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Even the journalists that focus their entire career on tech subjects often don't gain any appreciable expertise in the field. Besides, journalists aren't meant to be experts, they're meant to know exactly enough that they know when they should be asking questions. That usually isn't that much but for whatever reason (maybe they don't want to look stupid, maybe they don't want to appear to be dumbing down the article) journalists are quite reluctant to do so when it comes to technology issues.

I'm one of those tech journalists. You're right that the job is to ask questions, even when they sound stupid.

The simple solution to getting your facts right (the Principia Mathematica of journalism, as it were) is to check your facts with an independent expert in the field (preferably more than one).

There are single-source stories and multiple-source stories. If a dermatologist claims at a scientific meeting or in a journal article that his method cures baldness, I want to call another dermatologist who treats baldness and get his reaction. Even if the first guy is basically correct, the second guy can usually add some important qualifications. In the ideal situation, after I've interviewed 3 or 4 experts, I usually have a reasonably good understanding of the story. Then when I talk to the *next* expert, I can usually ask him really good questions. I may not be able to get the truth, but I can get as close as humanly possible by deadline.

When I decide whether a news source is worth reading, the first thing I look for is whether they quote a single source, or get a reaction from a second source. Why should I waste my time reading an article that's wrong, when I can read an article that got its facts right? Why should anybody?

I once gave a journalism course and told my students to look up stories in the New York Times. For example, here's a science story http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/14/science/earth/14fuel.html Did they just take the promoter's claims at face value, or did they check with an independent expert?

One of the magazines I worked for would pay me $50 extra for every additional source I interviewed, up to about 2 or 3 sources. That reflected on the quality of the story, and the effort required, pretty well.

The big problem today is that the pay for these stories has gone down. You used to have reporters on staff who could spend a full week working on a major story. Now newspapers have laid off half their staff and doubled up the work for the remaing staff. Freelance writers used to get $1,000 or more for a 2,000-word story that would take a week, and give them time to read the literature and interview a lot of people. Now they're lucky to get $500, and sometimes $150. You can't interview a lot of people for $150.

Some of the research mentioned in the NY Times article point out that it's only right-wing terrorists which tend to be engineers. Left-wing terrorists (eg, anarchists) also build bombs but tend to come from the liberal arts side of things. One theory presented is that right-wing extremism is relatively more popular among engineers than left-wing extremism.

If you eat enough fat and protein, your body won't be fooled by carbs of any type, and your appetite will control itself. But today's "healthy eating" craze restricts fats and proteins. THAT is the real issue you're seeing, not which type of carb is consumed or what its concentration is. Fat-deprived people crave carbs, and protein-deprived people lack long-term appetite control.

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/07/magazine/what-if-it-s-all-been-a-big-fat-lie.html?pagewanted=print

Beer is a poor example, since people often drink to achieve a certain level of buzz, and that takes NN-much alcohol whether you get it from everclear or near-beer. Obviously it takes a lot more near-beer. Which tastes worse, I leave as an exercise for the reader.

That's all true. Blaming fructose is like blaming spoons because you ate the whole container of ice cream. We've been taught to clean our plates, then they made the plate larger AND loaded it with carbs while taking away fats and proteins, and most people lack the self-control or the self-awareness to stop when they're satisfied rather than only when the food is all gone. Between that and our radically more-sedentary lifestyle of the past couple decades, what did people expect, a population of svelt athletes??

And yes, I have noticed a fairly good correlation between eating-out all the time (especially if it's fast food) and steady weight gain.

But the bigger one is the computer era. I've watched dozens of people go from slim to spherical with the SOLE change in their life being how much time they spend in front of the computer. Furthermore, the up-all-night gaming lifestyle tends to make you munchy (according to some research, it impacts your insulin metabolism which causes this). Bigger snacks, less exercise, hello balloon world!

BTW, being as usual a freak, I still fit in my college clothes, and I'm now 55. :) But I do physical work every day, I eat a rather old-fashioned diet (from before all this 'healthy eating'** restricted fats and proteins), and I don't snack in front of the computer, even tho we spend many hours together (as you can tell by my /. stats ;)

** http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/07/magazine/what-if-it-s-all-been-a-big-fat-lie.html?pagewanted=print

The scantron approach didn't work out so well for NYC recently.

The pornographic movie industry has long had only a casual interest in plot and dialogue. But moviemakers are focusing even less on narrative arcs these days. Instead, they are filming more short scenes that can be easily uploaded to Web sites and sold in several-minute chunks. “On the Internet, the average attention span is three to five minutes,” said Steven Hirsch, co-chairman of Vivid Entertainment. “We have to cater to that.”

and

But interest in DVDs has fallen sharply, Mr. Fishbein said, because the Internet has made it easy to watch snippets of video. Mr. Fishbein estimated that pornographic DVD sales and rentals in the United States generated $3.62 billion in 2006 but had fallen as much as 50 percent since then. He says the slump has made some companies reluctant to share sales figures, so his estimates are getting rougher.

