It's pretty obvious that this is merely Scientologists acting as agent provocateurs to discredit Anonymous. In fact, they're probably just beta testing some secret tech like Snowcrash, since they're going to need to take out the hacker community anyways. And while we laugh at them now, this is all part of their secret plan which also involves assembling the Raft somewhere in the Pacific. Why else would their leadership be called "Sea Org"? It won't be so funny when half a million brainwashed zombie Scientologists invade the shores of California and take over everything. Hopefully someone can reach the Mafia in time...
I too found this too be an enormously insightful post, as it confirms a lot of my own personal experiences. You mention the book "People Smart" which sounds interesting. Amazon returns two books titled People Smart, one by Melvin Silberman, and another by Tony Alessandra. Both books seem to be in the same genre and topic. Which book were you refering too? Thanks.
BOB SLYDELL Uh, we should move on to a Peter Gibbons. I had a chance to meet this young man and boy does he have Straight to Upper Management written all over him.
BILL Ooh, uh, yeah. I'm going to have to go ahead and sort of disagree with you there. Yeah. Uh, he's been real flaky lately and I'm not sure that he's the caliber person you want for upper management. He's been having some problems with his TPS reports.
BOB PORTER I'll handle this. We feel that the problem isn't with Peter.
BOB SLYDELL Um-um.
BOB PORTER It's that you haven't challenged him enough to get him really motivated.
Eventually, they say, the technique can be commercialized to improve search results on more mundane matters.
What a totally lame plan. I am outraged that my tax dollars are contributing to this. For starters, it's totally inefficient.
A much better program would be to create an Afgan-style terrorist training bootcamp somewhere in the Midwest and invite radical Muslims and people from the militia/posse commitatus scene to "try it out" free of charge. Then "study" them afterwords in order to better understand real-life terrorism. Hell, they should even hire high ranking Al-Qaida members to staff the thing. And be sure to give them full amnesty, citizenship, high level security clearances, and six-figure salaries.
Eventually the neocons will have their terrorists... even if they have to create them.
The proper thing to do is of course consolidate everything down do a single choke point by creating a national ID card, and using that instead of SS or CC numbers.
Then all fraud can be classified as terrorism, since any activity which defeats the security apparatus of the DHS is itself terrorism.
Make ID theft easier, but increase the punishment a thousand fold.
What a mess. Certainly there must be prior art for such an obvious software implementation. Thank you USPTO for your complete ineptitude. And thank you legal system for your ineptitude as well.
Eolas probabally just wants to cash-in on the $250 million patent settlement. I don't think MS intentionally lost the case in order to squeeze the competition. MS provides a trivial javascript work-around at the bottom of the new IE documentation. Any browser which runs javascript can presumably do the same. MS' documentation seems to state that the patent covers external program and data referenced within a web page, but it does not cover a second layer of indirection, such as an externally included javascript file that itself includes external activex object data. So that is the new work around.
But it does create a whole new upgrade-cycle of browser exploits. Previously, javascript could be filtered, which made it much more simple to filter out the remaining active content.
But now all the active content must be put into javascript, so filters will have to be able to process javascript to indirectly filter out the active content. Since the majority of the IE exploits target activex and embedded objects, there will be a long road of successful IE exploits until this new filter technology is stable.
This disproves the conspiracy theory that says MS lost the patent case intentionally. Why would MS lose this patent case and accept the consequences of a whole new round of IE exploits and Virii/worms? That would be just plain dumb, especially when your company is being sued in California for creating insecure software, and your reputation for providing secure products is at an all time low!
Kudos to you. I have no need to add my own comments about the meaning behind The Matrix films since you have expressed exactly my own sentiments.
I believe the films do have a message, and that the message was the real reason the films resonated and propogated to a cult following. It's easy to miss that message due to the form it's packaged in(i.e. a mere action and special effects movie, or an ephermeral pop-culture phenomenon). The format of presentation itself expresses a theme similar to your own summary of the meaning--our perspective is an incomplete view of what it could be. W.
This is a notice informing you to cease and desist in your infringment upon my client's IP rights. You have violated patent #333al0156ldd23, which provides for exclusive rights to ask questions about patent infringment. Thank you and good day.
An alternate view...
on
A Beautiful Mind
·
· Score: 2, Informative
After seeing the movie several weeks back(I thought it sucked), I found an old review of this book in the mathematics zine "Ferment." This review pretty much dismantles every shred of purported clueness in Sylvia Nasar's book.
