Tell that to the people of African descent who grew up before the civil rights movement.
They will do with you what they want. According to the Bush cabal's interpretation of the law, we are in a state of emergency. the president has exceptional powers in these exceptional times. Waterboarding? Yes, yes, yessity yes. All they have to say is that you were an "enemy combatant" and you have no rights at all.
Did they let Padilla in? No, they sent him on a joy-ride through the gulag. He's still there, basically because it was a useful diversion from the massive fuck-ups in Iraq and Afghanistan. It helped that he's a bit whacko and dopey, but shit, Bush himself would be in Gitmo, too on that score.
The Padilla case proved that US citizenship will not protect you from the machinery of the post-911 state.
What's this about "valid people"? Just who isn't valid?
One isn't any less a person for not holding a US passport or a green card!
I know it's probably a slip of some sorts, but the slip indicates that the writer unconciously considers those who would end up on this list to be "less equal".
Yes, I "fired" a certain Healthcare IT company that was interviewing me after finding out by Googling that they practically run a sweatshop, paying a salary and making people work up to 60hrs/week.
It doesn't take Google to figure that out. That's pretty much the rap on Epic in Madison. Of course, if you aren't here, you don't hear the word on the street.
He also makes a political critique of PP, saying that it tends to reproduce and propagate top-down, bureaucratic organisation. The classroom ends up becoming a mini-Microsoft. Read that in the PP chapter in Beautiful Information
I don't see what PP has over a blackboard. (OK, absence of dust. Got me there.)
That's because it's only really an issue for Windows. On linux, one already has "an ergonomic software program that eliminates the need to click the mouse". It's called *vi* or emacs. OSX comes with both, too.
No way! Had i not read the book and seen the original, i would have had no idea of what was happening in the remake. More importantly, the remake was not half as visually interesting as the first. In fact, it's an almost an insult to Tarkovsky to even compare the two. I also thought the remake lacked most of the philosophical inquiries into the difference between Self & Other. It was quite gripping if you're into that particular epistemological aporia. The remake was just melodrama. And better actors? I don't get that either.
A good pair of headphones are probably enough to let you hear the difference. Perhaps that excludes the iPod ear buds. (I don't know -- never tried an iPod.) I have a pair of big headphones and i occasionally listen to music on my Powerbook when i'm at a cafe with annoying music or conversation. I have a few iTunes tunes on my playlist, and i've heard a small subset of those on CDs. I'm not an audiophile at all, but even i have noticed that the iTunes versions don't sound that good compared to CDs.
So you guys wouldn't mind if municipalities provided the capital (=network infrastructure) and absorbed the risks and costs of maintaining the infrastructure while ISPs took home the profits?
I guess i wouldn't mind that either -- if i were an ISP.
One other issue that hasn't come up yet is convenience. When i cancelled my parents' overpriced and underperforming Charter internet service, i had to drive an hour to Charter's "local" office to do it. I could have walked to city hall in 10 minutes.
It's always bugged me that computer games by and large don't allow players to be truly autonomous. The player follows the parameters the game sets up. In real life, it is possible to change the values one assigns to objects and relationships, or even to change the rules. Needless to say, we are not completely free to do so on our own. A dollar is a dollar no matter what i think its "true" value to be. But i can nevertheless change the value of that dollar within my own value set. And in our dealings with other humans, we aren't bound to any particular modes of interaction. Through negotiation, we can do things differently.
So yeah, I agree. Compared to the richness of real social life, RPG are frighteningly one-dimensional.
This system is already in place. It's a bit more clever than the old "papers please" type of travel control in that only requires you not be on some Mysterious List. All air travellers show their papers and their names are checked against the "No Fly List". Even Greyhound sometimes asks for ID. Why I don't know, but I suppose they might be checking a similar sort of list. The national insecurity apparatus already checks our papers at node points in the transportation network, it's just that most folks don't realise that's what's happening.
Electric heaters and stoves work fine -- except of course during blackouts. (The power was just out here in my neighbourhood in Montreal for 18hrs.) I think the issue is rather efficiency.
Electricity can be an OK heat source or it can be a waste. It depends on how it's generated. In the case of wind or hydro power, it's fine. (As far as efficiency goes -- there are obviously other issues involved.) The water or wind turns the turbines, and you get a stream of electrons you can send down the grid to get turned into heat in your P4s, AthlonWhatnots & WhizzBangGPUs. Aside from more efficient turbines, a superconducting grid, and more efficient space heaters, there's not much we can do to improve the picture here.
On the other hand, if you're generating electricity from hydrocarbons, you're losing energy as heat is transformed into electricity at the power plant, as it travels down the grid, and then even more when it's transformed back into heat again in our homes. Neither the generators nor our home heaters are perfectly efficient. Nuclear energy isn't all that better, since it takes a lot of resources + energy to extract and process the fuel -- not to mention the waste.