I don't know about the rest of you but that sounds about right - I haven't sat through a pizza-delivery scenario in it's entirety in ages.

Same shit with computers. Most people are not at all literate. They have never seen a command line and shouldn't have to. If you can use a command line to do installs, well guess what? You have a good deal more literacy than most of the population. You are no computer grand master but then that wasn't what was being talked about.

Then these people are not technically literate, thus not included in my initial comment at all...

You just have to accept that being technically literate means understanding the basics of something and being able to trouble shoot a bit on your own. It does not mean being able to do everything, it does not mean being an expert at things. Technically literate doesn't mean "Competent programmer," or "Expert technical support."

No I don't and no it doesn't, logic prevents me from doing so...
I'll throw you an example:
Understanding that most (all?) math computations can be achieved just by additions does not mean someone is math literate.
Knowing the alphabet does not make someone literate...

You're adequate at spinning things, you should work in PR. :)

FYI, I make a mean Soutzoukakia

[1] Technically literate people are not afraid of copy pasting something out of a forum in a black box with a blinking cursor dubbed "Terminal".
Also command line wasn't a Windows thing that Ubuntu then "dubbed" as "Terminal".
Command line is command line.
A l-i-n-e where you -i-n-s-e-r-t commands, so either way the article writers themselves are illiterate, technically or otherwise.

PS. This whole rebuttal is ridiculous.
I was just making a joke from the usual high-horse geek /. perspective, but thanks for giving me something to kill time anyways. ;)

PS2. How could you possibly know that I'm no "computer grand master"?

Google does remember the debacle earlier this year...right?

OK, show of hands: given what happened with Buzz, who here would feel comfortable with Google Me?

Apparently, since you can get glass over 60cm thick, at least as thick as the person who used that description. I suppose they'll be telling us that the screen is as long as a piece of string next.

So to recap, in three rounds of replies you've gone from:

"What's wrong with editing for impact?"

to

"He doesn't edit anything! You're a liar!"

No, I know that every bit of news, ever, has been edited, and therefore know that one news source saying "OMG that other guy has done editing" is a distraction tactic to stop you from hearing what's being said. I will know you're an idiot so long as you fail to explain what -=exactly=- has been done as part of this "editing" process you hate with such a passion, and how exactly those things are a)not ok and b)not done by your own sources? Be very careful about b), you've quote Fox News (winners of the "we're allowed to knowingly lie in the news" lawsuit).

"OMG your sources are bullshit!" + Grammar Nazi.

Your sources ARE bullshit! You should be ashamed of trotting them out. Seriously.

They're guilty of =intentionally misleading= editing. They do it routinely. And you, in your blatant jingo bias, want other people to dismiss wikileaks because of those shameless liars accusing wikileaks of "editing". Mysterious, ominous editing.

Fine. Here's an interview of Assange saying explicitly that he edited that video and presented that edited video to the public

Again, editing a video and showing it to the public is NOT A BAD THING. It's perfectly normal, good and honest behavior for someone who wants the world to know something. And further more, you're showing me a video of the guy honestly saying he did it, and you think that's going to make me think he's dishonest...

What you defend in your shrill, babyish cries of "but but but he edited the video for impact!" is the continued murder of thousands upon thousands of people, and the lies of the pentagon told to justify their murders, lies that I don't claim vaguely they may have possibly implied through mysterious editing (as you would), lies I can quote verbatim: ''There is no question that coalition forces were clearly engaged in combat operations against a hostile force,'' said Lt. Col. Scott Bleichwehl, a spokesman for the multinational forces in Baghdad.

And if you go and watch the videos (edited or unedited) you will not find a hostile force clearly engaged in combat with that helicopter.

But you'll defend that too, because you are dishonestly 'patriotic', whatever wrongs your side does you'll say didn't happen, and when someone points out those murderous lies, you'll whine "editing" rejoice when the spokesperson for the truth is being kompromat.

So, when you complain about "editing", the other idiots in your echo chamber will pat you on the back for catapulting the propaganda, but you out yourself as a brainless idiot to anyone capable of critical thinking, because intelligent people know that "editing" is part of the normal process of news disclosure, and you're pretending it isn't (or more likely, ignorantly parroting the lines you were fed without the intelligence needed to actively pretend).

"You'd think Intel would just accept they suck at GPUs and buy Nvidia already."

Should Intel buy nVidia? Jen-Hsun Huang, who averages about $23.02 million per year, is not the sort of person who would easily integrate into Intel, and he is important to the leadership of nVidia. Intel's CEO, Paul Otellini, makes about $14 million.

Soon Intel's integrated graphics will have mid-range speed, leaving only the high range for nVidia. The high range of video adapters is mostly bought by teenagers who want to practice being violent with video games, instead of practicing being involved with other people. That means nVidia will be dependent on buyers who are being self-defeating; eventually there may be a backlash against that.

