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Comment Re:Not surprising. (Score 1) 725

Not an assault on Darwin, assault on myths of Darwin and juxtaposition of the simple fact that the guy who had all the writing done and who was eventually ignored despite having demonstrably better work in some ways actually believed in some power in the sky if not an old man. And no challenge is made here to the place of Darwin's work as significant in history. ;)

Comment Re:Not surprising. (Score -1, Troll) 725

Nobody but Americans talk about religion in science. The rest of the planet doesn't care about old men in the sky.

Whereas Alfred Russel Wallace, who I believe can rightly be regarded as far more legitimate than Darwin himself (after all, he had a working paper that was observational while Darwin was still putsing and had nothing written, read Wallace's work, and back-fit "his" ideas to the notes from his voyage) but who simply wasn't a famous noble (damn pleb, stay out of the spotlight!), elucidated a theory of theism and the impossibility of life without it.

The general trouble faced by all for, as Hayek put it (slightly differently), rejecting "old men in the sky", is the reduction of vocabulary and thousands of years' refined traditions for thought of every kind; it's not accident the scientific revolution was preceded by religions ones, which formed the vocabularies necessary and led to the careful parsing of matters to be able to make distinctions and think clearly; nor that wherever religious have retreated throughout the globe, tyranny and mass murder have followed on scales unprecedented in history.

But hell, reject "religion" and one rejects the theoretical fundamentals. I've seen university professors go ape-shit when saying this, then reply to them such that the historically liberally ones STFU, and it takes only one word: "Spinoza."

Interestingly, a Christian-just-God-deist-Spinozan coalition on theology produced a document that put rights of man above the reach of rulers, wrote a whole document imbued with that philosophy and said it was only a silver mirror to a declaration that was gold and annunciated it; they were promptly ignored by others who don't "care" about the God of Nature or Nature's God, and their legal theory is tiraded againts on my country's shores by the "originalists" who reduce themselves in these moments to children with minds intolerant of something that can't be defined or set around an equal sign mathematically, with statements like "organic law is a theology, and not a theory of law." No, for lawyers, anything but brute force to the heads of all is no law at all--cause God ain't there.

One thing folks beyond our watery borders never have gotten is that religion has pretty much been a benefit to keep those mofo's in check at home, voting the cynics out or constraining what they can do. (Why they tirade about their being "idiots!!!!") It's as religion has declined in America that largely things have gotten worse, not only on account of removing the traditions and particulars that prevent a larger portion of people from buying their bullshitting or accepting the kind of things which only add to their historical litany of gross harms to human rights (forcible sterilization by the "superior" class of "educated" professionals who graduated stupid-U with inculcation of Darwinism? Only a troglodyte would dissent!).

Of course, as the sophistication of religion is drowned, its adherents' own harmfulness rises: the whole point of religion is largely to "do no harm", at least in the Christian tradition ("harmless as doves...", "...children of the Father..."), which includes the "do to prevent harm", which a certain left here hates heatedly. People hate religion because it can be used to coerce, yet then impose their own flimsier, undeveloped, and evidently harmful (which from the consequences which keep recurring, is obvious) ethics and shame, silent, threaten...in a totalitarian streak instead of fearful of a God should they be wrong.

My point is, really, "old men in the sky" shows a level of theological understanding that predates the Empires of Egypt and Nubia, or the Logos of Egypt, probably comes from those who think everything "Jew" is just late-made-up writing anyway (even as among some of the most significant of Egyptologists continue to uncover long-lost and forgotten sites are found by using Jewish writings) and don't know that the oldest mentions of a theology that is truly Divine comes from Semitic scratchings on cave walls in quarry caves in the (southern) ancient Egyptian empire, and that ignorance of how these things informed and shaped civilization is pretty much guaranteed to doom that civilization whose ideals and ethics were founded upon them, a la:

Why can Sovereigns be overthrown? The historic answer was that a King who breaks his own law forfeits legitimacy; why? See the notes of the Genevan Bible on a certain ancient king. Why do men have rights, equality before a law, not just to expect the violent force of Sovereigns? Because God made man in His own image, and the ruler either serves justice or loses "Divine Right", which is no right, nor privilege, but duty to serve justice. Why should strangers and sojourners in a land, though not of your tribe, be treated with dignity and justice? Because your God brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage, where you were strangers and sojourners in the land...

etc.

Comment Re:It'll come down to an opinion (Score 1) 255

Tell this to the ****** (self-censoring) judge: Tor was funded by the US government to permit those under totalitarian and murderous regimes engaging in human rights abuses gain access to information outside of State controls and preserve their anonymity against those who might kill or substantially harm them. p.s. Funny how its (US's) own agencies are now desperate to destroy or infiltrate it...

Comment Re: They're infringing my Second-Amendment drone r (Score 1) 268

the founding fathers never envisioned an article in the Constitution that would legitimaze the rise against the legitimate authority

"legitimate" and "authority" didn't mean "elected" and "power" in their parlance; and they were quite clear on this; infringe a natural right and you loose legitimacy; wield power to enforce it and you are a tyrant. And about that part of never envisioning, a little nobody named Jefferson (along with similar statements of a few others) mentioned the need for mass use of Amendment II, well, about every 20 years...

Comment Re:Breach of Contract (Score 1) 120

Why would anyone sell shovels? If it was profitable, they'd dig everything themselves. Actually, the real profit is in licensing the shovels with a per-scoop fee.

It's about balancing risk. Some people prefer taking a shot at mining. Some people prefer selling shovels. Some people probably do both.