What in THE HELL IS GOING ON?
Are you guys on crack?
/. IS SELLING OUT!!
First you proclaim IE as being superior to Netscape and Mozilla and now this crap.
Have you guys forgotten? Microsoft is *EVIL* because of its whole approach; you cannot let yourselves be tricked by their simple Sith mind control tricks. Yeah they release a couple kewl things; but those are only a smoke screen to cover their heinous acts of EVIL! If you start supporting them in any capacity you will be consumed by the dark side.
I hearby prescribe the following remedy for your condition: dont touch, operate, look at or listen to ANY product micros~1 makes for 3 WEEKS!
You MUST ween yourself off them before you become addicted!We can help you, but you must first admit you have a problem.
Thus if I seen anymore stories praising M$ on here ever again BAD BAD karma will follow!!
I am currently 170 pages into "Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition" by Frances Yates(Univ. of Chicago press). Damn interesting book, if Renaissance magickal-religous-philosophical history is your thing...
Just what is a gnostic anyways? Gnosticism doesnt fit into nice neat little categories. It seems all other religions could be subcatagories of Gnosticism-again the idea of the "unified field theory of religion". Each religion attempts to say the same basic thing(differing cultures cause the collapse of the reality tunnel-one can only observe another culture and comment on it relative to your own culture. And when religions exist in proximity to one another, they tend to feed off each other and end up appearing more similar than disimilar.
That said, yes he was a gnostic(hell, who isnt?)or a least the ideas he promoted sounded exactly the same as the teachings and writings of other "heretic" NeoPlatonists/Cabalists/Magicians of his own time to 10 centuries before him. As the end period of the Roman empire was quite the mixing pot of religion, philosophy and (pseudo?)science, so too was Renaissance Europe a mixture of ideas. People just keep inventing the same things. And today we witness the unprecedented mixture of ideas on the internet. The gravitational lord of memes, sucking in all human thought, filtering, compressing, and disseminating throughout the collective...
It is unfortunate the curse of genius is obscurity. Like Nietzsche wrote "the higher we soar, the smaller we appear to those who cannot fly".
"Men of rare spirit who have in them something of the heroic and the divine, will climb the hill of difficulty and wring from harsh circumstances the palm of immortality. And though you may never reach the winning post nor gain the prize, cease not to run the race." -Giordano Bruno
PS. What do you think could drive a man to such dedication? To what end?
As a rule I never debate morals/ethics(its so irrelevant and conclusive answers are never found) except to say any standard is always wrong.
As for objectivity, I realize I left out my main point(I wrote it from work in a hurry).
Descartes suspended all beliefs, assumed everything was false, and came to the conclusion that the only thing he could not disbelieve was that he himself did not exist or did not think, proving that he was an existing, thinking thing.
My point was that the solipsism found in The Matrix(yes, yes I know its not a new idea-Gibson, PKD, and many greater minds than myself have had this same idea) has to be wrong for the same reason Descartes solipsism is wrong.
This may help explain. In one of the meditations(its been awhile so please forgive) Descartes tries to prove that God really exists. Although ultimately its flawed logic, he uses as one of his examples this:
By declaring that I exist, I simealtaneously declare the possibility that Not-I exists. For you math geeks this *is* the same thing as the number zero. An existing abstract concept of nothing-it doesnt "really" exist because if it did, it wouldnt really exist.
Unfortunately, Descartes goes into psycho-religous mode, and skips this simple proof in favor of pedantic and sophisticated babbling about non-existent Gods and such...
Basically, people invoke Descartes whenever the doubting of reality is mentioned, yet Descartes main accomplishment was to prove that existence itself prooves the existence of the objective:-)(e.g. if you exist, then other stuff that is external to your mind's electrical/chemical activity also exists).
Gerund hastily spoke the following: "is morality fundamental to the structure of the universe, or is it something that we have invented ourselves?"
Are you serious?
Would you like to know why morals/ethics are completely irrelevant to philosophy?
Try to prove one moral. Just try it. You cant. They exist only in your mind; a product of your environment(e.g. culture). The only moral I think that is universal would be the taboo against incest; which obviously would serve pure physical biological purposes. Thus, the realm of morals and ethics mean nothing and lead nowhere in answering The Big Questions(epistemology, ontology, cosmology)- ya know, the stuff that really matters.
As for perplexing, the main paradox of Descartes(and as I read more it seems like all great thinkers have fallen into this same pit) is the opposition between the subject and object.
