Follow Slashdot stories on Twitter

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×
User Journal

Journal Journal: Lions and Tigers and Bears...

So the Anna Chapman dish continues to flower. Oddly, I found my heart-strings twanging out a solemn dirge as I read about Ms. Chapman's most recent public appearance. I can only wonder if her adoring audience didn't just watch their heroine have her heart torn out before the people of the Earth, the Universe, and Everything.

Comment Re:troll detected (Score 1) 710

I post without my karma bonus for a reason. I know I don't belong at +2 to start. That being said, the mindlessness gets to me and some days I do want to be a jerk.

A post that includes something like this is trash:

I hate religious conversation because it's generally a waste of time but, unfortunately, there is a reason people generalize about Christians being against everything related to freedom and choice.

It does not bother me that it gets modded up, but don't people see this bias is being applied to all of humanity by all sides. Bring up any topic - Islam, Evolution, Global Warming - and otherwise well spoken people start talking like they couldn't think their way out of a paper bag.

Comment Re:Aw thanks... (Score 0) 710

Take the Bible literally? You mean like believing that there have been many tribes since recorded history began, and will be many tribes until the end? Or did you mean interpreting the words literally?

At least in the U.S. most content fundies basically boil the Book down to "We will, We will rock you." They are simply noisier than the others... which the Book suggests we should allow them to be. Look up flagellation.

Two different things, the form and the content, you know?

Comment Re:It is still different HW (Score 1) 191

Bell curve dude. You got one system out in the fourth standard deviation.

I don't know about that. I'm not an over-clocker, but my C-64 SX, Amiga 2000, and my grandmother's 8086 on which she wrote her life story all still boot. Computers Pentium era and later I have had fail for all sorts of reasons - and I am not including any sort of storage failure - that is a different issue.

I'm betting the problem is just the integrated aspect of everything. My mother's expensive laptop had everything and the kitchen sink on-board - and then the wireless stopped powering up or something... Doorstop despite the fact that it has more computing power than all my fossils combined.

Anyhow, I'll check my museum pieces again in 2-3 years. Worst problem so far was actual storage media failing - but the net provides and I found the images on-line along with replacement media.

Comment Re:Ok (Score 1) 90

The only reason we trust people is because they build up a reputation over time. Unfortunately, reputation is a double-edged sword: it means that what you do and say has consequences. That's kind of the point, though - people generally don't like hanging out with people who aren't willing to stand behind their words and actions, because perfect consequence-freedom tends to breed irresponsibility.

This is only true if the majority of practitioners in your field of speech are also known. Any field where the total publicly known practitioners are fewer than constitutes a majority of all practitioners requires more complex analysis.

I wonder, though, how you feel about total delegation positions? There are difficulties in accountability when the speaker and the doer are always two different parties, even when both parties are known. Isn't this institutionalized freedom from consequence provided the speaking party makes every appearance of legality, thought the acting party will commit a crime? The speaking party is protected so long as the acting party can be safely sacrificed, right?

Wouldn't perfect anonymity provide a similar mechanism for the individual? The speech won't burn you, but any actions may result in penalty.

Anyhow, I like being able to talk with the assumption that only site administration and people guilty of what I consider to be a crime have access to my specifics. It's even better when someone you have conversed with over time brings up something you posted AC while replying to your non-ac post elsewhere.

Comment Re:Right in the headline (Score 1) 6

And generally, there is nothing about "gov is horrifically ineffective/immoral and over budget" in the concept of conservatism

I have to disagree here. Conservative is related directly to the conservation of sound methodology within the social body... Hence the usual focus on tradition. The idea is that you can prevent the erosion of the social condition by focusing on the values that allowed us to persevere thus far.

If the government is experiencing difficulty today, but contented you yesterday then the answer is to reform the government to the traditional ideals. This means a pretty much perpetual belief that the government is many times larger than necessary or many times more depraved than before.

Liberal is related to governance through the exercise of liberties to incrementally improve the condition of the social body. This is often confused with application of creativity to the process, but is not limited to this, and usually falls well short of real creative thinking.

Both stances are subjective, such that anyone with a balanced opinion is usually between these two definitions.

Conservatism is formism such that supplicants typically speak in terms of correct/incorrect. By conserving the correct aspects of social governance, communal values, and beneficial traditions we are fulfilling the conservative vision.

Liberalism is Null-A in that the equivalent is correct as defined by benefit/harm (many-logics, many-truths). Literally - doesn't matter what values are involved if any aspect of the social body is suffering due to insufficiently advanced governance.

These two things are not mutually exclusive, but only descriptions of the basic impulses encountered in the wild. When everything goes to hell do you wish everything was the way it was in the good old days or the way it could be if only you were allowed to try great idea X.

Strategically speaking this interpretation has not lead me wrong. Given that I only sip mass media in small doses I don't know how far the reps have drifted, but on the street this def should allow you to divide accurately.

Comment Link up. (Score 1) 1

There have been some really disturbing incidents that suggest the FBI has moved themselves much further up the food chain in trying to find radicalized individuals. I would be most interested in a comparison of the experiences of people that were involved with FBI informants before 2003 vs the experiences we are hearing more about post 2003. I suspect we will find increasing difficulty in separating the Bureau from the process of radicalization. Get too close and we can't tell you apart.

For those that aren't going to go inserting themselves into other people's business, look up the case coming out of Irvine, CA regarding the mosque infiltration. When taken in context with the preliminary data from the other two recent domestic bombing attempts it may be a warning sign that we are setting the enforcement *personnel* up for a slaughter in the courts. Making martyrs out of people that believe they are patriots like the feebees hopefully believe is not a good tactic. Letting the personnel get burned when they were following orders is bad.

If there is an institutionalized problem then we need to begin preparing to support the prosecution of the institution over the persecution of the institutionalized practitioners. Put another way - who wants the g-ride when you can get the machine that is making them?

Written from FF because I'm tired of coding my own apps in machine language to avoid compromised compilers ;)

Comment Re:Right in the headline (Score 1) 6

Wikileaks is exercising restraint. If this thing had gone full disclosure we would be neck deep i shit as opposed to simply covered in it. Maybe you were posting to point out their restraint.

Anyway, voted down for the comment about right wingers. The concept that the government is horrifically ineffective/immoral and over budget is exactly the platform that real conservatives respond to in each election. Seeing a successful prosecution of Assange would weaken the platform ahead of the next election.

Including commentary like that is both counter productive and inaccurate.

Slashdot Top Deals

Our OS who art in CPU, UNIX be thy name. Thy programs run, thy syscalls done, In kernel as it is in user!

Working...