gnosis

You mean were the worth anything when considered from the perspective of the ordinary state of consciousness?

Clearly in one particular altered state of consciousness they were considered worth something.

So the question becomes which state of consciousness trumps which other state of consciousness? Or which one gets to decide what's worthy and what's not?

Often, people who see themselves as "hard headed realists" think it's obvious that the sober, oridinary state of consciousness is the one and only legitimate state of consciousness, and the rest are mere delusions, and not worthy of being trusted or relied upon for important decisions and the business of life.

On the other hand, there are people who think that while in an altered state of consciousness, they can see through the bullshit of consensus reality and the ordinary state of consciousness. To them, it is the ordinary state of consciousness that is deluded, or even pathological or psychotic.

Which one is right? And how are the products of and insights from these various states of consciousness to be judged? Can an insight gained in state of consciousness X be legitimately evaluated in state of consciousness Y? Do such evaluations even make sense?

I'm not sure there are any easy answers to these questions.

It's still possible for the substance to have some subtle, interesting effects at these doses. Things such as an increased creative ability, enhanced energy, and insight. Some people take microdoses of psychedelics to improve their problem-solving abilities. At these doses, your anxiety should be much lower than if you took a regular (nevermind a mindblowing) dose outright.

After a number of such microdose trips, it's possible to slowly increase the dosage. Hopefully, as you do this, you'll become more familiar with the territory and know what to expect, and there will be less fear of the unknown and of the novel effects you will likely experience.

That said, there can be some negative effects -- particularly nausea. Also, it's dangerous to pick wild mushrooms, which can be poisonous if a mistake in identification is made. There's a saying in the mycology community: There are old mushroom hunters, and there are bold mushroom hunters. But there are no old, bold mushroom hunters.

Ideally, you'd only partake of mushrooms under the guidance of an experienced mycologist (and after having done a lot of research yourself about proper mushroom identification).

Unfortunately, an experienced mycologist is not always available, and the mushrooms available on the black market are often dried, crumbled, and in a state that's virtually impossible to identify anyway. The potency and even the active ingredient in such samples is very questionable. They could easily be laced with LSD or some other drug and you may be none the wiser.

Some people advocate only ever taking synthetic compounds like LSD, which are at least less likely to be counterfeit when taken as blotter or microdots (because they are so small that no other drug would be potent enough to do anything at that dosage). However, some newer designer drugs are almost as potent as LSD, and are potentially more toxic. So it's not clear what should be recommended, if one is concerned about side-effects, identity of the compound, or toxicity. Perhaps growing or synthesizing one's own would then be the safest route. But, of course, depending on the laws in your jurisdiction and depending on your skills, these options may come with their own risks.

In retrospect, this kind of pat, simplistic advice has the ring of either inexperience or lack of self-knowledge. A person who is in touch with himself and his own subconscious will not avoid looking in the mirror (either literally or figuratively).

One of the most important things one can learn on psychedelics is how to deal with unpleasant aspects of yourself, others, and the world around you. One often learns much more from "bad" trips than good ones.

If one goes in to these experiences with a sincere determination to learn from whatever one may encounter, to use one's time constructively, and with a great deal of honesty and humility, then half the battle is won. Then looking in the mirror can be seen as an opportunity for self-discovery, not as a potential unpleasantness to be feared or avoided.

I can recommend a book called "The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience" for a more comprehensive look at some of the possibilities. Also, see the trip reports on erowid.org.

Psychedelics may be best for people who are naturally inquisitive, like seeing things from novel perspectives and walking in other people's shoes, are comfortable with encountering material from their subconscious, and who enjoy questioning themselves and the world around them.

People who are very set in their ways and who think they've got the world figured out might be in for a rude awakening when their certainty is pulled out from under their feet. Then again, maybe that's just what some of them need.

It's great that the author thoroughly educated himself about the effects of the drugs he was about to try, and planned his day. The world would be much better off if more people did that.