Actually, it's about capital. If you lack access to it then once you're done making the money printer you don't have enough left to run it. So you sell the damn thing at a slight profit and build yet more, relying on the prior aggregation and assembly of capital in a useable form to produce something of value (more capital).

At some point it becomes about risk if you can afford to no longer sell them, but then someone else who can afford to print on their own but continues to sell them because of structuring their factors of production (including capital) which includes revenues from sales can give them an edge may mean you take a whole other level of risk on by relying on only one source of income.

Better get all the revenue possible, specializing, and out-innovate the other guy though, by doing this you may simply lose your skills edge to run and wield the thing you yourself are producing better than your buyers: suddenly we have a symbiotic relationship of maker and user and neither has the edge over the other in terms of the other's particular discipline and scope!

And of course, each have separate kinds of capital so even if you know how to mine better, they may have better conditions and contracts and equipment and environmental conditions and.... :)~

(Gotzta love deh economicz.)

Comment Re:Yeah sure (Score 1) 371

You seem to be all for the utter and total betrayal of the "beta" soldiers, for the betterment of the "alpha" soldiers. There doesn't seem to be much else to say.

And you're a context-ignoring troll, willfully. He's saying that a byproduct of these people who are deemed (by you) to be idiots and useful tools for the "swine" of the MIC is that the betas don't actually have to be sacrificed up the hill; they're weeded-out of the process altogether (hence preserved) because a volunteer military PREVENTS a draft. Go bad and read it--unless you're just trolling. A beneficial consequence of the draft is we don't send flesh into a shredder just to slow the shredder down. And since folks like yourself lambast a great portion of a nation for aspiring to something like duty and being noble and "serving country", without particularizing the fault and explicating how this undermines those very ideals--though indeed general language has it splace--there doesn't seem to be much else to say. However should you take some time to produce examples, give the context, explain it, reference sources, argue details, etc. then you may even produce convincement for those noble savages to hold-off on aiding the MIC with their sensibilities of duty and patriotism, and more importantly strength of body, to instead turn such principles towards the demand that the MIC actually serve the ideal of nation which endears them to patriotism.

Comment Youtube Videos (Score 1) 321

Don't know if others here are getting this, but if I click to the left of the comments Youtube Videos load and cover the comments page. If anyone else is seeing this behavior on Slashdot, any suggestions to stop it? (I have JS disabled so maybe this is a downside to HTML5 for which will be needed new methods of crippling the shit thrown-into browser by the likes of whoever took-over and ruined Mozilla in the name of "empowering designers!!! TAKE BACK THE WEB [from the user]".)

Comment Re:Economic reasons (Score 2) 384

[...] the Byzantine Empire, which was what they called the eastern half of the Roman Empire after the Empire split).

Common mistake. As it was ruled by direct succession of Emperors from Rome itself and under the same laws (though developing, of course), and much of the same society, peoples, etc., the peoples of Byzantium called their Empire...Rome. So did their eventual conquerors and the proto-states of Today's Turkey, and various languages call Greek-speaking Turks and Greeks "Rum" or "Roman". Colloquial Greek itself still calls Greek-speakers "Romeyka", meaning "Roman" since they are (or like to think of themselves as)...the descendents/escapees of Rome/its conquerors and their successors.

Comment Re:Possibly Worse Than That (Score 1) 216

Okay, mind indicating the best way for doing so in, say, User Agent Switcher for Firefox? e.g. know which field actually transmits...or maybe you know a better agent with more mark-up and which field in options for a given agent to use?

I ask because I look and see a lot of options, for instance, like "Description" or "Vendor" and don't know precisely what actually transmits and which one to enter text like this into.

Comment Re:oblig xkcd. TFA itself points this out (Score 1) 105

As much as scientists in other fields adore outspoken, know-it-all physicists, Bakâ(TM)s audacious idea â" that the brainâ(TM)s ordered complexity and thinking ability arise spontaneously from the disordered electrical activity of neurons â" did not meet with immediate acceptance.

Comment Re:Yes, for any mission (Score 1) 307

Actually no. They know some of them "probably" will die, with such high certainty that they just say "will die", but there's a good chance you as the individual soldier will not actually die. For all the heroics surrounding soldiers, the least convincing thing to me is the 'facing death' idea given that your chances are actually pretty good. 2-10% chances of death vs. all the other crap people face daily...of course that's over huge numbers vs. local involvements but then that's also what we see in the real world: clusters of probabilities with more dilution between clusters. The real heroes are the...steely ones who can mentally put up with all the crap you can throw at them.

Sending someone to, say, Afghanistan vs. to Europa really are entirely different: in the latter case, barring some hyper-extraordinary rush of development ability to manufacture for space all within a few months followed by boosting to orbit the new ship that will then out-run the other to catch it...that probability approaches infinitely toward zero, not only of dying but even "making it" with one or two good radiation waves from the Sun.

On the other hand, come-up with a system and plan to get someone back, then you can avoid the "callous disregard" part and the person taking the risk isn't certifiable insane/stoppable but now the hero. Maybe it even consists rather not so much "get back", but perhaps "my some miracle all this stuff we'll send after you in a thousand different directions at different velocities will make it and you can survive out there a while."

Who with the training and highest qualifications in the world wouldn't go for an opportunity to do such insane sol-system shattering R&D real-time when your life is on the line? Just as long as there is a substantive, serious, committed--irrevocable--effort to sustain that life or lives, then people would back it and be correct to do so.

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