercial doesn't have the inherent depth and complexity of Goethe or Keats or Walt Whitman -- but it reveals a lot more about the people and the common attitudes of its time. What were the cultural values that made an endorsement by someone who played a doctor on TV trustworthy? Did changing ideas about consumer sophistication and complicity accompany the move from straightforward informational advertisements to those perfume ads that are unrelated to the product? What are the beliefs about entertainment and lifestyle that made ABC's 1997 ads like "hobbies, schmobbies" and "It's a beautiful day... what are you doing outside" seem like a good idea?
I characterize postmodern criticism as psychology by proxy. It's part of the same movement that got historians looking at the diet and lifestyle of the 99% of humanity that wasn't declaring wars and lolling in opulent luxury. The fact that this stuff is important to great masses of people makes it worth trying to figure out, regardless of your personal opinions of it.
- Michael
-----
Go ahead, blame me... I voted for Nader!
Lots of people are criticizing pop-up windows, their intrusiveness and waste of system resources. A website I've designed uses pop-ups to provide brief definitions and pieces of ancillary information without interrupting the flow of the parent page. I'd like to describe my use of pop-ups and find out whether they avoid the complaints here.
First of all, my pop-ups are backwards compatable. I use the code
page" onClick = "closeWin();openWin('page?popup=1','myWin'); return false;">
for links, where openWin opens a popup called myWin. But if Javascript is unsupported or turned off, or if you choose "open in new window," it's interpreted as an ordinary link.
closeWin() closes myWin, ensuring that no more than one instance of it will be open at any time. Additionally, the parent page contains the tag , so that it won't hang around after they move on.
So, is this an improvement? Would you accept this kind of popup?
- Michael
-----
Go ahead, blame me... I voted for Nader!
I think the Dali Llama would disagree.
Hey, what are you trying to pull? I checked the website, and the emperor's name is Kuzco, not Dali. Anyway, what does this movie have to do with Buddhism?
-----
Go ahead, blame me... I voted for Nader!
I think that those who live the Buddhist way of life with peace and vitality do find it personally satisfying. This may be because they have cultivate a point of view which includes others inside their ego. But any life which can be sustained is not a life of emotional suffering and lack of fulfillment. I suggest that my analysis of Scooby-doo and your description of Buddhism have a lot in common -- people have developed skills and points of view that allow them to feel good about doing good. But this is much more evident in a show of arete like solving a mystery than it is in the modesty and hard-learned self-denial of the Bodhisattva.
Besides, to return to the original point of this thread, Scooby-Doo teaches skepticism and empiricism. These are not hard-hearted; they are a prerequisite to being able to help people effectively.
- Michael
-----
Go ahead, blame me... I voted for Nader!
Dr. Montessori? I didn't know you read slashdot!
(note to the trigger-happy: the above is a compliment)
-----
Go ahead, blame me... I voted for Nader!
First of all, I recommend you take the advice of the "throw a football" contingent with the proper seasoning. Yes, you don't want to raise this kid to be an outcast. But you also don't want to cheat him of the best developmental period he'll ever have. Being a preadolescent genius isn't just an opportunity to learn some stuff a few years before everyone else -- it's an opportunity to get that matertial into a brain that's still plastic and growing. People who learn math at that age have an opportunity to think in ways that come very hard to anyone older.
I would say absolutely push this kid to learn challenging material (I'll get to the content in a moment). Also do the big brother stuff, or find someone who can. I'm not sure about pushing peer-group interactions, because it would be hard to find a peer group. Dumping him with other kids his own age might just enforce the perspective that most people are dumb and not worth his time. Teaching him to look for information and answers from other people, online, might be a start. It would be nice to find others on his emotional and intellectual levels, but I can't tell you where to look.
As for material to study, I would stay away from the "bleeding edge." You never know what will collapse, or what will be radically reconceptualized. Anyway, the best programmers (just for example) aren't the ones who have been writing C since they were five; they're the ones who have a deep understanding of the mathematics that underly all programming and automatic systems. These are the people who will always be valuable, who can understand any new development. They'll still be advancing our understanding after the market-glutters who learned perl and java for two years in college are used up and discarded.
Rather than specific fields, then, look at the commonalities among the big trends in science and/or computers, and see what their basis is. Don't study nanotech, study physics. Don't study cloning; study cell biology. Aim for knowledge that won't become obsolete, and will create a firm foundation for whatever comes.
Apropos of the pop neurology above, I'd recommend the more arcane / symbolic fields like math and logic. It's a rare opportunity to be able to build those things into the brain on a low level, and should not be discarded. This is probably also a good time to teach music, even though the idea is somewhat tainted by prodigies who had their lives ruined by overbearing tutors.