I was also very pleased to see that he tried to use his time constructively while tripping. Way too many people's sole aim in taking drugs to "party" or "get fucked up". That's a complete and utter waste of the potential of these enormously powerful substances, and borders on abuse, IMO.

The main thing I was disappointed with was that he didn't have an experienced and trusted trip guide or a sitter with him. That's very important, especially for inexperienced users. Fortunately, his decision to walk around the city by himself turned out fine. But it might not have. When tripping, you don't always make the wisest choices. An experienced sitter can help keep you safe.

There's a really great book called "The Secret Chief Revealed" about a therapist who guided hundreds of trips for his clients. One of the more interesting techniques that he used during his sessions was to ask his clients to bring a stack of personally significant photographs with them (in particular, photos of family members and loved ones). Looking at these after the peak of the trip could be incredibly helpful. That may be something to think about for your next trip.

  function calc {
    print $1 | bc -l
  }

  calc "(1+2)*3"
  9

  zcalc "(1+2)*3"
  1> 9
  2> 

As for Howard Roark, who is supposed to epitomize Ayn Rand's "virtue of selfishness" ideal, I don't remember him being any kind of philanthropist. If anything, he (like Rand) has nothing but contempt for the masses.

Wikipedia would be the antithesis of what Roark would want to build. The Encyclopedia Britannica would be more to his liking, except that even it would require too much cooperation and would be made to help others and instead of himself.

Rand's ideal is the lone visionary designing his brilliant artwork for his own pleasure, and to the gnashing of teeth of the ignorant horde who are jealous of his genius.

[1] - http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/01/lead-crime-li...

On the one hand, there are some huge, monolithic packages like Xorg that have split in to many smaller, more independent packages.

On the other hand, we have something like systemd absorbing ever more functionality, becoming more monolithic with feature bloat.

I am personally more in favor of having many small, simple tools that each do one function well and can be easily integrated together, and understood independently of each other, rather than going the monolithic route.

To me, systemd is one gigantic step backwards from this vision, even if it has some (or even many) good ideas.

Never underestimate what the rich and super rich will do to get more money.

Does Warran Buffet need more money? Yet he's still trying to make himself richer.

Do all the top CEO's, VCs, and board members in the world "need" more millions and billions? Maybe not. But it hasn't stopped them from trying to further enrich themselves.

Besides, there could be other motivations for this stunt, such as fame or wanting to be talked about or thought of as a certain type of author.

(WARNING: Spoilers below)

"Tessier-Ashpool is a fictional family appearing in William Gibson's Sprawl trilogy novels. The family owns Freeside, a space station shaped like a spindle Bernal sphere constructed in high orbit. The family resides in the Villa Straylight, which occupies one end of the spindle.

The family is organized and run as a corporation, Tessier-Ashpool S.A.. Family members are kept under cryogenic stasis and thawed out periodically so that governance of the family is cycled between members. According to "orbital law" they are legally dead while cryogenically preserved.

...

The Tessier-Ashpools were founded with the marriage of scions of two powerful families: Marie-France Tessier, who was Swiss and John Harness Ashpool, an Australian who inherited a Melbourne engineering company. After the two were married, Ashpool began construction of Freeside in high orbit due to the relatively relaxed laws governing construction.

The family became extremely successful financially, developing the attached space station, sponsoring human colonization of space, and acquiring a number of other firms which subsequently flourished.

...

However, following the death of Marie-France, the family became extremely reclusive. Family members, including Ashpool, tended to place themselves in cryogenic sleep. At any one given time, only one or two of the children would be awake. They are also known for cloning their own assassins, "vat-grown" ninja who follow their orders without question.

...

By the time of Neuromancer the family has become extremely degenerate and dysfunctional. The patriarch Ashpool spends almost all of his time in cryogenic stasis. A dissolute alcoholic and heavy drug user, when he is awakened for the final time he has sex with and subsequently murders a clone of his daughter prior to committing suicide."

