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There's no sense in claiming you're pirating an artist's work because they're being screwed over by record companies. Practically EVERY LAST THING the "apologist" claimed was so entirely hypocritical as to make me think that they were in fact a caricature or a troll, and not a real person. Except I've met dozens of kids that are just as dunderheaded in face to face conversations!

You think "MINE" is childish but taking an artist's work from them without compensation isn't? Are you a caricature?

Why isn't it a good idea

Excel is still plagued by inaccuracies problems, bugs, etc.
In short : excel could spit the wrong answers.

and does this apply equally to OpenOffice?

In the opensource world, Gnumeric is a spreadsheet well known for it's collaboration with the R-Project in order to guarantee a good accuracy.

I don't know about OpenOffice.org Calc. I tend to use it only for basic tasks and move to more appropriate languages like R when the need arise. But last I heard about it, OpenOffice.org was criticized for simply NOT having advanced statistics.

In a short caricature :
- Microsoft Office Excel : does stats and does it wrong
- Gnumeric : does stats and does it well (excels at it :-D )
- OpenOffice.org Calc : doesn't do stats
- R/Octave/Matlab/Python+modules/Fortran : what the real statisticians use.

I'll add to this. No doubt the people reading this who have worked/are working tech support will likely balk at what we are saying, but just like the original poster, they are on the other side of the bridge and are angry because they think they shouldn't be there.

Fact of the matter is, this guy settled. Imagine someone who went to school and got a masters in some sort of engineering/drafting for bridges, but instead started his first job drawing caricatures at at a carnival. Imagine a PhD is psychology who decided out of school to "Watch my neighbors son on weeknights". Think about the PhD in some sort of super brain/heart/whatever surgery who took a job as a school nurse right out of school.

Sure. MAYBE these people CAN do what they went to school for, but taking such jobs right out of the gate tells me and others that you are incapable.

You hit the nail exactly on the head. You need a solid portfolio of what you have done & learned outside of your support job, as most first-tier tech support workers just follow the script, and have to send any REAL troubleshooting up to the next level.

I'll add to this. No doubt the people reading this who have worked/are working tech support will likely balk at what we are saying, but just like the original poster, they are on the other side of the bridge and are angry because they think they shouldn't be there.

Fact of the matter is, this guy settled. Imagine someone who went to school and got a masters in some sort of engineering/drafting for bridges, but instead started his first job drawing caricatures at at a carnival. Imagine a PhD is psychology who decided out of school to "Watch my neighbors son on weeknights". Think about the PhD in some sort of super brain/heart/whatever surgery who took a job as a school nurse right out of school.

Sure. MAYBE these people CAN do what they went to school for, but taking such jobs right out of the gate tells me and others that you are incapable.

Try explaining the concept of evolution to humans still banging rocks together to get fire, and see what you get.

Actually, you might find it pretty easy to get the idea across.

"Suppose you were to eat all the larger of your sheep and cattle, and keep only the smaller for breeding. How large would your grandchildren's animals likely be? Or suppose you eat only the smallest ones and keep the largest for breeding; what would the results be in a few years?"

Substitute dogs or turnips or sunflowers or strawberries any other edible crop, and the example works just as well.

I've actually asked questions like this of anti-evolution people. They always understand, and agree that selecting for size or other desirable feature would have the expect results after a few years of breeding. Their problem is that they don't understand that this is how "evolution" works. They usually have some idea that "evolution" means only that humans are descended from monkeys, or some equally silly caricature. They have never read (or maybe listened to) an accurate description of evolution. And they're usually offended when I point out that they've just agreed with the basic concept behind evolution. They "know" that evolution is against their religion, and they know that selective breeding obviously works, so they aren't going to listen to any explanation that might show that they don't understand the issue.

I know, I know, I'm more than anyone aware of the 'sexless caricatures that speak in long monologues' being a fine portrayal of Atlas Shrugged, which I like very much from the philosophical standpoint, but during that Galt speech I was going - like many others I believe - "jesus, won't he ever finish?".

