Faux-socialist misanthropes are WINNING.

Time to beat them down.

Because modern technology has made them "civilized" and "comfortable" and soo "enlightened".

It starts when they are children. They are the bullies who would kick or trip others for fun, but do not because they are afraid. The more fortunate among them actually did these things and got an ass whoopin' -- and at least in the context of person-to-person relations, (perhaps) learned the greatest lesson -- that restraint of bully impulses saves you from retaliation, but also even a tiny bit of polite respect gets you further still.

But as emerging adults they learned that the human race as a whole, has no staunch defenders. You can trash the human race as a whole, in as stupid or skillful a manner as you wish, and as long as you are speaking about people in general, your opinions and remarks go unchallenged.

And sadly, they do not. Among others who also get off on this people-hating trend, you are a celebrity in this useless and ultimately dangerous sport. Those who disagree are held back by social conditioning that, in striving for a conflict free world, encourages you to disengage from confrontation.

In order for our species to succeed it is NOT ENOUGH to teach politeness and respect.

You have to teach children to draw a line, their own personal line.

And you MUST teach your children that is their duty to kick ass, LOUDLY, when someone crosses that line.

People all over are teaching their children that when someone crosses a line, it is okay to re-draw the line.

Meanwhile, the most ugly sentiments get the most traction.

Which is why assholes like the one who wrote TA feel free to take something he did not think of himself, something that would ennoble the human species with the simply inspiring, breathtaking act of its construction -- sitting in his electricity powered climate controlled room, he will proceed to take a shit on the idea and try to smear it all over the rest of us.

Okay it is painfully obvious what he is against. Maybe, it all sounds so vaguely political. That 'thing'. What is he FOR?? He does not think it worthwhile to elaborate on what his real 'plan' for those resources are, he'll leave it to you. He can't be bothered. He's done.

What you read in TA is a symptom of a really dangerous problem.

Someone who respects and stands up for the whole human needs to kick his ass. Verbally and en masse, of course.

+5 Funny also on the mark.

These affectations of language have their origin in entertainment and activities for young children that include a special 'vocational adult hat' to wear. Latent memories of this technique emerge later on as iconography, such as the cute Sherlock Holmes hat (with Cavendish pipe) or graduation mortarboard cap beside extra credit puzzles.

This Wears A Special Hat trick is used to titillate the news media, which is locked in a state of perpetual childhood.

So Mr. and Ms. Whale, I hope you have fun wearing your Very Special Hats.

Thanks kindly for asking.

Because some one needs to stand up for the whole damned human race. I'm no stellar specimen -- but someone needs to do it. Misanthropy is becoming "cool", in the guise of clumsily vague self-effacing applied psychoanalysis, in environmental activism, in trendy herd angst. Now that we have developed this comfortable security blanket of modern technology, some of us feel no need to show respect for our own kind on any scale whatsoever.

In the case of the study, this simple 'respect' might have taken the form of following up on the men and women who administered themselves shocks to determine their real motivation for doing so. Could be mere curiosity, or a desire to endure/accomplish something one had dismissed as scary/unthinkable. For all we know, some of the subjects could have believed they were expected to use the button at least once. Why was it there at all if it had no other effect (such as releasing them from remaining contemplation time)?

I find it perfectly healthy that half of the people admitted they "hated" the experience of enforced idleness on some one else's terms. Asking people their feelings towards contemplation, especially in cases the subject could choose their own place, that's real research. The part with the shock-button was badly done and butt-ugly.

These psychologist boffins who put their heads together only to discern only one possible motive for pushing the button -- being "tormented" by boredom or idleness, my response is what the fuck. Why am I angry? Without passionate opinion life itself is a dull study in uselessness that none would care to read.