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tessier_Ashpool

Any chance you could release the code as Free or open source so that its users can use it standalone on their own machines?

I wonder if most Googlers have faced up to this reality yet?

Or if they simply don't care, or think the money, perks, and "cool stuff" that they get to work on makes it all worth it?

   export LC_ALL=C

  echo "1\n2\n3\n+\n+\np\n" | dc -

  > dc
  1
  2
  3
  +
  +
  p
  6

Not sure how to automate this to sum 1000 values without needing to explicitly insert 999 + signs, though. Haven't explored dc in depth myself yet. There's probably some way to do it with a macro or something, but it may not be pretty.

Instead this is a set of basic examples of bog-standard tools that every newbie *nix user should be already familiar with: cat, awk, head, tail, wc, grep, sed, sort, uniq

https://panopticlick.eff.org

A major problem with this is that advanced surveillance technology and the increased sharing and cooperation between the various spy agencies and ever more militarized police force is being used to target, spy on, and repress political activists and protestors.

If you seriously, but peacefully and non-violently, try to oppose the surveillance state aparatus and are deemed to be a threat to the huge sums of money they are getting to fight the good fight or a threat to the power they're ammassing, you can expect to be spied upon and harassed at the bare minimum. The more of a threat they consider you to be, the more you're likely to find yourself in jail or worse.

Of course, this has been par for the course for political activists ever since Spartacus led a slave rebellion, and it will not stop the minority truly dedicated and idealistic activists. But the tools of state surveillance and repression have advaced so much that it's much harder for ordinary people to participate in the political process beyond voting for two mostly the same parties, writing emails, or making phone calls without suffering serious consequences.

This is scaring a lot of people off from even trying to make a difference. In many ways, many of us already are living in a dystopia.

That said, trying to raise the political consciousness, technological literacy, and privacy awarenss of the average individual is still a very worthwhile and usually safe thing to do (depending on how radical and confrontational your tactics are), and we'd all be much better off if more people did this instead of throwing up their hands and giving up or pretending it's not happening.

If the less risk-averse minority believes innovating will make them a quick buck, they might give it a go. The majority, however, will try to follow the rest of the lemmings to the pot at the end of the rainbow, which right now seems to be Facebook games, iphone apps, and web services.

steganography[1], anonymous remailers[2] (particularly the Mixminion[3] type), the Paranoid Security Guide[4] (which was on HN today[5]), and a nice talk on privacy and anonymity options[6][7]

There were also a couple of lists of darknets on HN recently, but I can't find them right now.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anonymous_remailers

[3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixminion

[4] - http://crunchbang.org/forums/viewtopic.php?id=24722

[5] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6040381

[6] - Part 1 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HHoJ9pQ0cn8

[7] - Part 2 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9fByRmAHgU

First, Part 1 is only 1 hour and 17 minutes long (though perhaps it felt much longer to you).

Second, while the subject of TrueCrypt comes up a couple of times in the Q&A period, it's not the main subject of the talk. The talk is about privacy, anonymity, surveillance, and what can be done about them.

I highly recommend watching this video, especially for people who might not be up to date on all the latest privacy-enhancing technology or who might not be very aware of how much digital surveillance there is these days. Even if you do know about these things, it's still interesting to hear an intelligent, articulate presentation about them.

In a system where elections are so influenced by money that billions are spent on advertising candidates. Where virtually all the discussion of the candidates is about their personalities and presentation (such as whether a candidate wore a flag lapel, or how he golfed) rather than about their policies and stances on concrete, important issues.

In a system where the majority of those who do vote are embarrasingly ignorant of politics, history, and the candidates and parties for whom they're voting (largely thanks to the horrendous media coverage mentioned above, and the atrocious education system in the United States).

In a system where the elected candidates can do the opposite of what he campaigned on virtually without consequence or most of their constituents noticing (thanks to the media, yet again).

