thataccount

Cool. Can you link me to them?

Well, there is another angle here from the Defense sector. Lotus Notes had a big ole backdoor in it: http://www.cypherspace.org/adam/hacks/lotus-nsa-key.html

The same problems keep being solved, and then nation-states get involved, and eventually the technology shifts to something else because the game has played out as far as it can in terms of those nation-states. It is not really so much as a steady march of technology, as much as it is a quiet kind of informational arms race.

Nothing new about that desire. Only thing different is the technology has caught up with the desire such that some technocrats can make living in that hell a reality.

>Religious stories about the Buddha were readily and literally coopted into Christian lore by early Church writers.

That's just another assertion of "They copied it!" Where is the evidence that this is so beyond an inference that they were copied?

>Unless you presume the Buddhist stories were themselves historically accurate - which would start down a road of "both Buddhism and Christianity are true" - it's hard to imagine that these were coincidentally also stories about real figures.

Life is suffering, and the Messiah took all human suffering on himself? I'm not sure these are mutually exclusive.

Ya know, the Divine sometimes works in mysterious ways. While it is possible these two fellas were a ripped-off Buddha story, it is also possible that they were actual people who lead these lives so that people who were Buddhists had some examples of how to adapt their previous Buddhist tendencies to Christian ones if they had an experience that caused conversion. Is there evidence to suggest they were not real people, or at the least, a large absence of evidence?

This is the way!

The diversity of Roddenberry is a different animal from the imposed diversity of the modern left that NPR is trying to stoke the fires of with this article. For one thing, last I knew, there are no versions of Star Trek on the air that are currently new for the first time in a long while. The reason this is so, partly, is that the series was strangled by diversity and politics that got too far away from the idea of "exploring strange new worlds".

Why I Like Reading About Bugs by Bertrand Russell

I stopped worrying about getting indexed by Google around 2008ish when it became apparent they were trying to impose their own rules on the internet and how things were found. Nowadays, I'm content to not have google index anything at all.

They left out the part where they profit. Otherwise, it checks out.

I still have a modem that looks like that, I just can't easily use it anymore. I also remember all the talk about taxes, and then how taxes in different states were applied to e-commerce and still are.

The issue with all discussions around the digital world is that the infrastructure doesn't have the same costs as say having a road. It is partly why ownership is being redefined so heavily when it comes to digital bits and whether you can own anything other than a license. Because the internet is not really physical beyond some cables and smart pieces of plastic, a tax applied to it is a little like trying to tax certain thoughts. Nothing makes solid sense in terms of how to impose a tax on anything since all of it is ultimately "wisps in the air" that ultimately exists chiefly in the mind.

This is a weird project. I'm not sure what the point of it is, exactly. Whole point of webrings was that they were not generated and were made by real people.

I bet after all this time, it still doesn't have a glossary function.

They are if the world doesn't stop trying to control how you have children and in what way you want to educate them, and how to look after their health.

>Are you saying that senior military leadership has earned the right to a little light graft?

I'm saying graft isn't the only explanation at this point.

There are a couple of ways of seeing this. One is that there is a conflict of interest. The other is that there has been a conflict of interest in the military for years, and this guy has proven himself to be useful in fighting it such that he has been given an unusual amount of power. Obviously, number 1 would be bad. Number 2, though, would be laudable. I'd be careful about jumping to a conclusion until more evidence comes to light in either direction.

It's like the Word of God succeeded where everything else failed. Probably some specific lessons to be learned there.

Uh, what? I'm not sure where you are pulling that accusation from. I said very succinctly that I was not talking about what was the majority in Africa. I think you are confused.

>It's news because it's the handoff of man to machine being the best at a particular thing.

That's a way to see it. Another way to see it is that for any given event in a zero sum game, one of two outcomes, where two players are involved, will occur. Man only had to beat machines for what, 200-400 years only for it to beat man how many times for it to be "best"?

>Photoshop showed up in 1990 and the people retouching photos by hand had every reason to be worried, because it took that work. It didn't take photography. Thirty-odd years on it's open on every photographer's machine and nobody calls it a threat.

Uh, the entire film industry went under, along with film developers and the majority of film cameras. Everything shifted to digital, for the most part, which is why "every photographer" has "Photoshop". (which also really isn't true. I'd say many probably have Gimp as Photoshop has lots its mind charging fees)

>'cultures'.

That's interesting, because I don't really think of a "culture" as smaller than a "civilization". I think of a culture being a necessary thread that runs through a civilization and without which there are no civilizations.

> for any reasonable definition of "large portion."

I'm sure those relatively voiceless cultures will appreciate your minimization of their contribution to the peoples of Africa.

I'm not arguing for what is a majority. I'm talking about the large portions of Africa that still live in a hunter-gatherer situations in mud huts.

I don't know what the fascination with these AI versus human tournaments is. I'm old enough to remember the whole "Deep Blue" vs Kasparov exhibition, and I didn't really understand the fascination with all that either. That humans can make sufficiently strong calculators has never been a dispute in my mind. If the human wins over the calculator, good, but if the calculator wins, okay. What does that tell us exactly? The human had a bad day? The machine had a good one?

Poe's life had many complications due to poverty and jealousy that made his being a literary genius almost irrelevant. Researching his death produces even more questions than answers, as a strong case could be made that he was made to appear to have died of a morphine overdose in a ditch.

And also China. Never rule out China.

Easy solution: Stop buying whatever it is that Sony is trying to sell. Watch definitions radically shift.

Those are all reasons to like Florida.

>How does the article you linked support your point that mail-in voting is abused or rife with fraud?

The absence of outrage on one issue concerning the Postal Service, and the presence of it for another. How come you couldn't understand that point?

>Moving here after living in NYC for a decade was a breath of fresh air. I had forgotten that competent governments exist.

Kinda sad since even though NYC was always iffy, it was never flat out as useless as it is now.