The high range of video performance will always be needed for architectural drawing and machine design, for example, but the total demand will drop, as the nVidia stock price seems to indicate. So, maybe nVidia is not a good purchase for any company.

Should Intel CEO Paul Otellini be replaced? Another reason Intel should not buy nVidia is that Intel is generally a failure at anything besides making new CPUs and support chips. For the success of Intel and AMD in making CPUs, the world can be extremely thankful; that's enough success for any company.

But Intel in other areas seems amazingly badly managed. Intel marketing seems completely out of control. Is the product confusion at Intel a deliberate, sneaky way to sell slow processors to technically challenged customers, or just stupid?

Quote from the article linked just above: "Sandy Bridge PC processors will keep the CORE-i3, i5, and i7 designations and will be rebranded the "new CORE-i3..." That approach is likely to create confusion among customers about exactly what they're buying, given that the average user likely wouldn't be able to pick a Nehalem i7 from a Westmere i7 or Sandy Bridge i7."

Either Intel's purchase of the inferior security software maker McAfee for a "lofty 60% premium" is a HUGE mistake, or the reasons why it is not a mistake should be explained by Intel marketing. No explanation was given, apparently. McAfee has a 21.9% market share selling software often pre-loaded on a computer to technically challenged buyers.

Quote from the article: " 'We believe security will be most effective when enabled in hardware,' Intel Chief Executive Paul Otellini said in a conference call." That seems a particularly wacky statement. "Security software" is needed only because, in my opinion, Microsoft deliberately allows its software to be insecure. Insecure software makes Microsoft more money because people with infected computers often buy another computer. For example, see the New York Times article, Corrupted PC's Find New Home in the Dumpster. The Apple Mac OS, Linux, and BSD operating systems do not require "security software" because they are made to be secure.

Intel CEO Otellini does not seem to have the social sophistication necessary to running a big company. When he made an announcement in 2006 about the Intel Eduwise laptop, he seemed to be intending to have Intel compete with MIT professor Nicholas Negroponte's One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) charity program. However, Intel's intention seems to be just to make a market fo

Exams can be part of the learning process to!

There was an interesting article the other day on study methods in the NYT. (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/07/health/views/07mind.html?_r=1&ref=science&pagewanted=print)

Basically it talks about study methods backed up by psychological studies. Amongst that one of the more interesting points is that because of the difficulty of recalling knowledge in them, exams are a powerful tool for increasing the ability of students to recall knowledge.

Now I understand that what you're saying is that it's not necessary to memorise masses of equations because they can be looked up. However, it would seem necessary for students to have a working in memory knowledge of the principles of a field of knowledge, even if they can't remember the exact equations. Exams can be a powerful tool for helping students build that knowledge.

Btw. I'm surprised the original posters university doesn't have a blanket policy on dictionaries .etc. A blanket policy would prevent exactly the kind of situation as what arose with the Korean girl.

Oh and on a side note most electronic dictionaries for a long time have allowed note taking in them and newer more expensive ones are basically complete computers with wifi connectivity. So anybody setting an exam should keep that in mind.

Although, personally, and having experienced studying overseas in normal classes (as opposed to language classes) in an environment where I wasn't a native speaker of the language, I think allowing any dictionaries in exams is a bit silly. Realistically if a student has learnt the materials properly they should be able to write about it. If they haven't mastered the jargon related to their field of study, then I think that raises serious questions about their knowledge of the field.

Hello, and welcome to the internet!

Let me tell you about one of our best-kept secrets. It's called "Google", one of a number of "search engines", and it's very, very useful to help prevent you from looking like a complete moron!

For instance, if you type in "walmart locked in overnight" (without quotes-- an easy mistake for a beginner LOL!), the first "link" (usually blue, underlined text you can click on to take you to a different page) is:

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/18/us/workers-assail-night-lock-ins-by-wal-mart.html

Amazing!

Replying to myself, I just remembered another interesting option that came up recently: you could also use the $40/month Virgin Mobile hotspot, along with an Android phone + sipdroid + google voice, and have unlimited 3G data and voice everywhere plus your own hotspot. How cool is that?

Okay, so let's say Nicolas Carr is right, and we need something to help us concentrate deeply in the face of the ecosystem of interruption technologies.

Is there a technical fix for this? I'm thinking something like an X windows hack that will force you to stay inside your text editor for an hour.

technophobic crap along the lines of claims that cell phones cause bone/brain cancer

But this is (or at least was) a plausible theory, that had some preliminary research results in it's favor. Supposedly it's been shot down (I haven't looked closely enough to judge how well it was shot down), but that just makes it Wrong, it doesn't make it "technophobic crap".