If you want a laugh, check out starting humanities profs' salaries. Then consider that humanities PhDs usually take longer to complete. (10yrs was fairly common in my day.) Now laugh harder.
What's odd is that humanities divisions often run surpluses because it's cheap to teach. All you need is a room, some chairs, and a prof. Where I used to work, the Faculty of Medicine was always in the red (expensive to teach -- all those corpses, chemicals, doctor/profs...). The admins would transfer money from humanities to medicine, which meant no raises for humanities folk.
Where did people get the idea that hackable, breakable machines are better than paper ballots counted by local election committees? Somehow the Bush admin. were able to sell the idea that electronic machines, many sold by their friends at Diebold, were the solution to the type of problem we saw in Florida in 2000. What the Florida debacle showed was that given an unimaginative and cowardly opposition, it was possible to jam the machinery of American democracy by a concerted partisan effort applied to certain pressure spots (e.g. Florida state gov. & Katherine Harris' office in particular, the US Supreme Court). How anyone could have believed that technological gimmickry could solve a political problem of this nature is beyond me, but the Help America Vote Act sailed through Congress.
It now seems to be common knowledge that these machines are in fact less trustworthy than the mechanical devices they replaced. Which means that the Help America Vote Act has solved none of the problems it was designed to solve -- except for lining the pockets of makers of defective voting devices. Big surprise.
I say ditch the voting machines, print up ballots, stock pens at the polling stations, and hand count the ballots. It can't be any worse than the system we have now.
I don't know if they still do it, but about 5 years back, FedEx was busted for bribing customs agents so that they could move stuff in more quickly. I can't remember if they were bribing US or Canadian agents. Maybe both.
Having been in hackademia just as pomo was losing its sheen -- about 15 years ago -- I've heard all sorts of juicy stories about Foucault. Still, I've never heard that he was a pedophile -- unless you meant in the French-slang sense, where pede = homosexual man.
But aside from that, I don't think Foucault would approve of the Internet. He'd probably classify it as an architecture of surveillance, like the school or the factory. Can't say that he'd be completely wrong about that, either.
Mark Poster wrote an interesting book called the The mode of information in which he tried to link Foucault and some other pomo figures to the emergent forms of info-tech (c.1990). I think he was trying to connect Foucault to data bases. I didn't quite get it then, and it probably makes even less sense now, but it was still an interesting read. I've always meant to go back to it.
And no, pomo cannot be summarised as "think outside the box." It's more like "the box's interiority is always already circumscribed by the trace of its exteriority."
The Lyotard book was titled (in English) The postmodern condition .
Anyway, I think the idea is that DHMTL is to HTML what pomoismo is to the merely modern, to wit, New-n-Improved! More whizz for your bang! and all that.
To be fair, and this is something most people miss, atheism is just as much of a religion as anything else.
Your epistemological analysis of the question is interesting, but few believers would accept a logical proof of the existence or non-existence of god anyway. I suspect that the more rigorous you are about it, the less interested people will be. That goes at least double or triple for Believers. Atheists aren't stupid, you know. They realise that nothing -- not even a stout 2x4 applied firmly to the forehead -- will shake someone's faith in beings-unseen. That being the case, atheists, for the most part, leave believers alone. (Would only the Jehovah's Witnesses leave me alone!) This means as things work out in Actual Social Practice, that the ever-so-thin line that the agnostic crowd likes to draw between themselves and us hairy, uncouth atheists doesn't really exist.
But I digress. The more important point is this: Atheism is not a religion. Epistemology or not, it just isn't. Religious people have attached a whole set of social ideologies, rituals, and practices to their theological beliefs. There is no such a thing as atheist confession. An atheist may confess to a psychiatrist, but she goes because she is depressed or because she lives in Manhattan or Paris. There are no atheist holy days because there is nothing holy in atheist thought. Nor is there is anything like the believer's faith in ecclesiastical bureaucracies among atheists. Atheists may be bureaucrats, or they may like bureaucracy, but they do so for purely earthly reasons, and not because some Very Special Guy, who may or may not have really existed, made some vague comment to some Other Important Guy about 2,000 years ago.
It's hard to know what exactly what people are doing with their linux laptops, but since you can choose to suspend to a swap partition from the kernel config, I'd guess that's a fairly popular option. On old thinkpads, I remember having to creat a hibernation file on a dos partition under dos and I'd suspend to that. That's just my experience with my machines ( = apples and thinkpads) & my favourite distros (slackware/slackintosh), but I'd still hesitate to say that the typical linux laptop user suspends to a file in/tmp. What does Ubuntu do?