I think therefore I am. Therefore when I dont think I am not. Is this true(objectively, that is)? Could you prove it to yourself?No-because you would have to think in order to know your not thinking; a clear contradiction in terms. But when your in a coma, when a mugger knocks you unconscious, when your passed out drunk on the sidewalk in front of your home, your not thinking but obviously YOU EXIST.
If the tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, it still falls, its atoms move and interact with other atoms and the chain reaction of atomic causality reverberates throughout the entire universe. But there is no way to know it unless your own atoms interact with the observed atoms(the Copenhagen interpretation anyone?). But it seems absurd to say that nothing exists apart from oneself.
This problem of subjectivity preceding objective-knowledge is a major theme in The Matrix. If its all in our head-electrical signals interpreted by the mind, then is reality really real and how the hell could one even begin to know anything?
>This concept is explored at great length in >Robert Anton Wilson's Illuminatus trilogy.
>Heh, this guy defines crackpot. You cite a guy >who claims to have talked to a multi-dimensional >alien named Mescalito >and, according to his own disinformation >theory, spreads disinformation himself. I always >thought of him as an ignorant >new-age version of RA Heilein.
Hey, you better watch it, insulting my favorite author and all;/ Anyways, if you would actually read what Wilson said, you would *no doubt* realize that when Wilson said he had contacted a discarnate-multi-dimensional entity who also practiced guerrilla-ontology(e.g.:disinformation)he was actually pulling your leg(or at least trying to filter out the droids who actually believe the gov't is a Good Thing... Read a little more carefully, for Wilson is not a crackpot...
Hmmmmmm...interesting Would you happen to have the schizophrenics manifesto of metaphysics available online or through email? I would have email you but you did not give any reply address...
Slashdot Mirror
It's pretty obvious that this is merely Scientologists acting as agent provocateurs to discredit Anonymous.
In fact, they're probably just beta testing some secret tech like Snowcrash, since they're going to need to take out the hacker community anyways.
And while we laugh at them now, this is all part of their secret plan which also involves assembling the Raft somewhere in the Pacific. Why else would their leadership be called "Sea Org"? It won't be so funny when half a million brainwashed zombie Scientologists invade the shores of California and take over everything. Hopefully someone can reach the Mafia in time...
I too found this too be an enormously insightful post, as it confirms a lot of my own personal experiences. You mention the book "People Smart" which sounds interesting. Amazon returns two books titled People Smart, one by Melvin Silberman, and another by Tony Alessandra. Both books seem to be in the same genre and topic. Which book were you refering too?
Thanks.
BOB SLYDELL
Uh, we should move on to a Peter Gibbons. I had a chance to meet this
young man and boy does he have Straight to Upper Management written all
over him.
BILL
Ooh, uh, yeah. I'm going to have to go ahead and sort of disagree with
you there. Yeah. Uh, he's been real flaky lately and I'm not sure that
he's the caliber person you want for upper management. He's been having
some problems with his TPS reports.
BOB PORTER
I'll handle this. We feel that the problem isn't with Peter.
BOB SLYDELL
Um-um.
BOB PORTER
It's that you haven't challenged him enough to get him really
motivated.
it takes a stadium packed with 7200 naked NSA agents and a truck full of Kleenex tissues to check out all the videos in real-time
I take it that this is implying that the fine folks at the NSA are mostly a bunch of wankers and voyeurs?
Eventually, they say, the technique can be commercialized to improve search results on more mundane matters.
What a totally lame plan. I am outraged that my tax dollars are contributing to this.
For starters, it's totally inefficient.
A much better program would be to create an Afgan-style terrorist training bootcamp somewhere in the Midwest and invite radical Muslims and people from the militia/posse commitatus scene to "try it out" free of charge. Then "study" them afterwords in order to better understand real-life terrorism. Hell, they should even hire high ranking Al-Qaida members to staff the thing. And be sure to give them full amnesty, citizenship, high level security clearances, and six-figure salaries.
Eventually the neocons will have their terrorists... even if they have to create them.
Alas, how America has fallen...
Cooperating with China--doesn't this make them "evil"?
Hey wait a second, those weren't terrorists--those were liberators liberating American jobs!@#
They deserve medals!
The proper thing to do is of course consolidate everything down do a single choke point by creating a national ID card, and using that instead of SS or CC numbers.