In a system where gerrymandering has effectively guaranteed the seats of most members of Congress, no matter how poorly they perform. (Given the record low approval ratings of Congress, virtually all of them should been thrown out ages ago, but that's not going to happen any time soon.)

In a system where there are only two parties who agree on most issues, and collude to keep third parties and serious alternative from ever being viable.

In a system where the people appointed by the elected/selected politicians get to make decisions outside the (incredibly flawed) legal process, in secret, and with virtually no oversight or accountability to the public.

In a system that tortures prisoners, violates human rights, starts unprovoked wars that kill millions of people.

I'm sorry, but I just don't place much trust in such a system. And I applaud whistleblowers who risk their lives to expose wrongdoings.

Uptime can be used as a source of "randomness" in PRNGs, so knowing that bit of information could clearly be beneficial to an attacker.

Of course such determinations should be left to the professionals, our Supreme Leader, the oh-so-popular Congress and the stalwart defenders of liberty and justice: the Courts -- which are all so trustworthy, moral, and competent.. and who would never hide anything under the pretense of "national security" to cover their own asses, to grab more wealth and power, or keep the public from knowing of atrocities and crimes they, their buddies or their lackeys have commited.

Feature request: allow the user to select separate colors for the relative and absolute line numbers, and for the slash. So three separate colors in total. That would make it easier to read.

Another idea is to have relative line numbers on the left side of the screen, and absolute line numbers on the right (or vice-versa).

In comparison, the wholesale spy program that's been in the news recently has far more potential for profit through economic espionage, blackmail, and various types of political manipulation. It could easily be self-financing if the information gathered through it was exploited.

This program is a proverbial goose laying golden eggs for the government. I really can not imagine them closing it down over a bit of bad press (which will probably die down and blow over as soon as the next big scandal hits).

[1] - http://www.radio4all.net/index.php/program/30027

[2] - http://www.radio4all.net/index.php/series/History+Counts

[3] - A small excerpt:

Q: "Through the drug profits, were these operations essentially self-financing?"

A: "Everything in the Far East was self-financing"

Q: "And they were off the books, so there was no public record or accounting?"

A: "Of course I'm speculating here, because no one has done me the favor of showing me the CIA's books, but I think when we get to the scale of a 35,000 man army in Laos in the 1960's -- Congress found out about that and held hearings in to it and were complaining they've never been told about it, so I assume all of that was financed by the drug traffic than it was -- whatever input there was from the CIA's legitimate budget was minimal compared to what was happening... that was built up continuously from the 1950's"

[4] - I'm not saying I believe in this particular conspiracy theory. I've really not looked in to this subject beyond this one History Counts show. But I could see something like it happening, and the current mood is one where such conspiracy theories are starting to look more probable than usual.

Apparently, the program worked wonderfully, and they got a lot of useful intelligence out of it. However, word somehow got out that German prisoners there were being treated like royalty while the British public starved. There was outrage in Parliament, and Churchill ordered the program shut down.

British intelligence pretended to follow Churchill's orders, but actually continued the program in secret. The information they were getting was just too useful. They just stopped telling Churchill about it.

I expect something similar might happen here. To the public's knowledge, to most of Congress, and maybe even to Obama, the program might appear to be shut down. But it'll either continue wholesale or morph in to something else that's effectively the same (or even worse).

Unfortunately, there really is no way to verify the words of these spy agencies. Virtually no one has the clearance to go inside their datacenters and check. Now they'll probably just be a lot more careful about keeping what they do secret.

Remember that the NSA is far from the only secret agency in the US. For a long time its very existence was denied. The running joke in Washington was that "NSA" stood for "No Such Agency". Eventually, its existence was confirmed. But there are probably dozens if not hundreds of other secret agencies that operate under the so-called "black budget" that Congress authorizes. Who knows what they do? Something like PRISM could easily migrate to one or more of them.