So whether he is a staunch capitalist or an altruist doing it for humanity is besides the point. He WILL make loads of money, and it is obviously a motivation, even if he says he's doing it for selfless reasons.

In a free economy which follows the Rule of Law, bettering society and acquiring money go hand in hand, as always. When taking others property by force or fraud is not an option, producing and creating wealth becomes the only means to earn a living.

I disagree on your last point though. I see it as he's someone who made his millions by bettering society and sees no reason to stop while there's industry and initiative in him to keep doing so.

It is the same in kind, but different in degree. I have never in my life seen so hotly contested an election cycle as we have this year. I've absolutely never seen primaries even remotely as overblown as this year's; you would have thought the primaries were the actual election from all the attention. Aside from that, more of the same, although each year the media turn into an even more absurd caricature of themselves. The media do what the media always do, and focus on the most sensationalist (and often most meaningless) headlines they can get their grubby little hands on.

In fact, I can't believe I'll ever hate ANYONE as much as I hate Bush.

You don't even know the man. All you know is a caricature handed to you through your television and news papers.

The biggest problem with this, is between 78% and 80% of people told to act suspiciously can fool the system into believing they are intending to commit crime,

Besides, this sounds like it was phrased as a challenge. How many of those people do you think started doing jumping-jacks in front of those devices? How many of those people started acting like some crazy homeless person that just got out of some asylum? And what about the remaining 20% to 22% people who failed to get detected, are those people morons or something? And what about the 2% margin of error, did those 2% get detected and then run away before the machine could catch them? Or did they fail to remember the instructions that were given to them? In either case, I congratulate those 2% for having eluded both the machines and the people leading this study.

Anyway, acting and behaving are two very different things. One is a caricature, and one is not. If anything, this kind of test would only be reinforcing the false perceptions people already have about criminals/terrorists. We don't need that. If you want to make good machines, train them on good data at the very least. And if you can't get good training data, work on something else -- get yourself another job.

A better test would have been to randomly assign a one hundred bill and a couple of razor blades to a couple of people out of a larger pool of candidates, and to tell them that the metal detectors were broken, and that if they could go through security without getting stopped, that they would be able to keep the money. Such a test would still be absurd, because it really couldn't replicate the pressures that a real criminal/terrorist would be feeling trying to get through, but it would still be far less absurd than this original so-called 'study' was.

I take more of a Libertarian stance, and am very much a fiscal conservative, which makes it hard for me to ever vote for a Democrat.

I don't expect or want to make you a party-line Democrat, but seriously, you have tuned in, turned on and dropped out for all of the last 30 years if you truly believe "fiscal conservative" = !Democrat. Whatever you dislike about the "tax and spend" caricature of "the Democrats," in the real world, it's "borrow-and-spend" Republicans who have been the worst possible parody of fiscal responsibility. Ron Paul and Tom Coburn are notable exceptions, not the average Republican any more than Larry Craig is the average Republican. On average -- objectively defined by spending and votes for it -- only Republicans' empty rhetoric is fiscally conservative. Democrats, admittedly over-generalizing here, unquestionably do a better job of being fiscally conservative in proportion to their rhetoric, comparing Clinton and Democratic Congresses to Bush Jr. and Republican Congresses. Democrats are not less fiscally responsible than Republicans overall, they are less noisy about fiscal responsibility, but more responsible in practice, where it matters. You are holding Republicans' vice -- fiscal hypocrisy -- against Democrats.

What has Obama done to change anything? I mean, I keep hearing about Obama being about change, and about hope, and reform. But, what has he actually done about anything? Besides get elected, and sell some books.

One thing Obama has done is consistently pursue meaningful accountability for malfeasance and incompetence in government. If you want to know what "has Obama done to change anything" else, go look it up yourself.

A complete SDI system is what Reagan wanted; a comprehensive STRATEGIC (not tactical) defense system that could rid the world (actually just us) of nuclear terror.