___
The press has already seized on this pop-psych tabloid lollipop and is slurping on it nosily:

"When asked to sit alone in a room, with nothing but a button that administers an electric shock, men will choose to take that shock more often than not. Yes, a series of 11 experiments has confirmed that men would rather experience a mild electric current course through their body, than think."
~Wired UK
"People, and especially men, hate being alone with their thoughts so much that they'd rather be in pain."
~Washington Post
"In a new study, people who were asked to spend a few minutes alone with their thoughts disliked it so much that they would zap themselves with electricity during their alone time."
~LA Times
"The results are a testament to our discomfort with our own thoughts, say psychologists, and to the challenge we face when we try to rein them in." [...] " In the next experiment, participants were given a small electric shock that was so unpleasant that three-quarters of them said they would be willing to pay not to experience the shock again. Yet when they were placed in the room to sit alone with their thoughts, 67 percent of male participants and 25 percent of female subjects were so eager to find something to do that they shocked themselves voluntarily."
~Business Standard [India]

We are the fighting Uruk-hai!
We slew the great warrior.
We took the prisoners.
We are the servants of Saruman the Wise, the White Hand:
the Hand that gives us man's-flesh to eat.
We came out of Isengard, and led you here,
and we shall lead you back by the way we choose.
I am Uglúk. I have spoken.

I xerox that remark!

*IF AND ONLY IF* they had agreed to sit for 15 minutes but were permitted to leave right away after shocking themselves -- and some did so, could the researchers claim that some people would rather endure a shock than be alone with their thoughts.

As the experiment was conducted (correct me if I'm wrong!) they agreed to sit out the period alone and all of them did so. They were not asked to refrain from pressing the button..

So the only difference from the basic experiment was the presence of the button which offered entertainment and also enlightenment -- in the form of providing the subject an opportunity to test and prove they could endure the shock, a new and unfamiliar experience.

In this version the experimenters FAILED to provide an environment with NO stimulation. They merely reduced available entertainment options to one, the button.

What the experiment did prove is that given time alone to think and reflect -- people will reevaluate their own aversion to an "unpleasant" sensation and decide to take advantage of an opportunity to better themselves by proving (to themselves) they can endure it.

This is SO DIFFERENT from the conclusion that people are little scardie-rabbits who cannot endure being alone with themselves, these researchers should be ashamed of themselves for irresponsibly portraying this, or permitting this to be portrayed in the news without rebuttal. They should apologize and re-do the experiment.

Hrrrmph. These subjects were cheated. These times are full of shoddy research and tabloid sound-bite conclusions like this.

Horse flies like a banana.

How best to study the Big Bang? Make a Little Bang in the laboratory! Perhaps we will discover that the optimal conditions for the Big Bang arose when someone began to devise practical laboratory experiments to study and understand the previous one. Ad infinitum.

When Anonymous Cowards bicker, it makes God laugh.
When real people do it, it makes Him cry.

Assuming that Emperors return to the same nest areas throughout their history because we have visited the Antarctic a few times and followed them to the same spot more than once, that's a good one.

Posing that any deviation in their behavior is due to so-called climate change, that's a better one.

Question.
Evaluate.
Why does the porridge bird lay his egg in the air?
Obligatory Firesign Theater reference.

Listen to an ananamatroiniclly correct president!
Listen as the president is hacked!
Listen as the president is placed in diagnostic mode!
Listen as the artificial intelligence is crashed!
Listen as the president is broken!
Listen!

This was done in 1971 Either these folks were waay ahead of their time,or things haven't changed much. Rewind and listen to the whole thing. It's a life changing experience. As my parents would attest.

*** Relevance fight! ***

Rosin yer bows fiddlers, hike yer skirts ladies and sweep out the pit, smoke dem crawdads while you got 'em... we're gonna have open source pit 'relevance wraslin' tonite!

Over in the corner Papa Snuff Daddy is totin' his signed binary drivers, he's a real tootin' feller. He installs clean and you can see he's runnin' but yo better watch out for his kernel panic hold, it'll get ya good. And when he gets ya, whatch gonna do, patch him? He's been patched so many times but the scars don't show 'cuz he wore out his version number years ago.

In the other corner we have the astounding Patefacio Radix Maximus Mesa! He is 'open', he is 'sourced', 'committed' to victory! You can clearly see he has the biggest package, but does he know how to use it? This feller is so smug he wants you to patch him! An when the proverbial shit hits the coolin' appatarus, who would you rather have out in the woods with ya, far away from dem vendor websites? Lets just say if Maximus panics you could fix him yerself in time. Or if you can't chop off the part of him that don't work. Ha, he heard me say that, only jokin' fella, now he's ready to fight!