What's actually interesting about that whole business is how little credence was given to the claims that it might actually be dangerous to hold a microwave transmitter right up against your head for long periods of time. The cell phone habit had already become entrenched, and no one wanted to hear about any problems with them. That in itself is kind of worrying: we're looking at an addictive technology here, with many actual problems (like, an estimate of thousands of traffic accidents a year from cellphone gabblers). But hey, The People Want It, our corporate masters are making money pushing them, you can't challenge it without being some weirdo luddite freak.

The possibility that, say, google searches are similarly addictive is an interesting thought... it's too bad this BBC article sucks as far as providing references to actual research. All you get is the fact that Nicolas Carr has a book out he wants you to buy.

This PBS interview makes it sound like he wrote a whole book about his private theory:

What we can I think theorize is that as we train our brains to take in information very, very quickly in a very interrupted, distracted way little bits of it come at us all the time, the way we experience it online that strengthens those parts of our brain that are good at multitasking and good at zipping up, shifting our focus very, very quickly. On the other hand we are not exercising those parts of our brain that are involved in deep concentration, deep attentiveness, things like contemplation and reflection.

Jonah Lehrer objects in a NY Times book review:

What Carr neglects to mention, however, is that the preponderance of scientific evidence suggests that the Internet and related technologies are actually good for the mind.

Carr's 2008 article in the Atlantic has at least a few research links in it: Is Google Making Us Stupid?

Is it me, or are people having a hard time believing the technology actually exists?

Two Companies Already Have Products:

http://www.powercastco.com/
http://www.witricity.com/

NY Times Covered this stuff in 2007

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/09/magazine/09wirelessenergy.html?_r=1&ref=magazine

Here's CNET demoing powercast's tech in 2007!
http://cnettv.cnet.com/powercast/9742-1_53-25606.html

You can buy full blown evaluation boards online that powercast manufactures that implement wireless electricity:

http://www.futureelectronics.com/en/technologies/development-tools/rf-wireless/Pages/9660812-P1110-EVB.aspx

Why is everyone having such a hard time with this concept?

It actually passed the EU standards http://wheels.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/15/video-nano-passes-european-crash-test/ which are slightly more stringent than US standards. Oh BTW, the Yugo did pass those pesky US standards, LOL

The NY Times link is somewhat broken. It links to the single page version, which requires (free) member access. The printable version gets around that and doesn't require membership.

Are you sure that's what happened? I'm pretty sure they mandated a target efficiency so that energy efficient incandescent bulbs are still allowed.

Seriously.

I remember this article last year

"When Congress passed a new energy law two years ago, obituaries were written for the incandescent light bulb. The law set tough efficiency standards, due to take effect in 2012(?), that no traditional incandescent bulb on the market could meet, and a century-old technology that helped create the modern world seemed to be doomed."

"But as it turns out, the obituaries were premature." ...
"The incandescent bulb is turning into a case study of the way government mandates can spur innovation."

"There's a massive misperception that incandescents are going away quickly," said Chris Calwell, a researcher with Ecos Consulting who studies the bulb market. "There have been more incandescent innovations in the last three years than in the last two decades."

-----

So it would seem that GE just doesn't want to invest in the US and instead make the same crap it's already making more cheaply in China.

The article you are referencing only proves the Taliban are using the leaked documents to scare Afghan informants. Of course they are threatening to kill anyone hinted at in the documents; it's in their interest to make being an informant to the US military seem as dangerous as possible.

You might not have noticed this, but the Taliban haven't exactly been models of restraint and decency. They have a history of killing informants, and there's every reason to believe that the informants will be killed. Since the documents weren't sanitized, they obviously contain information that can identify informants. A classified report where the principals in the report weren't identified would hardly be useful to the military. And again, you have to weigh that against any theoretical benefit from leaking the documents. (See below.)

If the government withholds information that shows how badly the war is going, or how many innocents are killed in it, the war may be unnecessarily prolonged, and even more lives lost. The public needs to know the truth to make an informed decision about whether to support the war.

If the documents actually showed more military or civilian personnel dying than has been reported already in the media, it might influence public opinion. But that's not what I've seen -- at least in what the NY Times released. The documents they reviewed talked about things like the Pakistanis working both sides of the fence, and drones being shot down by heat-seeking missiles, rather than conventional weapons. Here's the summary of what the NY Times found about the papers:

Over all, the documents do not contradict official accounts of the war. But in some cases the documents show that the American military made misleading public statements — attributing the downing of a helicopter to conventional weapons instead of heat-seeking missiles or giving Afghans credit for missions carried out by Special Operations commandos.

[Emphasis added]

The proof is in the aftermath. With all the documents released, do you hear Congress calling for hearings? Is there a Million Peacenik March? I sure don't see this Kumbaya effect. All Assange did was endanger people for his own political purposes and his own personal aggrandizement.

You are aware that Wikilekas has offered the US government to sanitise the documents before they release any more, but that the US government has declined, aren't you?