Mine is in range according to a reading of the page, but their script is telling me that the battery serial no. is ineligible. I'd like a nice new battery, too. This one has lost some its capacity, and it's got so many dents and dings that I think I'm warping the frame of the PowerBook when I put it in.
There wasn't a standard interface for digital displays when the 1600SW came out. What were they supposed to do, wait for everyone else to put out their version and wait to see who won? It was even possible (though unlikely) that their interface would emerge as the standard.
SGI have made plenty of blunders and treated customers like dirt, but I'm not going to knock them for the 1600SW.
Many US ebay sellers won't deal with foreign customers, even those in Canada. Given the paypal fees (they zap you for another few percentage points on the currency conversion) and the added uncertainties, it's somewhat understandable. On the other hand, they could always add something to the shipping to cover the extra expense and risk. It seems kind of parochial to give a blanket 'no'. After all, if you're on ebay, folks in other countries are going to be seeing your auction.
It's similar in Japan. I've sold and otherwise unloaded a lot of stuff on fj.comp.forsale and I can understand the sentiment. It's so much easier dealing with transactions through Japanese banks or postal accounts that it really doesn't seem worth the trouble dealing with overseas transactions. But again, if someone wants to pay for it, why not let them?
Gentoo mystifies me sometimes. "Stable" ebuilds are often unstable, but some of the ebuilds marked ~ are perfectly safe (e.g., the memoir latex package was marked unstable last I checked.) Portage is nifty, but how well it works depends on the quality of the ebuilds and testing.
Slashdot Mirror
That's a good one.
Tell that to the people of African descent who grew up before the civil rights movement.
They will do with you what they want. According to the Bush cabal's interpretation of the law, we are in a state of emergency. the president has exceptional powers in these exceptional times. Waterboarding? Yes, yes, yessity yes. All they have to say is that you were an "enemy combatant" and you have no rights at all.
Did they let Padilla in? No, they sent him on a joy-ride through the gulag. He's still there, basically because it was a useful diversion from the massive fuck-ups in Iraq and Afghanistan. It helped that he's a bit whacko and dopey, but shit, Bush himself would be in Gitmo, too on that score. The Padilla case proved that US citizenship will not protect you from the machinery of the post-911 state.
What's this about "valid people"? Just who isn't valid?
One isn't any less a person for not holding a US passport or a green card!
I know it's probably a slip of some sorts, but the slip indicates that the writer unconciously considers those who would end up on this list to be "less equal".
It doesn't take Google to figure that out. That's pretty much the rap on Epic in Madison. Of course, if you aren't here, you don't hear the word on the street.
What's worse is the money you pay for tracks by dead people.
I don't see what PP has over a blackboard. (OK, absence of dust. Got me there.)
That's because it's only really an issue for Windows. On linux, one already has "an ergonomic software program that eliminates the need to click the mouse". It's called *vi* or emacs. OSX comes with both, too.
No way! Had i not read the book and seen the original, i would have had no idea of what was happening in the remake. More importantly, the remake was not half as visually interesting as the first. In fact, it's an almost an insult to Tarkovsky to even compare the two. I also thought the remake lacked most of the philosophical inquiries into the difference between Self & Other. It was quite gripping if you're into that particular epistemological aporia. The remake was just melodrama. And better actors? I don't get that either.
A good pair of headphones are probably enough to let you hear the difference. Perhaps that excludes the iPod ear buds. (I don't know -- never tried an iPod.) I have a pair of big headphones and i occasionally listen to music on my Powerbook when i'm at a cafe with annoying music or conversation. I have a few iTunes tunes on my playlist, and i've heard a small subset of those on CDs. I'm not an audiophile at all, but even i have noticed that the iTunes versions don't sound that good compared to CDs.
I guess i wouldn't mind that either -- if i were an ISP.
One other issue that hasn't come up yet is convenience. When i cancelled my parents' overpriced and underperforming Charter internet service, i had to drive an hour to Charter's "local" office to do it. I could have walked to city hall in 10 minutes.
So yeah, I agree. Compared to the richness of real social life, RPG are frighteningly one-dimensional.
This system is already in place. It's a bit more clever than the old "papers please" type of travel control in that only requires you not be on some Mysterious List. All air travellers show their papers and their names are checked against the "No Fly List". Even Greyhound sometimes asks for ID. Why I don't know, but I suppose they might be checking a similar sort of list. The national insecurity apparatus already checks our papers at node points in the transportation network, it's just that most folks don't realise that's what's happening.
Electric heaters and stoves work fine -- except of course during blackouts. (The power was just out here in my neighbourhood in Montreal for 18hrs.) I think the issue is rather efficiency.
Electricity can be an OK heat source or it can be a waste. It depends on how it's generated. In the case of wind or hydro power, it's fine. (As far as efficiency goes -- there are obviously other issues involved.) The water or wind turns the turbines, and you get a stream of electrons you can send down the grid to get turned into heat in your P4s, AthlonWhatnots & WhizzBangGPUs. Aside from more efficient turbines, a superconducting grid, and more efficient space heaters, there's not much we can do to improve the picture here.