The musicians were poised with their instruments. They were ready to go. It would only be a few seconds now, I wrote.

It is really very simple. The colors of the days and the watermelons go like this --

Monday: red watermelons.
Tuesday: golden watermelons.
Wednesday: gray watermelons.
Thursday: black, soundless watermelons.
Friday: white watermelons.
Saturday: blue watermelons.
Sunday: brown watermelons.

A so sad, too bad story of genius... it reminds me of some of the tales told in the Cosmos and Connections series (Sagan, Tyson and Burke) of astronomical and physics visionaries, folks glimpsed truths that became essential building blocks of our modern understanding of the world, and yet in their own time this information was of little or no practical use.

I've been down some of the rabbit holes of Xanadu in my own algorithmic doodles which centered around 'compressing' information by changing tokens into references to tokens down to the rudiments of language, which is going too far because you lose useful context, and have witnessed some of the grandest experiments in whole encapsulation -- such as the replication versioning disaster that was Microsoft OLE (object linking and embedding), where burned-in OS paths to data (on my computer, not necessarily yours) create a fragile web of things on disk and things inside other things that is easily broken, leaving us with data cobwebs flapping in the wind.

Sadly, and with utmost sympathy -- it's a beautiful dream-- but I believe that many of these concepts are dangerous and should be abandoned.

These are extremes. Make lots of copies, knowing some will evolve and diverge... and try to smarten the analysis so after the fact you can reconcile diffs, but it's a separate process and you're screwed if non-trivial transformations occur. Or centralize and impose a System (as Xanadu attempts) with a battery of willing monkeys feeding knowledge into the system, correctly applying transclusion down to some atomic level, and on the seventh day He looked down upon it and saw that it was Good...

But you're screwed with Xanadu. You're screwed as a species because you have distilled a knowledge base into a few high-tech points of failure. Where knowledge survives over history through massive and often wasteful replication, oops there goes the Library of Alexandria, oops there goes another rubber tree, you're putting all your intellectual eggs a few baskets. Baskets held in Xanadu servers that are so pointer and reference rich that a raw dump of the damned thing wouldn't make any sense at all.

Xanadu screws you as a person because we assimilate knowledge via a narrative process. Books render completely and we read. We need lectures to learn, great lectures that illuminate and inspire. Good lecturers are those whose minds unroll knowledge into talking-streams. They cannot and will not (instead) engage in some process of hashing out every sentence they utter, completely researching and correctly embedding the underlying link to the utterance of the person who said it last to first, and did not necessarily say it better. When faced with the task of applying tranny-links to their work they would likely just fall silent.

Because (since we are each alone in the mind) there is no one way to say anything, and no distilled 'true' method of thinking. Not even in German. It's treatises, sermons and pulpits all the way down.

If you are excited by the Xanadu concept and think fewer points of failure are better, please take a moment to view this exquisite and amazing visit with Computer Zero. It is from the 1975 movie Rollerball, and what the hell is it doing there, it is true genius and is creepy as hell.

Zero was a 'memory pool', an actual Xanadu Server! It had all the books, all the knowledge, all the connections, and yet -- it was absent-minded and going insane, losing things, mumbling. If there had been a sequel to Rollerball world 100 years hence, it would surely have been a medieval society.

Make a zillion copies of everything. Re-tell in your own words. There's no time for linking or data trans-substantiation, just replicate data like rabbits and we'll fix it in the mix. Or let the kids sort it out.

Some type of triggered fission in the heavy elements of the meteorite? And gamma emitter with a short half life of minutes is being created and left in the trail, such as Barium-137?

Thanks for your inquiry. Don't bother to give your name or address, simply head down to the nearest book store and purchase a copy of The Catcher in the Rye. You will be hearing from us soon.