Interesting post. Actually, what Reagan tried to accomplish was the complete elimination of the threat of nuclear weapons from the planet. He almost had an agreement with Gorbachev to eliminate all warheads from the US and Soviet arsenals. Much to the relief of the advisers on both sides, Gorbachev backed out at the last minute. I know, it kind of ruins your caricature - but the whole premise of SDI was that the technology behind the shield would be shared with the Soviets to eliminate the ICBM threat completely for both sides. Sort of the ultimate "trust but verify". Unfortunately even a purely defensive weapon like an anti-missile weapon can be used an an offensive strategy (first strike), so many in the Soviet government saw SDI the same way that many on the far left in the US did, despite the offer to share the technology if it ever should come to exist.

Ask the families of the 50 people taken hostage by real pirates off Somali waters the other day how funny talk like a pirate day is. The caricature of pirates in the general public as comical is one thing (albeit of many) that hinders getting world support to eradicate piracy. Piracy is real, it is rampant, and it is deadly. Put it in this light. How socially acceptable would it be to have a "talk like a mugger" day... a "talk like a murderer" day, or maybe to round it off, a "talk like a terrorist" day?

I tend to think of Democrats as being afraid of things unrelated to defense.

I actually see it somewhat orthogonal to that. In many ways, the democrats are optimists while the republicans are pessimists. Barack Obama wants to sit down and talk to Iran and Russia, because he's just sure that they'll see good sense*. Ronald Reagan doesn't negotiate with Russians, he just intimidates them with his military might.

The same can be said of social policies. If pulled off properly, communism is the ideal economic system. If you think that people can and will take advantage of such idealistic systems whenever they can, then you tend to allow people to control their own destiny a lot more. The right to bear arms is a defense against a failing government; if the government were perfect, there'd be no reason to ever possess a weapon.

*these are obvious caricatures of the politicians. the statements don't capture the nuance of their foreign policies.

I can understand taking basic Chem 101 or Physics 101 or History 101 to gain an understanding of these subjects

Well apparently, in your case, it's a problem of dosage. Maybe your faculty insisted too much on an unnecessarily advanced level.

But as you point out, it is still important to have some basic knowledge in lots of scientific field. Even if it isn't you final field of expertise, that still help one to obtained a good general scientific culture.

which also help in producing scientist which are a little bit critical and sceptic and won't necessarily buy into whatever snake oil some efficient charlatan is try to market them. To make exaggerated caricatural examples : it makes those scientists better able to discern why intelligent design proponents' "theories" doesn't work, why cults such as Scientology are utter crackpot bullshit, etc.

This is very much important in the medical field, where once you graduate, you are constantly exposed to pharma corporations' marketers trying to push hard *their* products and bellow average publications in papers holding some strange theories, all based on shoddy statistics, unproven principles, and so on.

You don't need basic biochem, orgchem and stats to do medecine. But you need them to avoid risking life of patients, just because during the presentation the merketing-girls' dress was sexy and because the cocktails were free at the convention.

Also, having some broader scientific knowledge increases the probability "Eureka" moments, when you spot something unusual that is worth further analysing and may lead to new scientific idea that help progress research. Keep in mind that not all medical progress starts with some complex experiment in a fundamentalist's essay tube. Some time, progress is sparked by someone in the field who notice something unusual and whose scientific curiosity is stimulated by this (instead of just dismissing it), because (s)he known that this *shouldn't* normally happen. Or because (s)he suddenly realises that some obscure old unrelated knowledge learned during studies might end up being applied to this situation.

You didn't encounter any protein or amino acid in your electrical engineer carrier. But maybe some of your colleague realised that some of the thing he worked on could be applied on some other fields, and maybe that colleague helped develop some of the tools that are used currently for analysis in Proteomics.

Then of course, it all boils down to defining how much is defined as "basic", and how to present the subject in a clever way that compels the student to learn and understand the principles rather than brute force memorize everything.