Then all fraud can be classified as terrorism, since any activity which defeats the security apparatus of the DHS is itself terrorism.
Make ID theft easier, but increase the punishment a thousand fold.
Problem solved!?
Why the obvious choices are Dan Glickmanfor the former, and a very special joint collaboration of James Dobson and Pat Robertson for the latter!
What a mess.
Certainly there must be prior art for such an obvious software implementation. Thank you USPTO for your complete ineptitude. And thank you legal system for your ineptitude as well.
Eolas probabally just wants to cash-in on the $250 million patent settlement. I don't think MS intentionally lost the case in order to squeeze the competition. MS provides a trivial javascript work-around at the bottom of the new IE documentation. Any browser which runs javascript can presumably do the same. MS' documentation seems to state that the patent covers external program and data referenced within a web page, but it does not cover a second layer of indirection, such as an externally included javascript file that itself includes external activex object data.
So that is the new work around.
But it does create a whole new upgrade-cycle of
browser exploits. Previously, javascript could be filtered, which made it much more simple to filter out the remaining active content.
But now all the active content must be put into javascript, so filters will have to be able to process javascript to indirectly filter out the active content. Since the majority of the IE exploits target activex and embedded objects, there will be a long road of successful IE exploits until this new filter technology is stable.
This disproves the conspiracy theory that says MS lost the patent case intentionally.
Why would MS lose this patent case and accept the consequences of a whole new round of IE exploits and Virii/worms?
That would be just plain dumb, especially when your company is being sued in California for creating insecure software, and your reputation for providing secure products is at an all time low!
Kudos to you. I have no need to add my own comments about the meaning behind The Matrix films since you have expressed exactly my own sentiments.
I believe the films do have a message, and that the message was the real reason the films resonated and propogated to a cult following. It's easy to miss that message due to the form it's packaged in(i.e. a mere action and special effects movie, or an ephermeral pop-culture phenomenon). The format of presentation itself expresses a theme similar to your own summary of the meaning--our perspective is an incomplete view of what it could be.
W.
This is a notice informing you to cease and desist in your infringment upon my client's IP rights. You have violated patent #333al0156ldd23, which provides for exclusive rights to ask questions about patent infringment.
Thank you and good day.
After seeing the movie several weeks back(I thought it sucked), I found an old review of this book in the mathematics zine "Ferment." This review pretty much dismantles every shred of purported clueness in Sylvia Nasar's book.
t m# RH
http://www.maths.ex.ac.uk/~mwatkins/zeta/nash.h
>Ok, what the heck is the Turing-Dick Test?
Phillip K Dick?
As in is this really reality and am I really conscious?
What in THE HELL IS GOING ON?
Are you guys on crack?
/. IS SELLING OUT!!
First you proclaim IE as being superior to Netscape and Mozilla and now this crap.
Have you guys forgotten? Microsoft is *EVIL* because of its whole approach; you cannot let yourselves be tricked by their simple Sith mind control tricks. Yeah they release a couple kewl things; but those are only a smoke screen to cover their heinous acts of EVIL! If you start supporting them in any capacity you will be consumed by the dark side.
I hearby prescribe the following remedy for your condition: dont touch, operate, look at or listen to ANY product micros~1 makes for 3 WEEKS!
You MUST ween yourself off them before you become addicted!We can help you, but you must first admit you have a problem.
Thus if I seen anymore stories praising M$ on here ever again BAD BAD karma will follow!!
What perfect timing!
I am currently 170 pages into "Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition" by Frances Yates(Univ. of Chicago press). Damn interesting book, if Renaissance magickal-religous-philosophical history is your thing...
Just what is a gnostic anyways?
Gnosticism doesnt fit into nice neat little categories. It seems all other religions could be subcatagories of Gnosticism-again the idea of the "unified field theory of religion". Each religion attempts to say the same basic thing(differing cultures cause the collapse of the reality tunnel-one can only observe another culture and comment on it relative to your own culture. And when religions exist in proximity to one another, they tend to feed off each other and end up appearing more similar than disimilar.
That said, yes he was a gnostic(hell, who isnt?)or a least the ideas he promoted sounded exactly the same as the teachings and writings of other "heretic" NeoPlatonists/Cabalists/Magicians of his own time to 10 centuries before him. As the end period of the Roman empire was quite the mixing pot of religion, philosophy and (pseudo?)science, so too was Renaissance Europe a mixture of ideas. People just keep inventing the same things.