[excerpts from Secretary of State testimony before the UN]

"... Numerous sources tell us that they are moving, not just documents and hard drives, but Protoplanet fragments to keep them from being found by inspectors. [...] In this next example, you will see the type of concealment activity [...] We must ask ourselves: Why would the Moon suddenly move equipment of this nature before inspections if they were anxious to demonstrate what [evidence of Protoplanet impact] they had or did not have? [...] While this -- less than a teaspoon of Protoplanet dust, [shows small glass vial] a little bit about this amount -- provides evidential clues of a Protoplanet impact, UNSCOM estimates that the Moon could be harbor TONS of Protoplanet material, enough to wipe out every competing Lunar formation theory on Earth [...] The Moon has now placed itself in danger of the serious consequences called for in U.N. Resolution 1441. And this body places itself in danger of irrelevance if it allows the Moon to continue to defy its will without responding effectively and immediately. [...] There can be no doubt that the Moon has in its possession evidence of planetary impact and the capability to rapidly produce more, much more. [...] My colleagues, we have an obligation to our citizens, we have an obligation to this body to see that our resolutions are complied with. We wrote 1441 not in order to go to war, we wrote 1441 to try to preserve the peace. We wrote 1441 to give the Moon one last chance. The Moon is not so far taking that one last chance. We must not shrink from whatever is ahead of us. We must not fail in our duty and our responsibility to the citizens of the countries that are represented by this body..."

THE TIME FOR ACTION IS NOW. We must move on the Moon, in waves of human exploration and occupation to establish the Protoplanet theory, secure all available Protoplanet evidence, and ensure the evolution of our species' manifest destiny to expand into space. Also.

And then, ON TO MARS to further secure the region. We must gather an invasion force, resolve to stay the course until 'mission accomplished', and declare war on Martian aggression (which has been implicated in the sudden disappearance of Pluto).

As an alternative to conquering the rest of our world so as to destroy the currency of others to protect the value of our own... as an alternative to easing into authoritarian government to enable the building of gulags that could encircle those unrepentant, those dissenting... as an alternative to this sewer of cultured dependencies and endless terrestrial wars...

We choose to broaden our horizons. This means space war.

We choose to meet this Lunar threat head-on and go to the Moon. And We Choose Mars also.

If it is war they want, such a war we shall give them.

What a long way down to this.

TWENTY YEARS ago when a 1 megabit T1 cost $10,000 a month installed to the Caribbean -- with an equal measure of determination, deft grantsmanship and elbow grease we managed to bring Internet to the US Virgin Islands with the Virgin Islands Freenet. One day in September 1994 connectivity was available for ~40 cents a minute if you dialed long distance to the states, a couple thou a month for 56kbit or 10k for T1. The day after you could get an email address, access Usenet groups and browse the web with Lynx on 4 (and later as many as 12) local dialup lines.

So when the National Telecommunications Information Administration announced the first-ever roundtable discussion on the future of the global Internet we were there, and carried the newsgroups so our growing user base could follow and participate in this near real-time discussion. The issues were well presented, the discussion was formal and polite.

There does seem to be a general lack of civility and willingness to participate in process these days.

Now I do hold some measure of contempt for the Federal Government as a whole in its hubris over control of the Internet. The NSA is pushing net neutrality in its charter-be-damned initiative to listen to everyone, the president-du-jour tolerates 'Internet kill switch' dialogue throughout the Executive Branch as if martial law security checkpoints should be written into law, and let's not forget the peoples' hero Al Gore who lobbied for the government to hold our encryption keys in escrow. There is a large bullshit factor.

But attacking the FCC is sort of like going after park rangers. For better or worse (mostly better) it presided over the breakup of the Bells. It helped to ensure that even rural USA modernized its telecom to bring about modern access choices, the ones we take for granted today, to as much of the country as possible. And now they are charged with accepting comments on 'net neutrality' -- which will be as hard to adequately define in the modern context as it would be to discuss.

Now more than ever we need the real voices of people who aren't afraid to write their thoughts into multi-paragraph letters and opinions, no matter the medium, so say something about it. Just like my Freenet folks twenty years ago were eager to do. These folks are not wanting to know how to control, they are asking in what ways it may be best to regulate.

Control is what we generally try to avoid. Regulation that occurs with a majority of support that accomplishes useful goals -- such as the rural electrification and building of telecom in America -- is a necessary part of due process.

Time to try to recapture just a bit of the cultural restraint and intelligent determination of yesteryear, methinks.