Yes, I'm aware of that particular extortion attempt. As I've said elsewhere on Slashdot, if you want to publish classified information (which you didn't even get legally), then it's on you to sanitize the information, and if you can't sanitize it, you should have the common sense not to publish it. The fact that it contains such sensitive information is why it's classified in the first place.

China isn't subsidizing us with savings, they don't have any. What profits they make, they are wisely investing in natural resources elsewhere, including here, but what they are doing economically is a trick. They have their currency pegged to ours, the exchange rate can't fluctuate. Do I need to explain what that does to trade?

Except that isn't true. And the exchange rate is even lower now according to xe.com right now.

Citations please? Someone has been watching too much Fidel Castro or something.

Really? You're not going to spend like thirty seconds on Google and consider your lack of familiarity with common knowledge to be a valid debating point? Your choice.

Food insecurity:

http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/cgi/content/full/101/1/e3
http://www.frac.org/html/hunger_in_the_us/hunger_index.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/18/opinion/18wed2.html
http://jn.nutrition.org/cgi/content/full/129/2/510S

Medical coverage:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_care_in_the_United_States
(Just follow the damned links.)

Education:

http://www.google.ca/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CBcQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fnces.ed.gov%2Fpubs2005%2F2005021.pdf&rct=j&q=comparison%20of%20education%20in%20the%20united%20states%20to%20other%20countries&ei=9d-KTIjRBISdlgeC7KmsCQ&usg=AFQjCNHg2XP3uyuKjnED6uGl91FHXaS17g&cad=rja

I should also mention that the U.S. has the highest rate of incarceration per capita on the planet, but I'll let you look that one up yourself.

-FL

And there are those who would argue that Doctorow's constant ranting on this one issue makes him a crank, and his willingness to pump out mediocre science fiction novels for free and see if anyone likes them makes him a dilettante.

Number 8 on the New York Times bestseller list and a Hugo nomination isn't too shabby for a mediocre dilettante.

Well said, but unfortunately this weeks ruling means it is only going to get worse , much much worse..

Quotes from above:

"The ruling handed a major victory to the Obama administration in its effort to advance a sweeping view of executive secrecy power."

"The distorted, radical use of the state secret privilege -- as a broad-based immunity weapon for compelling the dismissal of entire cases alleging Executive lawbreaking, rather than a narrow discovery tool for suppressing the use of specific classified documents -- is exactly what the Bush administration did to such extreme controversy."

Rulings like this passed with little to no media coverage[1] show that the US is more little down the slippery slope to our Orwellian future. And people here are worried about wikileaks? The mind boggles.

[1] Slashdot posts old old news on Wikileaks instead - like there was ever a doubt that the remaining documents will be published

Thanks again ... and here's another link in a similar vein.

read some Glenn Greenwald. Yes, the same Greenwald that excoriated Bush. It's called consistency in pursuit of your beliefs.

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/index.html?story=/opinion/greenwald/2009/10/06/obama

But perhaps you missed the recent decision and its history.

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/09/08/obama/index.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/09/opinion/09thurs2.html?_r=1&hp

for those who say it wasn't Obama, it was his Justice department, for which he appointed Holder, "champion of civil rights"... except when it matters.

Did you know there was a Greek Orthodox that's nearby and destroyed when WTC fell on it? Do you know that they haven't been given their permit to rebuild

The Port Authority has offered them permission, land, and SIXTY MILLION DOLLARS to put up a much larger replacement building. But instead of taking the offer, the church demanded twenty million dollars in cash before they would do so much as put one brick on top of another.

How long do we have to put up with it?

Until the folks at St. Nicholas Church decide that they want to build a church instead trying to weasel more money out of the City of New York. That's how long.

Reading a book from cover to cover should be a prerequisite to burning it.

I support the freedom of people to peacefully burn whatever they so choose. However, the idiot pastor in question claims that

"it's full of lies"

With regards to the Quran. However, when pushed further (in the same article, no less), he went on to say

I have no experience with it whatsoever. I only know what the Bible says.

So he claims to know the Quran, then later admits to having never read it. Indeed it probably would do him some good to read the text that he claims to know something about. But we can't stop people from being ignorant of their own choice. Of course, if his knowledge was truly limited only to the Bible, I would love to know how it could tell him that a book published more recently than it could be "full of lies".

Past Decade Warmest on Record, NASA Data Shows

God you're a dumbass. There isn't a single true statement in your entire post.

Hmmm...

http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/5699214/rebuilding_of_st_nicholas_greek_orthodox.html?cat=9

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/08/18/leaders-disappointed-government-declares-deal-rebuild-ground-zero-church-dead/

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/24/nyregion/24greek.html

Here, have some facts. Thanks.

There is no evidence the release of the Afghan documents has hurt anyone; even the Pentagon admits so.