And today we witness the unprecedented mixture of ideas on the internet. The gravitational lord of memes, sucking in all human thought, filtering, compressing, and disseminating throughout the collective...
It is unfortunate the curse of genius is obscurity. Like Nietzsche wrote "the higher we soar, the smaller we appear to those who cannot fly".
"Men of rare spirit who have in them something of the heroic and the divine, will climb the hill of difficulty and wring from harsh circumstances the palm of immortality. And though you may never reach the winning post nor gain the prize, cease not to run the race."
-Giordano Bruno
PS. What do you think could drive a man to such dedication? To what end?
As a rule I never debate morals/ethics(its so irrelevant and conclusive answers are never found) except to say any standard is always wrong.
As for objectivity, I realize I left out my main point(I wrote it from work in a hurry).
Descartes suspended all beliefs, assumed everything was false, and came to the conclusion that the only thing he could not disbelieve was that he himself did not exist or did not think, proving that he was an existing, thinking thing.
My point was that the solipsism found in The Matrix(yes, yes I know its not a new idea-Gibson, PKD, and many greater minds than myself have had this same idea) has to be wrong for the same reason Descartes solipsism is wrong.
This may help explain.
In one of the meditations(its been awhile so please forgive) Descartes tries to prove that God really exists. Although ultimately its flawed logic, he uses as one of his examples this:
By declaring that I exist, I simealtaneously declare the possibility that Not-I exists. For you math geeks this *is* the same thing as the number zero. An existing abstract concept of nothing-it doesnt "really" exist because if it did, it wouldnt really exist.
Unfortunately, Descartes goes into psycho-religous mode, and skips this simple proof in favor of pedantic and sophisticated babbling about non-existent Gods and such...
Basically, people invoke Descartes whenever the doubting of reality is mentioned, yet Descartes main accomplishment was to prove that existence itself prooves the existence of the objective:-)(e.g. if you exist, then other stuff that is external to your mind's electrical/chemical activity also exists).
Or, like, um whatever...
Gerund hastily spoke the following:
"is morality fundamental to the
structure of the universe, or is it something that we have invented ourselves?"
Are you serious?
Would you like to know why morals/ethics are completely irrelevant to philosophy?
Try to prove one moral. Just try it.
You cant. They exist only in your mind; a product of your environment(e.g. culture). The only moral I think that is universal would be the taboo against incest; which obviously would serve pure physical biological purposes. Thus, the realm of morals and ethics mean nothing and lead nowhere in answering The Big Questions(epistemology, ontology, cosmology)- ya know, the stuff that really matters.
As for perplexing, the main paradox of Descartes(and as I read more it seems like all great thinkers have fallen into this same pit) is the opposition between the subject and object.
I think therefore I am.
Therefore when I dont think I am not.
Is this true(objectively, that is)?
Could you prove it to yourself?No-because you would have to think in order to know your not thinking; a clear contradiction in terms.
But when your in a coma, when a mugger knocks you unconscious, when your passed out drunk on the sidewalk in front of your home, your not thinking but obviously YOU EXIST.
If the tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, it still falls, its atoms move and interact with other atoms and the chain reaction of atomic causality reverberates throughout the entire universe. But there is no way to know it unless your own atoms interact with the observed atoms(the Copenhagen interpretation anyone?). But it seems absurd to say that nothing exists apart from oneself.
This problem of subjectivity preceding objective-knowledge is a major theme in The Matrix.
If its all in our head-electrical signals interpreted by the mind, then is reality really real and how the hell could one even begin to know anything?
But I have no answer, just questions....
>This concept is explored at great length in >Robert Anton Wilson's Illuminatus trilogy.
>Heh, this guy defines crackpot. You cite a guy >who claims to have talked to a multi-dimensional >alien named Mescalito
>and, according to his own disinformation >theory, spreads disinformation himself. I always >thought of him as an ignorant
>new-age version of RA Heilein.
Hey, you better watch it, insulting my favorite author and all;/
Anyways, if you would actually read what Wilson said, you would *no doubt* realize that when Wilson said he had contacted a discarnate-multi-dimensional entity who also practiced guerrilla-ontology(e.g.:disinformation)he was actually pulling your leg(or at least trying to filter out the droids who actually believe the gov't is a Good Thing...
Read a little more carefully, for Wilson is not a crackpot...
Hmmmmmm...interesting
Would you happen to have the schizophrenics manifesto of metaphysics available online or through email? I would have email you but you did not give any reply address...