On the other hand, if you're generating electricity from hydrocarbons, you're losing energy as heat is transformed into electricity at the power plant, as it travels down the grid, and then even more when it's transformed back into heat again in our homes. Neither the generators nor our home heaters are perfectly efficient. Nuclear energy isn't all that better, since it takes a lot of resources + energy to extract and process the fuel -- not to mention the waste.
What's odd is that humanities divisions often run surpluses because it's cheap to teach. All you need is a room, some chairs, and a prof. Where I used to work, the Faculty of Medicine was always in the red (expensive to teach -- all those corpses, chemicals, doctor/profs...). The admins would transfer money from humanities to medicine, which meant no raises for humanities folk.
I say ditch the voting machines, print up ballots, stock pens at the polling stations, and hand count the ballots. It can't be any worse than the system we have now.
I don't know if they still do it, but about 5 years back, FedEx was busted for bribing customs agents so that they could move stuff in more quickly. I can't remember if they were bribing US or Canadian agents. Maybe both.
But aside from that, I don't think Foucault would approve of the Internet. He'd probably classify it as an architecture of surveillance, like the school or the factory. Can't say that he'd be completely wrong about that, either.
Mark Poster wrote an interesting book called the The mode of information in which he tried to link Foucault and some other pomo figures to the emergent forms of info-tech (c.1990). I think he was trying to connect Foucault to data bases. I didn't quite get it then, and it probably makes even less sense now, but it was still an interesting read. I've always meant to go back to it.
And no, pomo cannot be summarised as "think outside the box." It's more like "the box's interiority is always already circumscribed by the trace of its exteriority."
Anyway, I think the idea is that DHMTL is to HTML what pomoismo is to the merely modern, to wit, New-n-Improved! More whizz for your bang! and all that.
Your epistemological analysis of the question is interesting, but few believers would accept a logical proof of the existence or non-existence of god anyway. I suspect that the more rigorous you are about it, the less interested people will be. That goes at least double or triple for Believers. Atheists aren't stupid, you know. They realise that nothing -- not even a stout 2x4 applied firmly to the forehead -- will shake someone's faith in beings-unseen. That being the case, atheists, for the most part, leave believers alone. (Would only the Jehovah's Witnesses leave me alone!) This means as things work out in Actual Social Practice, that the ever-so-thin line that the agnostic crowd likes to draw between themselves and us hairy, uncouth atheists doesn't really exist.
But I digress. The more important point is this: Atheism is not a religion. Epistemology or not, it just isn't. Religious people have attached a whole set of social ideologies, rituals, and practices to their theological beliefs. There is no such a thing as atheist confession. An atheist may confess to a psychiatrist, but she goes because she is depressed or because she lives in Manhattan or Paris. There are no atheist holy days because there is nothing holy in atheist thought. Nor is there is anything like the believer's faith in ecclesiastical bureaucracies among atheists. Atheists may be bureaucrats, or they may like bureaucracy, but they do so for purely earthly reasons, and not because some Very Special Guy, who may or may not have really existed, made some vague comment to some Other Important Guy about 2,000 years ago.
It's hard to know what exactly what people are doing with their linux laptops, but since you can choose to suspend to a swap partition from the kernel config, I'd guess that's a fairly popular option. On old thinkpads, I remember having to creat a hibernation file on a dos partition under dos and I'd suspend to that. That's just my experience with my machines ( = apples and thinkpads) & my favourite distros (slackware/slackintosh), but I'd still hesitate to say that the typical linux laptop user suspends to a file in /tmp. What does Ubuntu do?
Mine is in range according to a reading of the page, but their script is telling me that the battery serial no. is ineligible. I'd like a nice new battery, too. This one has lost some its capacity, and it's got so many dents and dings that I think I'm warping the frame of the PowerBook when I put it in.
Your fountain pen will not last long if you use india ink in it. Stick to dye-based fountain pen inks.
SGI have made plenty of blunders and treated customers like dirt, but I'm not going to knock them for the 1600SW.
It's similar in Japan. I've sold and otherwise unloaded a lot of stuff on fj.comp.forsale and I can understand the sentiment. It's so much easier dealing with transactions through Japanese banks or postal accounts that it really doesn't seem worth the trouble dealing with overseas transactions. But again, if someone wants to pay for it, why not let them?
Gentoo mystifies me sometimes. "Stable" ebuilds are often unstable, but some of the ebuilds marked ~ are perfectly safe (e.g., the memoir latex package was marked unstable last I checked.) Portage is nifty, but how well it works depends on the quality of the ebuilds and testing.