There's absolutely evidence that the release of the papers has put people at risk. When the Taliban kill people, they're not going to hang citations from the Afghan documents around their necks

There is a possibility that an informant may be killed because of the leak, but that has to be weighed against how many lives are risked by keeping the truth about the war from the public.

Okay, I'll bite. Where is there any evidence that any lives were lost from the public not knowing who informants were, or any other details revealed in the papers? The fact that the Pakistanis were playing both sides in this thing has been known by anyone paying attention for quite some time now. And most of what the NY Times has reported has been about the paucity of resources allocated to the fight. Not only that, but the documents aren't up to date, so they can't form an intelligent picture of what it looks like on the ground in Afghanistan now.

The documents were released because Assange has an obvious agenda, which he doesn't even bother to hide, and he released the documents the way he did to give the U.S. forces a black eye in the PR department.

I lived in Beaufort, SC, in 1992, when a small local church decided to become world famous - by creating confrontations with anyone and everyone who walked by. It was a ridiculous zoo; they'd bus these "preachers" in from all over the state, and have them arrested.

Eventually they made the NYT (along with CNN, ABC, etc):

http://www.nytimes.com/1992/06/14/us/preachers-take-shouting-match-with-city-to-court.html

These idiots would grab bypassers and scream at them that they would go to hell. Really, they'd grab kids and yell at them; they grabbed a 20 year old female runner friend of mine and yelled at her that she would burn in hell for being a runner: "all runners go to hell!"

Anyway, there's always some back-woods idiot who finds a way to get in the paper. Kudos to Rackspace for closing off one of this guy's means of spreading his nonsense.

Considering how much this one guy has done on a shoestring: http://www.khanacademy.org/

The whole paradigm is broken, see my collection of links starting here:
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-October/005379.html
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/005584.html
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/006005.html

And also:
"Academic Bankruptcy"
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/15/opinion/15taylor.html?_r=1

Without copyright you'd pay $2-3 for a textbook

Without copyright, old son, you'd likely not have a textbook. People still generally have this whole "pay me for my knowledge" defect, you see. I know you think information "wants to be free", but it's actually "freeloaders want information to be free", and the producers of information have a lot more value to society than the freeloaders do.

Now, when you can find a freely-given text (which is certainly doable in some cases), and get that into a curriculum (harder), that's just fine. But blaming copyright for availability issues... that's just wrong.

Plus, there is a durability/resale question. A textbook is pretty easily readable in 10 years, especially a math book, things aren't going to fundamentally change. History books, science books? Yeah. Math, English, etc? No.

That's not all there is to it. While the concepts may not change, the way they are taught may change not once, but several times. How problems are mixed together has been a subject of interest in just the last week; it apparently affects how well you actually learn. Approaches vary from learning times tables to handing the student a calculator. Something like an iPad makes it possible to stay current, or for that matter to take a mixed approach.

PCs are a hell of a lot easier to batch set up and load. AFAIK you can't just remotely load up 200 iPads, on the other hand its pretty damn easy to do that with PCs, just network boot them then push all the stuff in from the network.

iPads, however, can grab the textbook from the network. So it's trivial for the instructor to stand in front of the class, say "do this, do that, press here, read chapter one." Even so, should they turn out to have a natural home in the classroom (and I fully expect them to, they're bloody marvelous tools), how long do you think it'll be before Apple provides a central management tool?

I'll tell you what, it makes a lot more sense to carry an iPad than it does to carry a bunch of physical books. The sooner we move to e-books in the classroom, the better off we'll be. Both the students, and in general as a society.

I realize that people are using humor to deal with their fears and discomfort over death, but there's no way to make this funny:

December 17, 2009, 12:29 pm
Announcing a Child’s Death on Twitter
By LISA BELKIN
http://parenting.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/12/17/tweeting-about-a-childs-death/

According to this article the poverty line for a family of 4 in NYC is about $26,000.

It was not superior, but it was effective for a Mac owner. There was enough memory to hold many songs. The firewire interface was necessary because mostly computers still ran USB 1.1. The problem with my nomad, for instance, was that transferring songs was dead slow. It was also rugged, unlike the nomad.

What we will likely see on other devices is feature bloat. They will be able to do some whiz bang thing, but the overall machine will have never been thought out from the user point of view. It is like the android commercials. In the commercials, the human become a slave to the machine, the body turning into the machine to serve it. This to me is unacceptable industrial design.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/05/science/05robots.html?hp

The Boss Is Robotic, and Rolling Up Behind You
By JOHN MARKOFF

Mobile robots have been used for years by the military and law enforcement, but with falling costs, the next frontiers are the office, the hospital and the home.

These days, there are few people (in the West anyway) who know how to create a 'punching' as it is called, and fewer who are interested in learning.

TFA mentions this, "What do young people want to come into this trade for, especially at the manufacturing end - because it's so dirty, you know". Yet there are young people getting into it and Etsy provides them a sells outlet.