I think my advice is good. But to put it to proper use, you'll need compassion and sensitivity. The most important thing is to foster a love of learning, not to crush it. So make sure that at every step, your charge is studying something he loves; make sure he knows why it's valuable and just how cool it is.
- Michael
-----
Go ahead, blame me... I voted for Nader!
I'd say that Scooby-Doo teaches the best kind of compassion. The gang is constantly helping others, even against their own misgivings and at some peril. Now, they also do this because they love solving mysteries and have confidence in their abilities. But so what? Throughgoing selflessness, with no concern for one's own comfort or fulfillment, is not a viable way of life. In Scooby-Doo, the characters live for the exercise of deliberately developed faculties which make them happy at the same time as they help those in need. This is the secret to a good and enjoyable life: not sacrifice, but the cultivation of personality for which valuable behavior is natural and satisfying.
-----
Go ahead, blame me... I voted for Nader!
I don't see this as a particularly serious problem. Informative material is informative. If he'd lay off the plagiarism, I wouldn't begrudge him his karma. A polite note to that effect might have more influence than a public "exposè".
-----
Go ahead, blame me... I voted for Nader!
Not fair. Note that the first telegraph, the first phone message, etc, are the first ones anyone knew about -- the first ones sent to another person. I'll bet that Bell had two phones hooked together in his laboratory before he sent his famous message to Watson, but no one claims that the first telephone transmission was line noise, or Bell whistling to himself.
A more fair comparison would be the first message sent to another person. According to the article, this was a description of e-mail and how to use it. Still not an earth-shaker, granted, but not such cause for derision.
-----
Go ahead, blame me... I voted for Nader!
Now we see why the story was down! You must have used your Pentagon connections to get Satirewire taken out so your post would get more points! K**ra w***h!
-----
Go ahead, blame me... I voted for Nader!
Thanks to everyone who modded this out of sight. I had no idea people would take my post seriously. It was intended as a humorous reference to the GNU / GNU/Linux and free software / open source debates. Anyone who had any doubt, you have been trolled. Except that it wasn't a troll, just a mistargeted joke.
- Michael
-----
Go ahead, blame me... I voted for Nader!
For afficionados of science fiction, psychology, and mysticism, -- and especially for those who found Stranger sappy and idealistic -- I recommend an exercise:
Compare Stranger to Dune.
One is full of love, compassion, and freedom, while the other is about hardness, amorality, and discipline. The contrast between water-sharing and water murder is particularly strong. However, at bottom I think they're the same story: a story of what humanity can be when our true will is placed above everything else. Paul and Mike are both superhuman badaasses, but one of their most salient -- and emulatable -- qualities is that they don't get distracted. I think this juxtaposition hardens our view of Mike, and makes the strength beneeath his soft lovieness more evident. That, in turn, makes the story a good deal harder to dismiss as naively utopian.
-----
Go ahead, blame me... I voted for Nader!
Didn't the recent tragedy in Australia teach us anything about intermixing our vital activities with the internet? Let's just wait until we all need a satellite connection to go to the toilet... and then a misplaced anchor takes out one of the main fiber lines. Nationwide chaos!
"Sir, the line's been cut! We're spewing data all over the place."
"That's not all that's being spewed, Johnson. May God have mercy on us."
- Michael
-----
Go ahead, blame me... I voted for Nader!
I don't get it?
None of those words are dirty! Or do you expect someone to be "offended" by nonsense like "feck","cknt", or "c%wboy neal"?
-----
Go ahead, blame me... I voted for Nader!
I thank you for your post and agree with you to the extent that somber reverence is certainly not the only appropriate way to respond to death. I feel the proper response is one that commemorates and investigates the life of the deceased -- and equally importantly, one that helps the memorializers to stay between the poles of denial and morbid depression. There is time for mourning and there is time for vivacious rememberance. Humor that is not directly insulting to the survivors is certainly proper if it helps us to see the goodness or importance of the person we lost. In this case, the jokes certainly help point out the ubiquity of Muuss' work, and in that sense they are very fitting.
- Michael
-----
Go ahead, blame me... I voted for Nader!
GIF = "jif"
JPEG = "JAY-peg"
PNG = "ping"
DjVu = "duh-ju-voo"
So you have the choice between drooling on yourself or saying "deja vu," which has more syllables, tone changes, and stops than its nearest competitors. Plus the danger of the illiterate calling it "day-JAH-voo."
-----
Go ahead, blame me... I voted for Nader!