Funny, I had Keynesian Economics taught, and always saw it aligning with Conservatism and Libertarianism more than Liberalism.

That's probably because you, like most people, think of the caricature of Liberalism that has been painted by right-wing demagogues instead of trying to look at the policies of the various people in the Democratic party.

The strength of the Republican party is their ability to march in lock-step and deliver a consistent message, even if they don't actually do what they say, they always say the same thing--small government, less taxes, Christian values.

The weakness of the Democratic party is that they act like a herd of cats. Each has their own pet issues and sees little reason to support their party members pet issues. From southern conservative blue dog democrats, to west coast left-wing hippie crazies, to Midwestern democratic farm labor, to eastern blue collars and east coast blue bloods. They move in a lot of different directions at once and tend to get steamrolled by the Republican juggernaut.

This allows the Republicans to define "Liberals" however they want and they've managed to hijack the word and make it synonymous with a lot of straw man arguments of their own creation.

And my conclusion is just that there is no way to know beyond the shadow of a doubt. The only thing I know for a fact is that the earth exists, and I'm just going to go forward from there.

There is no way to know anything beyond a shadow of a doubt. How do you know the earth exists? How do you know you're not just floating in limbo, dreaming up your own reality?

Your statement is essentially a caricature of the Socratic argument - "all I know is that I know nothing". That's simply not a tenable position. Yes, it's good to keep an open mind and to judge every argument on it's merits rather than on how it compares to your preconceived notions, but at some point you need to form an opinion.

The best method we have for analyzing the world around us is the scientific method. Why? Primarily because the scientific method acknowledges that we all have inherent human weaknesses, and it provides a framework which minimizes the impact of those weaknesses. Science isn't dogmatic, and it isn't authoritarian - two problems which have traditionally been a massive crutch for religious "knowledge" and other methods of inquiry. It allows for free inquiry, and encourages not only new discovery but also the easy overturning of old ideas.

One good way to point out the practical differences of the approaches is this:

Disagreeing with religion is considered heresy, and is often punishable by death.

Disagreeing with scientific hypothesis is considered an everyday event, and disproving them is the greatest accomplishment which a scientist can make.

We didn't honour Einstein because he went along with what everyone else was saying - we honoured him because he showed that Newtonian physics aren't an accurate model of how the universe works, and he gave us a better way to explain it. Meanwhile the Church wanted to burn Galileo at the stake for daring to suggest that the earth might spin around the sun, instead of the other way around.

Can you truly say that you do not see the difference?

For what I saw with the emulator, OpenMoko is hurting open-source and open-platform by being strickly unusable and ugly. Android is another thing, and I would definitely buy an "google phone". But please, stop with openmoko. This is a caricature of what "people" hates with open-source software: Fucked-up ergonomic and ugly interfaces.

People who claim to believe in evolution on the internet have quite clearly never read any science and are behaving like some caricature of ignorant fundamentalists.

Unfortunately your responsive is both Ignorant and Dishonest. You have people as dishonest and ideological as yourself to promote your ideology as +Insightful.

Because you promote dishonesty I rate you as Evil.

People who claim to believe in evolution on the internet have quite clearly never read any science and are behaving like some caricature of ignorant fundamentalists.

On the contrary, evolution on the internet quite clearly happens. Trolls get modded down and die out; while insightful people survive and repr - uh, well, at least they get karma.

But seriously, it's not the people on the internet that evolve, it's the sites themselves. Sites that keep putting out interesting information and keep trolls down to a dull roar survive; while those that get boring or get overrun with trolls die out.

No, no. Evolution is the ABSOLUTE TRUTH and creationists are HERETICS.

Seriously people get over yourselves. People who claim to believe in evolution on the internet have quite clearly never read any science and are behaving like some caricature of ignorant fundamentalists.

It's one thing to read some Dawkins when you're a teenager and decide he's probably right and it's cool to watch him argue with idiots. It's quite another to try to be Dawkins yourself in your thirties when you have one millionth of the knowledge he does.