Strangely, the remnant of my father's business is just starting to get orders from Asia, so maybe 'Free Trade' is finally coming around to the point where manufacturing costs in the US are competitive with Asia in this regard

Free trade does that, as there's more trade people demand more pay from their employers. China is seeing more suicides, which is going too far, because employers won't give them raises they demand, though employers are giving some raises. China's middle class is rising afterall and there are now 64 Chinese billionaires on Forbes list. The same is seen in India. Free Trade raises everybody's boat.

Of course China doesn't have free trade, the Chinese currency isn't allowed to float, but trade is more open there now than it has been.

Falcon

I disagree that retirees don't need the money as much. Older women get nearly half of their income from Social Security. And the elderly in the lowest income quintile (income less than $8956 in 2008) got 88.4% of their income from Social Security.

Social Security taxes may be 15%, but that's not the same as adding 15% to the cost of employing a US citizen. If Social Security didn't exist, then there would be a greater need for employers to provide their employees with private pensions or simply higher salaries to allow for more savings for retirement.

As for public medical programs: sure, the US government could cut expenditures by eliminating them. Setting aside the resulting suffering of the poor and the elderly, it's not clear that the resulting health care system would be more efficient. Currently, total health spending in other developed countries (which have universal health care) is about half that of the US.

Ever wonder why you cannot buy Kellogg's Heartwise Cereal anymore? Thank the Texas Attorney General's office.

http://www.nytimes.com/1991/04/03/garden/kellogg-files-slander-suit.html

I laughed at the lawsuit at the time because the claims were baseless. Soon I could no longer buy my favorite cereal.

By family income and wealth. Compared to before 1980.

How do you arrive at your definition of income and wealth? Income has to be adjusted for inflation - which usually includes things like energy and health care. Energy is at least twice as expensive as it was in the '50s. Health care is many times as expensive. In both cases, it's not a fair comparison. Even the cheapest cars get many times the mileage as a '50s car, making gas prices a wash. And '50s health care was limited to antibiotics, mended bones, and minor surgeries. State of the art was the boom of vaccines. No replacement hips, knees, effective diabetes treatments, heart surgeries, stroke treatments, etc... to say nothing of cancer, which was a death sentence. I'd love to see someone compare the costs of health services that were actually available in the '50s with what they cost today. This article echos my sentiments. Certainly, manufactured goods are much less expensive.

So what's left? Housing. Housing has gotten more expensive, for sure... about double by most estimates I see. Of course, the houses are twice the size, so I'm not sure why this is a big mystery. Halve your square footage and live like the average person did in the '50s and you'll probably find a comparable price.

Ah, almost forgot education. This is another example of people demanding more. Take a look at any college campus and note the EXPLOSION of buildings with a cornerstone newer than 1980. For good or for bad, students are demanding a lot more out of colleges than they did in the '50s. I won't claim you get "more" or that the cost is worth it, but they are simply responding to demand and the costs have risen accordingly. For what it's worth, you can still go to a public school for about $5000 on average... that's a hell of a bargain, though it varies tremendously by state. Also, consider that in the '50s only about 6% of people actually got a college degree... your argument that the average person could send kids to college seems suspect given this statistic. I suspect you are thinking of a idealizing based on a very small portion of the population. Today over 16% go on to finish college, despite the cost increase.

In fact, you could say that the lower the cost of things at Wal-Mart, the lower the quality of life.

This statement is pretty vague... lower for who? Certainly the average person benefits from lower cost goods - but obviously the US factory workers suffer when goods are produced in another market for less money. Of course, those same workers are SOL when a robot takes their job - but I wouldn't argue against automation based on job impact. I think the move to China is a sham, but it will self-correct in time... and far sooner than it will get corrected by any political action or protectionist measures. Think about it... what are the Chinese going to do with trillions in US currency? Hold on to it forever, until inflation and devaluation render it worthless? Or buy stuff with it. When they buy stuff with it, who will benefit?

In 1956, a single breadwinner, earning the average wage, could expect to put a couple of kids through college and own a nice single-family home and provide health care to all the members of his family, even buying a new car every 5 years, all without having to use a credit card.

I'd love to see a source for this. Average salary in 1955 was around 4 grand. College seems to have cost about $1000. An "average" family in no way could have "a couple" of kids in college. As I said, 94% of people did not finish college. Health care only cost about $500/year but bought you virtually nothing except antibiotics, pain killers, and mended bones. You could probably still do that for $500/year if you could find a doctor willing to prescribe the crap they used in the '50s. And I'm glad you said "a

The Tea Party's grassroots: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/opinion/29rich.html

Are you saying we're dipping into income tax revenues to pay out social security checks? The program is supposedly solvent for about 20 more years.

