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Gerhard Stoltz's Library tagged terminology →  View Popular

30 Nov 09

Essay: The war of new words - November 2009 - Armed Forces Journal - Military Strategy, Global Defense Strategy

  • IEDs were not unknown unknowns: They were an ignored known, as were the vast majority of current threats, such as insurgents and pirates. Ignorance of warfare does not make it complex.
06 Nov 09

Reconnecting Power and Politics | Social Europe Journal

  • It is no wonder that voters have come to associate social democrats with the neoliberal policy of dismantling the communal frameworks of existential security, leaving individual men and women to manage their fates on their own, from their individual and mostly scarce and inadequate resources. There is now next to nothing to distinguish between the ‘left’ the ‘right’, in economic, or any other, policy.


  • Previously, the distinctive mark of social democracy was the belief that it is the duty of a community to protect all its members against the powerful forces that they are unable to resist as individuals.

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29 Oct 09

Britain: Protests and political campaigning redefined as “domestic extremism”

  • The report continues, “The term ‘domestic extremism’ is now common currency within the police. It is a phrase which shapes how forces seek to control demonstrations. It has led to the personal details and photographs of a substantial number of protesters being stored on secret police databases around the country.”

  • Noting that “there is no official or legal definition of the term,” the report adds that the police spying network has instead effectively created its own all-embracing definition.

Philosophy, et cetera: Hallucination, Virtual Reality, and Reality


  • What about the final option: Active Shared VR? In principle (i.e. if the VR faithfully reproduced all the multi-modal sensory richness and fine-grained environmental responsiveness that physical reality has to offer), I think that such a world must be acknowledged as no less 'real' - in any sense that matters - than our own.
  • there's also an important difference between merely believing that you're doing these things, and actually doing them in a different medium. This distinction is occluded if we fail to carefully distinguish the different forms that a 'Virtual Reality' could take.
08 Aug 09

On "socialism": round II (Lessig Blog)

  • None of them are complaining about people voluntarily choosing to associate however they choose to associate (except of course if they are gay). They are complaining about people being forced to associate in ways they don't choose to associate.
21 May 09

The Technium: The Arc of Complexity


  • What's more complex, a cucumber or a Boeing 747? The answer is unknown. We have no way to measure the difference in order and organization between the two and don't have good working definition of complexity to even frame the question. Seth Lloyd, a quantum physicist at MIT, has counted 42 different mathematical definitions of complexity.

  • The smallest description of a random number is the random number itself; there is no compression without loss, no way to unpack a particular randomness from a smaller package than itself.
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08 Nov 08

Antifascist Calling...: Are You a 'Violent Extremist'? FBI's Analytical Lexicon Lowers the Bar


  • The new road map allows investigators to recruit informants, employ physical surveillance and conduct interviews in which agents disguise their identities in an effort to assess national security threats. FBI agents could pursue each of those steps without any single fact indicating a person has ties to a terrorist organization. (Carrie Johnson, "Guidelines Expand FBI's Surveillance Powers," The Washington Post, Saturday, October 4, 2008; A03)
  • More troubling still, the guidelines allow a person's race or ethnic background to be used as a factor in opening an investigation, a move the ACLU believes may institute racial profiling as a matter of policy. ("ACLU Condemns New FBI Guidelines," Press Release, October 3, 2008)
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