Maybe you've noticed that your income tax and social security payments are separate items on your paycheck... A lot of people don't understand this whole "entitlement" thing. We've had politicians confusing Social Security with "welfare" for the past couple of months.

Social Security is already spending more than it takes in this year and until recently, was projected to do so beginning in 2018 anyway. They'll tell you that, at that point, they'll start taking money out of the Social Security Trust Fund, but the truth is, there is absolutely no money in trust. What there is, essentially, is a bunch of IOUs to be repaid from the general fund.

To give a brief history of why Social Security is already borrowing from the general fund, we need to go back to the mid-60s. In 1965, Medicare/Medicaid passed... and the CBO's estimates for what they would cost were drastically low. Congress quickly found itself paying significantly more than what it was told they would cost. In addition, Vietnam began heating up. So, Congress's solution, was in 1967, to pass a law stating that any government trust which ran a surplus would allow the general fund to borrow the surplus with the promise to repay it later. Since 1967, we've been papering over our deficits with Social Security money to make it look like the federal government wasn't running even larger deficits. The politicians of that era, like all politicians, wanted to get re-elected, so the last thing they were about to do, was admit to their constituents that they had screwed up... so they put a bandaid on it and pushed the problem down the road for a future generation to have to deal with.

Most of those politicians aren't in office anymore, in fact, most of them are buried by now... But here we are, suddenly finding ourselves mortgaged to the hilt so they could be re-elected back in the day... and our only choices are solutions that nobody is going to like - tell recipients that they aren't going to get the benefits they were promised (retirement age, amounts, wealth/income qualifications, etc) and/or to increase the tax the currently working generation has to pay. No politician wants to touch it (it isn't called the third rail of American politics for nothing) because doing anything to fix it would be career suicide... so, instead, we seemed destined to continue to do nothing, waiting for us to smack into the brick wall ahead.

It's not like they're taxing you so they can pay me more when I retire. What I get back depends on what I put in. But I guess misrepresenting the whole thing is a whole lot more effective as stirring the more ignorant parts of the population to come vote for you, so certain politicians rant about "entitlement" as if it were a hand-out.

You'll get back far more than you paid in.... it only takes a couple years to recoup the investment you made over your lifetime, while most people that collect collect for years, even decades, beyond their break even point... and, as I said, since the Trust Fund is essentially empty, yes, you will have to tax me so you can get paid when you retire. Sad part, is the people that are going to have to pay for the baby boomers weren't the ones electing the politicians that screwed us over, that would be the baby boomers and their parents that did that... but here we are stuck holding the bag.

That Thomas Jefferson guy wrote pretty extensively about how immoral it would be for one generation to saddle future generations with debt, but, hey, we wouldn't want that to get in the way of the me generation. Truth is, the boomers and their parents handed today's generations a country worse off than what they were handed at their birth, but in their narcissism, they've convinced themselves that, not only is the country better off, but we owe them something on top of it for granting it to us.

Ian Welsh wasn't writing about a permanent nationalization of the entire banking industry, but rather a temporary nationalization of banks that would be bankrupt if they actually valued their toxic assets at market value. This wouldn't be that different from what the FDIC does to bankrupt banks.

Excluding single-payer advocates has the effect of pushing the set of options considered "mainstream" to the right. If I was advocating for single-payer, I wouldn't exclude advocates of (British style) nationalized health care, since they would help serve to make my views appear more moderate. As for the Obama plan, it's based on the reforms implemented in Massachusetts under Mitt Romney, and (at the time) promoted by the Heritage Foundation, which to me qualifies as at least moderately conservative.

As for Alan Simpson, he isn't just a token conservative; he's one of the co-chairs. And the earlier quote indicates that he has total disdain for Social Security. He has also repeated the old zombie lie, "It's a bunch of IOUs".

If Obama was centrist, he would have balanced the commission by appointing an ardent defender of entitlement programs as the other co-chair; someone who is in favor of taxing the rich. Let's look at what the Democrat co-chair has said:

We’re going to mess with Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security because if you take those off the table, you can’t get there. If we don’t make those choices, America is going to be a second-rate power, and I don’t mean in fifty years. I mean in my lifetime.

Meh, privacy is a red herring. As he says, nothing you do will remain private. More information leads to more transparency... there's not really any escaping it, whether that information is collected by computers or mailmen or word-of-mouth. The trick is just to have the transparency work both ways.

The real deal is the war for mindshare.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/01/opinion/01gibson.html

But as state and federal officials, individuals and businesses continue to seek additional funds beyond the minimum fines and compensation that BP must pay under the law, the company has signaled its reluctance to cooperate unless it can continue to operate in the Gulf of Mexico. The gulf accounts for 11 percent of its global production.

"If we are unable to keep those fields going, that is going to have a substantial impact on our cash flow," said David Nagel, BP's executive vice president for BP America, in an interview. That, he added, "makes it harder for us to fund things, fund these programs."

Do you understand what Nagel's saying there?